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What would a coaching platform actually cost you?
Every comparison quotes sticker prices. None of them price your business — and the entry plan is regularly the expensive one once transaction fees land. Put your numbers in.
| Platform | Plan | Platform fees | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everfitper client seat | 10 client seats | — | $29 |
| LearnWorldsflat monthly | Starter | — | $29 |
| Teachableflat monthly | Starter | — | $39 |
| Teacheryflat monthly | Monthly | — | $49 |
| Thinkificflat monthly | Basic | — | $54 |
| TrueCoachper client seat | 20 client seats | — | $57.99 |
| Kajabiflat monthly | Kickstarter | — | $89 |
| Trainerizeper client seat | beyond 5 clients | — | not published |
LearnWorlds, Teachable, Teachery, Thinkific, Kajabi: Cannot assign sessions or review form-check videos — an LMS has no client roster.
Trainerize: Trainerize sells Pro in seat tiers of 5, 15, 30, 50, 75, 100 and 200 but publishes a price only for the first. Above five clients the real cost is higher than shown.
Card processing (~2.9% + $0.30) is excluded — every platform pays roughly the same, so including it would raise every row equally without changing which is cheapest. Coaching-app prices verified 3 August 2026, course-platform prices 17 July 2026. A means the vendor publishes no price for that tier, so the real figure is higher.
Why the cheapest plan is often the expensive one
Teachable Starter costs $39/mo and Builder costs $89. Obvious choice, until you count the 7.5% transaction fee on Starter. Sell forty $97 programs in a month and that fee is $291, making the cheap plan cost $330 against Builder's flat $89. The crossover happens at around eleven sales a month, and no pricing page tells you that.
LearnWorlds Starter has the same shape with a different mechanism: $29/mo plus $5 per sale. Forty sales is $200 in fees on top, so Pro Trainer at $99 with no per-sale cut wins from roughly fifteen sales onward.
The bigger fork: per seat or flat
Transaction fees are a rounding error next to the choice of pricing model. Coaching apps — Trainerize, Everfit, TrueCoach — charge for every active client seat. Course platforms — Thinkific, Teachable, LearnWorlds, Kajabi, Teachery — charge the same whether you have twelve buyers or twelve thousand.
For a coach with eight 1:1 clients, per-seat wins comfortably: Everfit is $29/mo where Thinkific is $54 and cannot assign a session anyway. Flip to selling a one-time program to forty strangers a month and per-seat collapses, because each buyer keeps occupying a paid seat long after they stop opening the app. That is the switch the calculator above is really showing you, andthe full breakdown of both models works through three revenue shapes in detail.
What this does not include
Card processing. Stripe and PayPal take about 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction whichever platform you use. Including it would lift every row identically without changing the ranking, so it is left out — add roughly 3% of sales revenue for your true all-in number.
Add-ons. Trainerize sells advanced nutrition, integrated payments and the branded app separately. Budget the configuration you will actually switch on, not the headline tier — theTrainerize review lists which ones cost extra.
Annual discounts. Figures are monthly billing. Most platforms take 20–25% off for paying yearly, which is real money once you have settled on one — but a poor bet in month one.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, with the date recorded next to it in the source data. Coaching apps were checked on 3 August 2026, course platforms on 17 July 2026. Nothing is interpolated: where Trainerize publishes seat tiers of 5, 15, 30, 50, 75, 100 and 200 but prices only the first, the calculator marks the figure as incomplete rather than inventing the middle.
Prices move. If you spot one that has changed, tell us — we would rather fix it than have you plan around a stale number. Our testing methodologycovers how the rest of the site is put together.