For a long time (years actually) I’ve been a Teachable customer and affiliate, promoting them heavily across my site, but they have lost both my business (and my recommendation) for a whole host of reasons which I’m going to get into.
Is Teachable Worth It?
Yes, it’s a decent platform to create and sell courses as a digital product.
What you get is your own full course website to sell products. Each course is a directory on your teaching site with it’s own landing page and learning modules and an excellent checkout page.
You can bundle courses together, offer 1:1 coaching, give coupon codes, run a simple affiliate program, create upsells and downsells and manage taxes with their back office service.
But after years of using Teachable, I’ve just grown unhappy with their service and overall offer.
So again, this is just my opinion and experience. Your experience may be totally different.
But here is why I made the switch to Thinkific to power the backend of my content marketing, You Inc. business.
The 5 Product Limit is Ridiculous
Update – They seemed to have come to their senses and upped the 5 product limit to 10.
*Starter, Builder and Growth plans pricing as of December 2025.
Teachable announced that they were going to be changing their pricing structures starting in June 2025 and would be migrating your account to a new plan.
The positioned the change as positive:
- Lowering transaction fees.
- Elevating the student experience.
- Increased access to sales and marketing features.
- Updates to how products are counted.
- Updates to student management.
While in actual practice all that happened was that they increased their prices and decrease features. Namely they implemented both a ridiculous 5 product and 1 product limit on their plans.
Starter plan – 1 product?!
Their lowest tier which they charge $29 a month for, only allowed you to sell one, ONE product. On top of that you have to also pay them an additional 7.5% transaction fee.
Ridiculous.
A product is anything you’re selling, be it a $9.99 ebook or a 20-hour video course.
Both count as one product.
So you had to pick one. To add insult to injury, you also have to fork over 7.5% of your earnings on top of paying them $29 a month.
This frankly stupid and needless limitation makes the Starter plan on Teachable unusable and uncompetitive. Why bother using the Teachable Starter plan at that point?
Use Gumroad, it’s free but comes with a 10% transaction fee because it’s free.
That’s fair and makes sense, or use one of Teachable’s competitors that allows multiple courses and no transaction fees at a similar price point.
Builder Plan – 5 Product limit, but you’re paying $69/month?!
This was the plan I was migrated over to, and I was quite annoyed as this change happened a month after I paid for another year of Teachable.
At $69 a month, particularly compared to other platforms (Teachable, Podia, Kajabi), I should be getting way more for my money.
Teachable used to offer “unlimited” courses, but now I’m limited to just 5 products.
Again, a product is anything you sell.
So how is it fair that a 10-hour video course or an ebook both count toward this tiny product limit?
If you want to have a coaching offer that counts as a product too.
For $69 a month, it’s just way too expensive and unreasonable with this 5-product limit.
Current pricing
As I mentioned at the start, they did update these ridiculous product limits, but compared to the competition, this is just silly.
$139 growth plan, you may as well use Kajabi and get a nice combination of email marketing funnels, a website, sales pages, blog, and courses with great checkout pages.
Since they insist on having a product limit, it should be 10 products on the starter plan, 25 products on the builder plan and 50+ products on the growth plan.
Low ticket is impossible to do with Teachable
I personally charge 97$ for each one of my courses, and bundle everything together into a higher ticket price point, so a low ticket is not a huge deal for me.
But if you’re someone who wants to create low-ticket books, checklists, cheat sheets, downloadable material, and courses, pass on Teachable.
You are too limited to properly do low-ticket products.
Properly, meaning you sell something for say $39 with an order bump of say $27, and after purchase, have an offer for another product offer.
What’s the point of having upsells and order bumps?
With these ridiculously low product limits, it’s silly that Teachable allows you to have order bumps and upsells because you have to be so careful, as you have this product limit.
So I have 5 courses bundled together, which was the limit previously on the Builder plan.
So even if I wanted to incorporate an order bump or upsell for a digital download, I couldn’t because I hit my product limit.
Site went down via the SSL
The whole point of paying $69 a month is to have a professional platform, with a custom domain that just works.
I’m a solopreneur, I don’t want to have to deal with tech issues and my LMS just breaking is not what I want to deal with.
On top of that, Teachable had NO idea what happened and took days to find a solution.
Their immediate solution was to set my course website back to a sub domain on Teachable (my-course-website.teachable.com), but my students don’t know that. They visit the domain and the site is just gone as far as they can tell.
So my site was:
- De-indexed by Google.
- Gave a massive “site unsafe” warning to any traffic I sent.
- Removed my custom domain name branding.
- Prevented my students from accessing the material they bought.
- Given no solution as to why this happened or how to fix it.
