If you run group lessons or a studio membership on a monthly plan, your revenue depends on cards that keep working. A student's card expires, their bank flags a charge, they switch banks and forget to update billing. Multiply that by 40 or 80 members and a few percent of failed charges every month becomes a steady leak. The platforms call this dunning: the process of retrying a failed charge and emailing the customer before you lose them entirely. It's one of the least glamorous features in any course platform, and one of the ones that matters most to your actual bank balance.
I pulled the current public pricing pages for Kajabi and Teachable to see what each platform states about recurring payments and payment recovery. Here's what's confirmed, what's implied, and what neither page actually spells out.
What Kajabi's pricing page confirms
Kajabi's plans start at Basic ($143/mo billed annually), Growth ($199/mo), and Pro ($399/mo). All three tiers list "Payment Integrations" and "Checkout Pages" as included features, and Kajabi Payments processing rates step down as you move up plans: 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% + $0.30 on Growth, 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro (US entities; rates vary by country). If you use a third-party payment provider instead of Kajabi Payments, Kajabi still takes a cut on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, 0.5% on Pro.
Communities and Access Groups are included on every tier, which matters for a studio membership since that's the mechanism you'd likely use to gate lesson content by paid status. Basic caps you at 2,500 contacts, Growth at 25,000, Pro at 100,000.
What the page does not mention anywhere: dunning, retry attempts, failed-payment emails, or grace periods for lapsed subscriptions. "Payment Integrations" is listed as a feature name with no description of what happens when a recurring charge fails.
What Teachable's pricing page confirms
Teachable's tiers are Starter ($39/mo, or $29/mo billed annually), Builder ($89/mo, $69/mo annual), and Growth ($189/mo, $139/mo annual). Starter carries a 7.5% transaction fee on top of the subscription price; Builder and Growth both show 0% transaction fees. All three tiers list "Memberships" as a platform feature under Student management, and all three list "Upsells & cart recovery" as a headline feature.
Cart recovery, as named, is aimed at recovering abandoned checkouts before a first purchase completes. That's a different mechanism from retrying a subscription payment that fails on month four. The comparison table below the pricing cards also lists "Abandoned cart emails" as a distinct line item from general sales and marketing features, which reinforces that reading. Teachable's page does not use the words dunning, retry, or failed payment anywhere in the content I could pull.
The actual gap
Neither page states, in plain language, whether a failed recurring charge gets retried automatically, how many times, on what schedule, or whether the platform emails the member to update their card before access gets cut off. That's a real gap in what's publicly documented, and it says nothing on its own about whether either platform actually has the capability. Payment recovery logic is exactly the kind of detail that lives in help-center articles or gets answered by a sales rep rather than a pricing page, and I'm not going to guess at retry counts or grace-period lengths that aren't in front of me.
For a studio membership specifically, this is worth resolving before you commit. A few concrete questions to put to either platform's support team or sales contact:
- When a recurring charge fails, does the platform retry automatically, and how many times over what window?
- Does the member get an email prompting them to update their card, and can you customize that message?
- Is there a grace period before access to lesson content is revoked, or does it cut off on first failure?
- Can you see failed-payment status in your admin dashboard without digging through a payment processor's separate portal?
What the pricing itself tells you
Setting the dunning question aside, the fee structure alone changes your math differently depending on scale. A studio charging $150/mo per student across 30 recurring memberships is moving about $4,500/mo. On Teachable Starter, the 7.5% transaction fee alone is roughly $337/mo, on top of the $29-39/mo subscription cost, which makes Builder's 0% transaction fee look like the real starting tier for anyone running paid memberships at volume. On Kajabi, that same $4,500/mo at the Basic tier's 2.9% + $0.30 Kajabi Payments rate runs closer to $140/mo in processing across 30 transactions, similar to what you'd pay any standard processor, with no separate platform-level transaction fee layered on.
Community and access-group gating is included at every Kajabi tier, while Teachable's Memberships feature is likewise present across Starter, Builder, and Growth. Neither platform reserves basic recurring membership functionality for its top tier, so the choice between them comes down to transaction-fee structure at your volume and, once you've confirmed it directly, how each handles a card that stops working on month six.
Bottom line for a studio owner
Both platforms are built to run recurring group lesson billing, and both list membership and payment features on every plan, including their entry tier. What isn't visible from either pricing page is the mechanic that actually protects your monthly revenue: how aggressively they chase a failed card before a student silently lapses. That's a question for a support ticket, and it won't get answered by a marketing page. Ask it before you migrate 80 students onto either platform, because moving a studio membership twice in one year is its own kind of churn.