Teachery is a bootstrapped, independently run course platform for selling online courses, digital products, and membership hubs, built around deep design control and a 0% platform transaction fee. It’s been around since 2013, run by a two-person team instead of a venture-backed company, and that single fact shapes most of what follows: the pricing, the pace, and the refusal to become bloated all-in-one software.
I build websites for health and wellness practitioners for a living, so I look at course tools through a specific lens: does this let a dietitian, a physical therapist, or a functional medicine provider deliver a course that looks like their brand and doesn’t cost a fortune to run during a slow month?
Teachery mostly earns a yes, with a few caveats. Here’s the full review, including how it stacks up against the two platforms people usually weigh it against.
What is Teachery, and who is it built for?
Teachery is a software-as-a-service course platform optimized for custom brand design, without native video hosting or built-in email marketing. You use it to build and sell courses, deliver digital downloads, and run resource hubs and membership-style access, all inside a space you can style to match your brand down to the hex code.
It’s run by Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband-and-wife team who’ve kept the company independent since 2013. No investors, no board, no annual pressure to raise prices for a growth chart. That’s why the monthly and annual prices have held flat for over a decade while most competitors raise theirs yearly.
It’s built for creators who care how their course looks and would rather assemble a small, deliberate stack than log into one bloated dashboard. For the practitioners I work with, the design piece matters more than they expect going in. A group nutrition program or a mobility course should feel like an extension of the brand, not a beige portal that could belong to anyone. Teachery is one of the few affordable tools that lets a non-developer get there.
How much does Teachery cost, and is the price changing?
Teachery has three ways to pay, and every plan includes every feature. No gating, no “upgrade to unlock custom domains.”
- Monthly: $49/month
- Annual: $470/year
- Lifetime: $550 one-time
All three include unlimited courses, unlimited customers, custom domain mapping, and a 0% platform transaction fee. That last point is the one that compounds in your favor. Plenty of platforms take a percentage of every sale on their lower tiers, so the more you sell, the more they skim. Teachery doesn’t touch your sales. You’ll still pay standard Stripe processing (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, which is the processor’s fee, not Teachery’s), but the platform itself takes nothing.
The timely part: the Lifetime price is going up in two steps. It moves from $550 to $750 on August 15, 2026, then to $950 on September 15, 2026, where it’s expected to stay. The math on Lifetime is simple either way. At $550, you break even against the annual plan in roughly 14 months, and everything after that is free. If you already know you’re building courses for the next several years, the one-time price is the cheapest way to own the platform instead of renting it. If you buy at the current price, you can lock in the Lifetime Plan here (aff link).
How does Teachery compare to Teachable and Kajabi?
These are the two platforms most people put next to Teachery. Teachery is the design-focused, own-it-outright option. Teachable is a course-first platform that charges a per-sale fee on its cheapest tier. Kajabi is the premium all-in-one that folds email and funnels into a much higher monthly bill. Here’s how the current numbers line up.
| Teachery | Teachable (Starter) | Kajabi (Basic) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $49/mo, or $550 one-time | $39/mo ($29 annual) | $179/mo ($143 annual) |
| Platform transaction fee | 0% | 7.5% | 0% via Kajabi Payments* |
| Lifetime / one-time option | Yes ($550, rising Aug 15) | No | No |
| Native video hosting | No (bring your own) | Yes | Yes |
| Custom domain | Yes, on every plan | Yes | Yes |
| Built-in email marketing | No (bring your own) | Basic | Yes |
| 3-year cost, entry tier** | $550 (Lifetime) | ~$1,044 + 7.5% of sales | ~$5,148 |
*Kajabi layers additional processing surcharges on top of standard card rates for subscriptions and international cards. **Subscription only, at annual-billing rates, before payment processing. The Teachable Starter figure also owes 7.5% of every sale on top.
Teachable’s Starter plan looks cheap at $39/month until you notice the 7.5% it takes on every sale, which grows right alongside your revenue until you upgrade to a fee-free tier starting at $69/month. Kajabi charges no platform fee on its own payments, but it starts at $143/month on annual billing because you’re paying for email, funnels, and a website you may already have handled elsewhere. Teachery’s tradeoff is the mirror image of Kajabi’s: no monthly bill on the Lifetime Plan and no cut of your sales, in exchange for bringing your own video host and email tool. If you already own those pieces, you aren’t paying twice for them, and over three years the gap in the bottom row is hard to argue with.
What is coming in Teachery 4.0?
Teachery 4.0 is a full ground-up rebuild, the biggest update since 2020, targeted for around October 2026 (no hard public date committed). The interface is being redrawn around a cleaner, more minimal layout with better search and faster in-app actions, and the whole platform is being rebuilt to load quickly and finally work well on a phone. The current version is fine for students on mobile but rough if you try to edit a course from your phone.
The other big addition is Communities, which Teachery calls its most-requested feature. You’ll be able to run a private community that lives inside Teachery and stays tied to what people actually bought, so you’re not bolting a separate Facebook group onto your programs. You can organize posts by spaces or by product, keep discussion attached to specific courses, run an event calendar with notifications, and post prompts and updates to keep people coming back. For anyone currently stitching a standalone community tool onto their courses, this pulls that job back into one place and ties access to the purchase automatically.
Alongside it comes proper Memberships, so recurring access becomes a built-in feature rather than a hub workaround, plus a broader push to organize courses, products, and hubs inside one calmer dashboard.
On the design side, you get more built-in templates to start from, simpler controls for colors and fonts, and stronger support for custom CSS if you like to hand-tune every detail, which preserves the design freedom that’s the main reason to choose Teachery in the first place.