Sales Pages Have a Mediocre Design
The sale pages from Teachable have no really improved much over the years. They’re not bad, but they’re starting to look a bit dated.
Teachable:
Thikific:
Teachable has decent sales pages for your courses, particularly if you have an eye for design like myself, but Thinkific sales pages are simply better.
I also like how I can incorporate the sales video into the above the fold, offer section instead of Teachable where this is not possible and I have to have the sales video under the offer section.
What both platform do well is allowing you to display the course material so visitors can see what they’re going go get access to, but the overall design is just better on Thinkific.
Design enhances copy, so this quite important as having a modern design helps you convert sales.
“Average at best” support
I’m simply not happy with Teachable support.
I find it difficult to even find a support page when I log in (there is no support link in the footer or when you access your school.
They have a chat bot that works sometimes and other times it does not:
When I am able to get in contact with support, response times take 12 hours to a full day. Not, great when one of your income sources is completely down.
It took them a full 4 days to get back to me with an answer and a solution.
The solution is for me to follow a guide on how to point my domain name to Cloudflare then create a Cloudflare account and configure my settings from there.
Mind you, the custom domain has been working for years with no issue, and no one contacted me to tell me they had a problem issuing an SSL cert.
Instead, they just let my SSL cert expire and give a terrible user experience to my students and prospective customers.
Can do it more cost effective myself (Thrive Cart + Bunny.net)
Thrive Cart costs around $500, one time fee and you get a “learn” function built in for courses.
Bunny.net offers cheap video hosting that you pay as your students watch your courses.
*Modules inside my Expat Escape course.
Thrive Cart again costs a one time and includes this “learn” functionality with your purchase, you own it forever and your course modules look better than Teachable honestly.
I like the masonry grid layout of the different modules and inside each module, video lessons are arranged in an easy to navigate way:
*When a user opens a module, this is what it looks like.
Combine this with Bunny.net for your video hosting, your hosting bill is based on storage and how much people stream of your videos.
I asked Grok how much my cost would be if I were making 3 sales a week of a 10-hour video course, and it stated the cost is in the $2-5 range per month, not $69.
So with Thrive Cart, I can have multiple 10-hour video courses with no arbitrary limit, order bumps included, digital downloads and use something like Bunny.net that would set me back maybe $3 a month per 10-hour video course.
So maybe my hosting bill would be what? $10 a month as an on-going fee?
So why not “do it yourself” then?
I don’t mind paying for Thinkific because they handle the tech and design on my behalf. That’s the big benefit of using a platform: it’s already built, and it’s easy to use.
But at some point perhaps I will move to Thrive Cart fully, but right now I’m happy with Thinkific.
Simply not that competitive with the competition
Compared to what Thinkific offers at their $36 a month starter plan:
- Unlimited courses.
- 5 digital downloads.
- Order bumps and coupon codes.
- Abandon cart recovery.
- 1 community built in.
- No transaction fees
It’s hard to recommend Teachable.
Teachable had their Starter plan with an honestly embarrassing 1 product limit with a 7.5% transaction fee (now updated to a 5 product limit).
What Teachable does well (kind of)
The back office service
Teachable’s BackOffice is an optional add-on service that automates backend admin tasks for course creators, so you avoid paperwork and manual work:
- Automated monthly payouts to affiliates.
- Automatic collection and handling of tax forms (for affiliates/authors, like 1099s).
- Enables extra student payment options like PayPal and Buy Now Pay Later.
But is this unique feature included given the strict product limits and premium price point? No, you have to pay around 2–2.8% transaction fee.
Teachable sure likes skimming money off your earnings.
Good checkout pages
The checkout page is not something you pay much attention to if you’ve never sold anything online, but having a well designed checkout page is quite important and Teachable does this well.
Clean and easy to make a purchase.
However, let’s look at Thrive Cart for my Expat Escape product:
I’ll let you decide which one is better, but one thing I like about Thrive Cart is that I can customize the checkout page however I want.
Colors, placement of blocks, images, copy and more.
As for Thinkific, their checkout experience is similar to Teachable. Clean, minimalistic and easy to navigate.
Final thoughts
So after years of being a Teachable customer, I’ve decided that it’s time to leave as I don’t agree with the direction their product offerings are heading.
Instead, Thinkific is now the best overall “done for you” option in my opinion if you’re looking to sell online courses via a beautiful website with high converting sales pages.
Thrive Cart Learn is also quite good but a bit more techy to setup. Thinkific’s ease of use is why I’m using them even though I have the tech skills to build out my own website and landing pages (using Thrive Cart learn for the checkout and deliverable).
*Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly my own. All assessments in this content are subjective and reflect my personal perspective.
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