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In January 2026 Kajabi raised its entry pricing to $143+/month, and thousands of creators felt what renting means: the platform sets the price, holds your subscribers, and keeps the keys. Schoolyland is the other path: a complete course platform, built for you in 2 business days, that you own outright.
Founding launch: $1,990 setup + first year (reg. $3,500) · renewal locked at $790/yr · 10 seats
Kajabi removed its $89 entry plan in January 2026. Entry now starts around $143/month billed annually: $1,716 a year before you sell a single course. When you rent, the next increase is never your decision.
Sell subscriptions through Kajabi Payments and your recurring revenue lives inside the platform. Long-time creators report that leaving means losing recurring customers, and the more successful you become, the harder it is to go.
Contact limits are part of the plan structure. Grow your audience and you graduate into a higher tier: your success raises your rent.
None of this makes Kajabi a bad product. It makes it a rental.
Kajabi is a polished rental, and Thinkific a cheaper one with a feature ladder. Schoolyland is not a rental at all.
| Schoolyland | Kajabi | Thinkific | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A complete platform built for you, that you own | All-in-one SaaS you subscribe to | Course SaaS with tiered features |
| Who owns the platform | You: your domain, your data, your files | Kajabi | Thinkific |
| If you walk away | You keep everything. Host it anywhere | Access ends | The platform stays theirs |
| Payment processor | Your own Stripe / PayPal accounts | Kajabi Payments or Stripe | Thinkific Payments; Stripe/PayPal adds a fee on Basic |
| Contact limits | None | Capped per plan | Admin seats and mass email gate by plan, not contacts |
| Email marketing | Built in: full CRM, 12,000 sends/mo included; or connect any email provider via API | Included, within plan caps | Student-only mass email on Grow; real marketing external |
| Courses & LMS | Full LMS: quizzes, certificates, drip, cohorts | Strong native course builder | Strong course builder |
| Community · affiliates · video | All included | Higher tiers / partial | Higher tiers / partial |
| Run it with AI | Built in: AI runs every department of the business, and builds new features on request | MCP connector on all plans (builds inside Kajabi only) | Read-only MCP (Plus, beta). AI can build display widgets (Plus only, capped at 10) and cannot change how the platform behaves |
| Extend & customize | Open WordPress: add plugins, build features, change anything. What you build lives in your database, and leaves with you | Custom code allowed but unsupported; the code editor is Pro-only ($499/mo), and what you build stays in Kajabi | Footer JS and theme code, unsupported, erased on theme update, and what you build stays in Thinkific |
| Setup | Done for you in 2 business days | DIY | DIY |
| Year 1 | $1,990 founding (reg. $3,500) | $1,716 to $2,388 | $480 to $1,968 + email tool |
| 3 years | $3,570 (yours from day one) | $5,148 to $7,164 (you own nothing) | $1,440 to $5,904 + tools (you own nothing) |
Sources: Kajabi pricing · Thinkific pricing (annual billing where available). Last verified: August 10, 2026. Thinkific mass email is available on the Grow plan and reaches existing students only. Schoolyland founding pricing is limited to 10 founding seats; regular pricing $3,500 + $990/yr.
Kajabi and Thinkific are trademarks of their respective owners. Schoolyland is an independent company, not affiliated with or endorsed by either. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we’ll correct it.
$1,990 setup + first year, then $790/yr, locked and optional. The platform is yours from day one, and after year one you can renew everything, only the services you need, or nothing at all.
$2,388/yr on annual billing after the January 2026 increase. At the end: you own nothing, and year 4 costs the same as year 1.
$164/month on annual billing, before the external email tool the ladder doesn’t include. Mass email at this tier reaches only students you already have. You own nothing.
That is roughly half the cost of Kajabi, and what you spend buys something that’s yours.
The platform runs on your domain, under your name. Move it to any host, any time. It’s a standard, portable website, not an account on someone’s servers.
Students, subscribers, orders, emails and content all sit in databases you control and can export whole. There are no “request your data” forms, because the data never left your hands.
There are no contact ceilings, feature gates or plan tiers. If your list triples next month, nothing changes except your revenue.
Stop working with us and you lose exactly nothing: the site, the data and the customer relationships stay with you. We think that’s the only honest way to sell infrastructure.
A SaaS hands you a fixed menu of features, checkout and page builder, and your business adapts to the tool. Schoolyland is open WordPress: the world’s largest ecosystem of plugins and integrations, plus an AI layer that builds custom pieces on request.
Thousands of proven WordPress plugins: booking, podcasts, multilingual, memberships, marketplaces. If your business needs it, it exists, and it plugs into your platform.
Layouts, flows, checkout fields and member areas are all open to change, because nothing is locked. Ask the AI, or bring in any WordPress professional in the world; no proprietary platform gatekeeps the work.
Custom features, calculators, client portals and niche integrations can be developed for your exact workflow, on your platform, and they stay yours. There is no SaaS roadmap to send feature requests to.
Your platform arrives with the full business layer already wired together: the same capabilities you’d rent from Kajabi, running as one system you own.
Your platform connects directly to AI across every system and every department, rather than through a chatbot bolted on the side. Marketing, sales, content, design, SEO, email campaigns, community and reporting: the daily work of an entire team happens in a conversation. Because the platform is open, the AI can also build on it: new landing pages, automations, design changes and custom features.
The departments this covers, in practice
The savings span every department on this list. The hours, and the monthly retainers you’d pay service providers for each of these, become a conversation with your own platform.
Claim a founding seat. You choose the domain; we take it from there.
Your complete platform goes live with courses, checkout through your own PayPal or Stripe, email marketing, community and affiliates, all connected and ready to sell.
Course content exports from Kajabi, videos re-upload, your email list imports from CSV. Importers, step-by-step guides, the AI layer and our support carry you through it.
One exception: active subscriptions billed through Kajabi Payments can’t transfer, and that is the lock-in. Your subscribers re-subscribe once through your own checkout. From that day the billing relationship is yours, permanently, with no platform between you and your customers.
Ten founding seats. $1,990 for the platform and your first year (regular $3,500), with renewal locked at $790/yr for as long as you stay. Built and live in 2 business days.
2 business days delivery · you own everything · 650+ sites built by this team since 2020