Two more worth flagging: PayPal support is finally arriving, expected at the end of the year! And migrating your current Teachery account to 4.0 is meant to be handled for you, so your existing courses and customers come along without a rebuild.
The one worth thinking through before you buy is the optional AI assistant. Teachery is framing it as a genuine build helper: point it at a topic and it can draft course and product structure for you. The tradeoff is the same one every AI build tool carries. It saves you the blank-page hours, but a generated layout tends to look generated, and for a design-led platform like Teachery, that would undercut the whole reason to be here. My read: use it to rough out the skeleton, then do the styling and sequencing by hand. Optional is the key word, and if you’d rather build every screen yourself, nothing forces the AI on you. Anyone who buys the current Lifetime Plan gets 4.0 included at no extra cost, so you’re not buying a version about to be replaced.
Is Teachery a good fit for health and wellness practitioners?
For most of the practitioners I work with, yes, as long as you go in understanding that Teachery is deliberately not an all-in-one tool. Picture a registered dietitian who runs one-on-one client work most of the year and wants to package a self-paced gut-health program to sell alongside it. She needs the course to look like her brand, she needs it to run without a monthly bill during the summer when enrollments go quiet, and she needs students to log in on their phones without a clunky experience.
If you sell hard in January and quietly in July, a Lifetime Plan means you’re not paying a monthly subscription (like to Thinkific or Kajabi) during the stretch when nothing’s moving. For a practitioner whose course income ebbs and flows around client load, that predictability is worth real money over a few years, as that bottom row in the comparison table makes clear.
What does Teachery not do well?
Teachery doesn’t host your videos, and it doesn’t run your email marketing. You keep your videos with a dedicated host like Vimeo or Wistia and embed them, which means your video files stay yours instead of getting locked inside a platform you might leave someday. You connect Teachery to whatever email tool you already use. If you were hoping one login would run your funnels, your email sequences, and your courses, Teachery isn’t that. That’s the reason Kajabi costs what it costs: you’re paying for those pieces to live in one place.
The mobile experience on the current version is the other real weak spot, especially on the editing side. It’s usable for students today and getting a full rebuild in 4.0, but if flawless mobile matters to you right now, that will come later. And because Teachery leans on integrations rather than a giant native app store, more advanced automations often route through a tool like Zapier.
None of this is a dealbreaker for a focused course business. It’s a dealbreaker if you specifically want one platform to do everything, in which case Teachery is honest enough to tell you to look elsewhere.
Why does Teachery require external video hosting?
Teachery requires handing off video hosting to a dedicated tool like Vimeo or YouTube. It’s the most common criticism you’ll see raised about the platform, since most people expect a course tool to store video for them.
When your files live on a host like Vimeo or Wistia, you control the privacy settings, the player, the engagement analytics, and the files themselves. If you ever leave Teachery, your video library stays right where it is, because it was never locked inside Teachery to begin with.
The tradeoff: it’s another account to manage, and you paste an embed code into each lesson instead of uploading straight into the course. For a few creators that’s a dealbreaker. For most, it’s a small setup step in exchange for keeping the most expensive asset in your course, the video itself, portable and fully under your control.
How Teachery connects to your video host and email tool
Once you’ve picked your tools, the wiring is straightforward. Here’s what connects to what, and what you actually set up.
| What you’re connecting | How the connection works | Common tools |
|---|---|---|
| Video hosting | Upload the video to your own host, copy its embed code, and paste that into a Teachery lesson block. Teachery shows the player while the file stays on the host. | Vimeo, Wistia, YouTube, and most hosts that provide an embed code |
| Email marketing | Two paths, often used together: embed your email tool’s opt-in form directly onto a Teachery page, and connect Teachery to Zapier so events like a new order, a new email lead, or a completed course add or tag subscribers in your email platform. | Any email tool with a Zapier connection, such as Kit, Mailchimp, or ActiveCampaign |
Is Teachery worth it?
If you’re planning to sell courses or digital products for the next few years, you care about how they look, and you’re comfortable pairing a course tool with your own email and video, Teachery is one of the best-value options on the market, and the Lifetime Plan makes that case even stronger. If you’re not sure you’ll build a course, or you genuinely need a single all-in-one suite, wait. Don’t buy lifetime software you’re only half sure you’ll use.
For the practitioners in my world who want a branded, affordable home for their programs without another monthly platform bill, it’s an easy recommendation. If that’s you, you can start a free trial or grab the Lifetime Plan here before the price moves in August.
Teachery FAQ
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Is Teachery 4.0 included with the current Lifetime Plan?
Yes. Anyone who buys the current Lifetime Plan gets access to Teachery 4.0 when it launches, with the new features included and no separate upgrade fee.
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When is the Teachery Lifetime price increasing?
The Lifetime Plan goes from $550 to $750 on August 15, 2026, then from $750 to $950 on September 15, 2026. The $950 price is expected to hold from there.
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Does Teachery charge transaction fees?
No. Teachery takes a 0% platform transaction fee on every plan. You’ll still pay standard Stripe processing fees, but Teachery itself takes no cut of your sales.
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How is Teachery different from Kajabi?
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that includes email marketing, funnels, and a website, which is why it starts around $143/month on annual billing. Teachery focuses on course design and delivery and expects you to bring your own email and video tools, which is why it can offer a one-time Lifetime Plan instead.
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Does Teachery host videos?
No. You host videos with a dedicated provider like Vimeo or Wistia and embed them, so your files stay yours.
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Is there a free trial of Teachery?
Yes, Teachery offers a 14-day free trial so you can build something and test the editor before committing.
Heads up: some links here are affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you buy through them at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I’d put in front of my own clients.
