That difference matters because a person selling a handful of ebooks, templates or downloadable resources has a very different problem from someone building a course business with funnels, email automation, communities and a large customer base.
So rather than treating this as a generic "A is better than B" comparison, let's look at what you actually pay, what each platform gives you, how discovery works, and what happens when you're bringing your own traffic.
At a glance
| Feature | Payhip | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|
| Digital downloads | Yes | Yes |
| Courses | Yes | Yes |
| Memberships | Yes | Yes |
| Website/store builder | Yes | Yes |
| Email marketing | Yes | Yes |
| Funnels and advanced automation | More limited | Yes |
| Built-in product marketplace | Yes | No equivalent general marketplace |
| Platform transaction fee | 5%, 2% or 0%, depending on plan | 0% |
| Starting monthly price | $0 | $179 monthly |
Payhip pricing
Payhip currently has three plans, and the important detail is that all three plans provide the same core feature set. The difference is principally what you pay Payhip when a sale happens.
- Free Forever — $0/month + 5% transaction fee. Payhip lists unlimited products and unlimited revenue on this plan.
- Plus — $29/month + 2% transaction fee. This keeps the same core feature access while reducing the platform percentage.
- Pro — $99/month + 0% transaction fee. Again, the feature set is not artificially restricted compared with the lower plans.
There is an important second layer to that pricing. Payhip says Stripe and PayPal still charge their standard payment-processing rates on transactions, regardless of which Payhip plan you use. Those are processor charges rather than Payhip's own platform fee, and the actual rate depends on the processor, country and transaction.
That distinction is easy to miss when comparing platforms. A 5% Payhip transaction fee is not the same thing as the card-processing charge on the payment itself.
Kajabi pricing
Kajabi takes a very different approach. Its current plans are subscription-based, with no Kajabi transaction percentage on sales. The current monthly prices are:
- Basic — $179/month, or $143/month when billed annually. It includes up to 5 products, 2,500 contacts, 1 website and 1 community.
- Growth — $249/month, or $199/month when billed annually. It includes up to 50 products, 25,000 contacts, 1 website and 1 community, with additional administration and business features.
- Pro — $499/month, or $399/month when billed annually. It includes unlimited products, 100,000 contacts, 3 websites and 3 communities.
Kajabi also states that processing fees apply and that rates vary by country and payment provider. For US entities using Kajabi Payments, its current published rates are 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% + $0.30 on Growth and 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro. If a third-party payment provider is used instead of Kajabi Payments, Kajabi lists additional platform charges of 2%, 1% and 0.5% respectively, excluding PayPal and Kajabi Payments and before that provider's own fees.
So the headline distinction is straightforward: Payhip combines a monthly subscription with a declining platform percentage, while Kajabi charges a substantial monthly subscription and does not take a percentage of sales itself.
What happens to a $20 sale?
Here's the cleanest way to see the difference. The Payhip figures below show Payhip's own platform charge. Its payment processor charge is additional and isn't included because Payhip does not publish one universal Stripe/PayPal processing rate for every seller.
| Platform / plan | Platform fee on $20 | Published processor charge | Platform + listed processor charge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payhip Free | $1.00 | Varies by Stripe/PayPal and seller location | $1.00 + processor fee |
| Payhip Plus | $0.40 | Varies by Stripe/PayPal and seller location | $0.40 + processor fee |
| Payhip Pro | $0.00 | Varies by Stripe/PayPal and seller location | Processor fee only |
| Kajabi Basic + Kajabi Payments (US) | $0.00 | 2.9% + $0.30 = $0.88 | $0.88 |
| Kajabi Growth + Kajabi Payments (US) | $0.00 | 2.8% + $0.30 = $0.86 | $0.86 |
| Kajabi Pro + Kajabi Payments (US) | $0.00 | 2.7% + $0.30 = $0.84 | $0.84 |
The monthly subscription is deliberately not added to the single-sale figures. A $179 subscription doesn't become a $179 charge against one particular $20 customer; it is the fixed cost of having the platform available for the month.
Platform-fee-only comparison at different sales volumes
Ignoring payment processors and, for this particular calculation, ignoring Kajabi's monthly subscription, the Payhip platform fees alone would look like this:
- At $500/month in sales: Payhip Free = $25; Payhip Plus = $10; Payhip Pro = $0.
