Kajabi now charges a surcharge for using your own Stripe, on top of Stripe fees

Kajabi restructured its pricing in January 2026, its first change in nearly a decade, and one part of that change is easy to miss because it does not sit in the plan price. If you run payments through your own Stripe account rather than Kajabi Payments, Kajabi now adds a platform surcharge on top of the fees Stripe already takes. Kajabi’s own help centre confirms the surcharge exists, that it is set by your plan, and that PayPal is not subject to it. Two independent pricing write-ups put the plan figures at 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth and 0.5 percent on Pro.

What the surcharge means in money

A surcharge is a percentage of every sale, so it scales with revenue, not with the size of your plan. Stripe already charges roughly 2.9 percent plus 0.30 dollars per card transaction; the Kajabi surcharge stacks on top. On Basic that pushes the effective card cost to about 4.9 percent plus 0.30 dollars, on Growth to about 3.9 percent plus 0.30 dollars, and on Pro to about 3.4 percent plus 0.30 dollars, before the Kajabi monthly plan fee. A creator on Basic taking 10,000 dollars a month through their own Stripe would pay about 200 dollars a month, or roughly 2,400 dollars a year, in the surcharge alone.

The two ways to avoid it

• Use Kajabi Payments: Kajabi does not add its surcharge when you use its own built-in payment processing, so the platform surcharge drops to zero. You still pay the underlying card-processing fee, but not the extra Kajabi cut.
• Take payment through PayPal: Kajabi states that PayPal is not subject to the surcharge, so PayPal sales avoid the extra percentage even when you are not on Kajabi Payments.
• Creators in countries where Kajabi Payments is not yet available are also exempt, since there is no in-house option to steer them toward.

The plan prices moved too

The surcharge did not arrive on its own. In the same January 2026 restructure the plan prices rose across the board. Billed annually, Basic is 143 dollars a month, Growth 199 dollars a month and Pro 399 dollars a month; billed monthly the plans are 179, 249 and 499 dollars. Growth rose from 159 to 199 dollars a month on annual billing, about a 25 percent jump. The Basic contact allowance was also cut from 10,000 to 2,500, so the entry plan holds a quarter of the audience it used to at a higher price.

Why the sticker price is not the cost

This is the same pattern our course-platform work keeps finding: the monthly plan is the visible number, and the fees on each sale are the line that actually decides your bill. A cheaper plan with a payment surcharge can cost more than a dearer plan without one, once real sales run through it. Our free course-platform profit calculator lets you put in your own price, volume and plan, and shows the all-in cost after platform and payment fees, so you can compare Kajabi against Teachable and Thinkific on the number that matters rather than on the sticker. Our piece on the cheap-plan trap in course-platform fees walks the same math in more detail.