The cheapest part of a coaching business just got a monthly invoice.

Teachable's Usage Fees page, last updated September 28, 2026, now charges $0.50 a month for every student above 100 who joined any way other than a paid Teachable checkout — free courses and 100% coupons included.

That is the giveaway mini-course. The webinar replay you gate behind an enrollment. The 100%-off coupon you hand out at the back of the room. The 400 people you imported from your old platform and never monetised.

They used to be free to store. Now they rent space.

The rule, in plain English

Teachable charges $0.50 per student per month, above an allowance of 100, for every student added outside a paid Teachable checkout — free products, 100% coupons, admin imports, API enrollments and buyers brought over from another platform. Students who paid more than $0 through Teachable's own or custom gateways never count. The fee is the same on every plan.

That last line matters more than it looks. Upgrading does not buy you out of it. A Growth subscriber at $189 a month pays the same 50 cents per free head as a Starter subscriber at $39.

There is also a contamination rule that will catch people. A free, imported or manual enrollment makes a student count even if that same student also pays for another enrollment. One free tripwire course attached to a paying client turns that client into a billable line item.

Where the math starts to hurt

The comparison that should stop coaches cold is against Kajabi, which has spent a decade being described as the expensive option.

On monthly billing, a creator with 280 free students pays the same on Teachable Builder as on Kajabi Basic: $179. Every free student after that makes Teachable the larger bill. At 5,000 free students it is $2,539 against $249.

Run it at the number most working coaches actually have. A thousand free students on Teachable Builder is $450 a month in usage fees before anyone buys anything, for as long as they stay enrolled.

A second tracker, reading the same policy independently, lands on identical arithmetic: a billing-period peak of 500 countable students adds $200 a month.

Note the word peak. The charge is based on the billing-period peak above 100, not a month-end snapshot. Run a launch where 900 people grab the free course in week one and unenroll by week three, and the spike is what gets priced.

What our own read of the page found

The desk pulled Teachable's usage-fees page directly rather than trust comparison sites with a horse in the race. The version we retrieved is a pre-September snapshot, and it is worth seeing, because it is the schedule a large share of coaches are still on.

It prices by tier, not by flat rate. Active students run $0.10 a month on Starter and Builder and $0.05 on Growth and Advanced, while imported students run $1.50, $1.00, $0.75 and $0.50 a month depending on plan. An imported student is defined as anyone added by a method other than Teachable's native checkout — an administrative import or the API, for example.

So the per-head charge on free enrollments is not new. What changed in September is that it became one flat rate on every plan, with a stated 100-student allowance and a much wider definition of who counts.

The page frames all of this gently. Additional usage fees are "rare," it says, and typically only hit schools that exceed plan limits without making enough sales through Teachable's commerce tools. Which is true, and is also precisely the shape of a lead-magnet funnel: lots of enrollments, very few of them transactions.

Who is on the clock, and when

Schools created on or after September 3, 2026 are on the new policy from day one. Older schools stay on the legacy schedule until their first renewal on or after April 30, 2027, when they convert automatically — and on conversion the count restarts at zero.

That reset is the single most misread detail in this story. Only students added after the school moves onto the policy count. Your existing 4,000-person free list does not suddenly generate a $1,950 bill the morning you convert.

Which means the expensive thing is not your archive. It is your growth.

Everything you add after conversion — every new opt-in, every Meta ads lead, every webinar replay enrollment — is the part that meters. The better your top-of-funnel works, the faster the number climbs.

One more thing to verify yourself rather than take from any tracker: before the rewrite, Teachable's own FAQ said active and imported student caps did not apply once a school reached $10,000 a year in sales directly on the platform. Whether that escape hatch survived September 28 is not something either tracker confirms. If you are near that revenue line, ask support in writing.

The funnel question nobody has answered yet

For fifteen years the standard coaching playbook has been: give the thing away, collect the email, nurture, sell. Platform costs were fixed. Audience was free.

That assumption is now a variable cost, and the variable scales with exactly the metric coaches have been trained to maximise.

There are workable answers. Deliver the lead magnet off-platform and keep Teachable for paid products only. Charge $1 instead of $0 and route it through Teachable's gateway, which exempts anyone who paid more than $0 through a native or custom gateway. Prune dormant free enrollments before a billing period peaks.

All three change how your funnel is built. The $1 option changes it most, and it is the one a lot of coaches will quietly adopt — not because it converts better, but because zero dollars now costs fifty cents.