- At $2,000/month in sales: Payhip Free = $100; Payhip Plus = $40; Payhip Pro = $0.
- At $5,000/month in sales: Payhip Free = $250; Payhip Plus = $100; Payhip Pro = $0.
These are platform fees only. They are not your final payment-processing costs or your profit.
When does Payhip Plus make sense?
This is where the $29 monthly Plus subscription becomes a simple piece of maths.
The Free plan charges 5%, while Plus charges 2%. That means Plus saves 3 percentage points on sales.
$29 ÷ 0.03 = $966.67
So, before considering payment-processing differences, the Plus plan's $29 monthly cost is offset at approximately $966.67 of monthly sales.
Below that level, the lower monthly commitment of Free may be attractive. Above it, the 3-percentage-point saving becomes larger than the $29 subscription. For example, at $2,000 in monthly sales, Free's platform fee is $100 and Plus's is $40. Plus therefore saves $60 in platform fees, more than its $29 subscription.
The same logic can be applied to Pro. Moving from Plus's 2% to Pro's 0% saves 2 percentage points, so $99 ÷ 0.02 = $4,950. That's the simple platform-fee break-even between those two plans, before processor charges.
Payhip's marketplace and discovery features
Payhip is unusual in this comparison because it isn't only a storefront. It also has a marketplace where eligible digital products can be surfaced to people who are not already following the seller.
Payhip says sellers become eligible after reaching $10 in total sales and passing store and product review. Products can be categorised and tagged to help customers discover them, and Payhip says marketplace sales don't carry an additional marketplace fee beyond the normal Payhip plan fee.
That doesn't mean the marketplace replaces marketing. You still need a useful product, a good listing and sensible categories and tags. But it does create a discovery route that isn't dependent entirely on you already having an audience.
Kajabi's marketplace or discovery equivalent
Kajabi does not offer a general product marketplace equivalent to Payhip's marketplace. Its model is much more centred on building your own business presence: website, landing pages, email marketing, funnels, offers, courses, communities and customer relationships.
That's not necessarily a weakness. It simply changes where the traffic is expected to come from. With Kajabi, you're generally building the audience and directing people into your own ecosystem rather than uploading a product and waiting for marketplace browsing to introduce new buyers.
Tax and VAT handling
Payhip puts considerable emphasis on taking tax administration off the seller's plate. Its current documentation says it handles digital EU and UK VAT, including collecting, reporting and remitting those amounts. Payhip also says that, from July 1, 2026, it handles US sales tax on behalf of sellers as a marketplace facilitator, and it handles Canadian sales tax as a digital platform operator.
There are still circumstances in which a seller can have their own filing obligations, so this isn't a substitute for tax advice. But for a small digital-product seller, the platform's role in collecting and remitting these taxes can remove a substantial administrative task.
Kajabi Payments has its own sales-tax integration and can automatically calculate sales tax at checkout. Kajabi says this tax-collection functionality is available through Kajabi Payments. Your own tax liability and reporting obligations are separate from the mechanics of collecting tax at checkout, so Kajabi does not remove the need to understand your particular tax position.
Cheaper for your own traffic
There's an important wrinkle in the pricing comparison: the cheaper platform on paper isn't necessarily the cheaper business model for every seller.
If you're already generating traffic through Pinterest, an email list, YouTube, a blog, social media, SEO or another audience you've built, you don't necessarily need a platform to discover customers for you. In that situation, you're primarily paying for the infrastructure that turns your existing traffic into customers.
Payhip's low entry cost makes that particularly straightforward for someone testing a digital product. You can start without a monthly platform subscription, accept the higher percentage fee while sales are small, and move to Plus or Pro when the maths makes sense.
Kajabi takes the opposite trade-off. You're paying a substantial recurring subscription, but you get a much broader collection of business-building tools and no Kajabi transaction percentage. That can make sense when those additional tools are actually replacing other software or when you're building a more involved course, membership or education business.
For Pinterest Sellers Specifically
This is one area where I'd personally keep things very simple. One of my own long-standing go-to ways of sending people to Payhip sales pages is Pinterest. I like the basic loop: create useful content around the problem the product solves, make the Pinterest pin genuinely worth clicking, and send the interested reader straight to the relevant product or sales page.
That approach fits Payhip particularly well because you don't need the platform itself to be the source of the customer. Pinterest can do the discovery work, while Payhip handles the storefront, checkout, delivery and the transaction.
For a seller building a catalogue of templates, printables, guides or other downloadable products, that distinction can be more important than having every possible marketing feature under one roof.
Disclosure
This page may contain a referral link. If you sign up to Payhip through that link, I may earn a commission. Payhip's Free Forever plan currently costs $0 per month to join, although sales on that plan are subject to Payhip's published transaction fee and normal payment-processing charges.
The Practical Difference
- Payhip is built around getting products for sale quickly. Digital downloads, courses, memberships and other products can live in the same storefront.
- Payhip's pricing scales with sales. You can start at $0/month, then move from 5% to 2% or 0% in platform transaction fees as your sales volume makes the subscription worthwhile.
- Payhip has a genuine marketplace. That gives digital products an additional discovery route beyond traffic you generate yourself.
- Kajabi is a broader business platform. Its current plans combine products with websites, landing pages, funnels, marketing email, automation, communities and other creator-business tools.
- Kajabi's monthly commitment is much higher. In return, Kajabi doesn't take a platform percentage from sales.
- Neither platform eliminates payment-processing costs. The processor and payment method still matter when calculating the real cost of a sale.
- The right comparison depends heavily on your business model. A simple catalogue of downloadable products and a full-scale course business have very different requirements.
FAQ
1. Is Payhip or Kajabi better for digital products?
It depends on what you mean by "digital products." For straightforward downloads, templates and smaller product catalogues, Payhip's simpler setup and sales-based pricing can be a natural fit. Kajabi is built for a broader creator business that may combine products with courses, communities, funnels, email marketing and automation.
2. Does Payhip really have a $0 monthly plan?
Yes. Payhip currently lists its Free Forever plan at $0 per month. It carries a 5% Payhip transaction fee, and Stripe or PayPal can also charge their normal processing fees.
3. At what sales level does Payhip Plus make sense?
Using Payhip's current 5% Free rate and 2% Plus rate, the saving is 3% of sales. The simple calculation is $29 ÷ 0.03 = $966.67. So the platform-fee break-even is about $966.67 in monthly sales, before considering processor charges.
4. Does Kajabi charge a transaction fee?
Kajabi currently lists a 0% Kajabi transaction fee on its plans. Payment processing still applies. For US entities using Kajabi Payments, Kajabi currently publishes rates ranging from 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic to 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro.
5. Does Payhip have a marketplace?
Yes. Payhip has a marketplace for eligible digital products. Sellers need to meet Payhip's eligibility and review requirements, and products can be categorised and tagged for discovery.
6. Does Kajabi handle VAT and sales tax?
Kajabi Payments includes a sales-tax integration that can automatically manage tax collection at checkout. Payhip goes further in certain areas: its current documentation says it handles digital EU and UK VAT and US and Canadian sales tax on behalf of sellers. Your own tax obligations can still depend on where your business operates and other circumstances.
7. Can I use Pinterest to send traffic to Payhip?
Yes. Pinterest can be used as an external traffic source, with pins linking visitors to your Payhip store or individual product pages. This can be particularly useful if your business is based around searchable visual content and downloadable products.
Final thoughts
The Payhip-versus-Kajabi decision becomes much clearer once you stop treating them as identical kinds of platforms.
Payhip is fundamentally attractive when you want the path from "I have a digital product" to "people can buy it" to stay relatively short. Its $0 monthly starting point, declining platform fees and built-in marketplace make the economics easy to understand, particularly while you're testing what sells.
Kajabi is playing a different game. Its subscription prices are considerably higher, but the product is designed to be the centre of a more developed creator business, with websites, landing pages, funnels, email marketing, automation, communities and larger product and contact allowances as you move up the plans.
If your traffic is coming from somewhere you already control — Pinterest is a good example — you may not need your selling platform to be your main discovery engine. In that situation, the question becomes whether you need Kajabi's broader business machinery enough to justify its recurring cost, or whether a simpler Payhip storefront does what you actually need.
That's the practical decision: not which platform has the longer feature list, but which set of costs and tools matches the business you're actually building.