Kajabi was originally an idea by Kenny Reuter, who wanted to start a side-business teaching people how to make toys online. He was not passionate about teaching online but he was passionate to make it easier for people who wanted to share their knowledge online.
It was easy to see the vision. Kajabi founders Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser knew they wanted to help people monetize their knowledge and premium digital content online. To do so, they would need a platform that makes the process painless and seamless for entrepreneurs.
Kajabi is a popular online course creator. It is one of the most widely used online learning platforms. Kajabi has grown to be the online learning platform it is today since its inception in 2010. It has empowered thousands to escape the jobs that no longer fulfill them and help them realize their dreams.
This overview will provide a basic understanding of Kajabi. These include marketing, pricing, online course creation, and much more. This will give you a clear idea of the benefits you’ll get if you choose Kajabi.
For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Lane Sebring’s YouTube channel. To get a comprehensive overview of Kajabi, you may still want to check out our article below.
General Overview Kajabi Designer
Pros
- A highly integrated platform featuring a lot of built-in tools
- Intuitive marketing tools that help you promote and sell your products.
- User-friendly
- Great customer support
- Intuitive course builder and highly customizable themes
- Wistia is used as a video host
Cons
- Kajabi pricing is higher than average prices
- Users cannot create custom certificates of completion for students on the platform
- Assessment customization is limited.
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an online platform for creating courses that allow users to manage their businesses from one location. From course creation to marketing and so much more, Kajabi will take care of it for you.
How does Kajabi work?
Kajabi is built to sell. It boasts how simple it is to use. You can start by purchasing a plan. There are three options available: Pro, Growth, or Basic. We will discuss them later in this review.
Once you have selected a plan, you can easily set up your account and upload your content. Using the lesson editor, you can upload your video lectures and give the lesson description and titles.
Assessments are easily done by typing the questions and giving options (if you have chosen the multiple-choice type ).
Assuming this is all done, you’re now ready to market your products. In Kajabi, you can build pipelines. You can use these mechanisms to increase conversion rates and turn prospects into potential students through efficient marketing channels. You can add landing pages, freebies that get leads to enter their email addresses, video marketing, and so on.
When the prospect becomes a student, you can process payments through the site. All without having to leave Kajabi. Kajabi Designer
Now, some features make Kajabi an almost “all-in-one” platform. These features will be discussed in the next sections. Kajabi is able to compete with most online courses platforms, thanks to the many features and benefits it provides.
Why should you choose Kajabi:
You want to maximize your investment as an entrepreneur. If you have valuable content that you would like to market, Kajabi provides excellent support for your needs. This guide will help you launch your business and keep it growing.
The business is more than just uploading your course content and waiting for students to sign in. You will need to create a course curriculum, set goals and assess your students, make sure your website is attractive to your target audience, and market it. You can do the following and more with Kajabi.
- Build a website
- Create course offerings
- Track student progress
- Manage subscriptions/payments
- Run email marketing campaigns
One criticism Kajabi has is on its price. It is more expensive than other alternatives, but that’s okay. This eliminates the need to purchase expensive plug-ins and saves you time. There is also the added stress of figuring out how to seamlessly make these plug-ins work with each other. This takes time, effort, and money. All this could be avoided by using one platform.
Platforms that are well-designed consider what their users need and want. These platforms will provide valuable tools for creating sales pages, emailing your students, and doing all sorts of marketing activities.
If you are a professional looking for ways to market your knowledge, Kajabi is the right choice. It’s a powerful all-in-one solution for creating, marketing, and selling online courses.
Kajabi: A Beginner-Friendly Tool
Not all great teachers are technologically inclined enough to share their knowledge and information online. The process can be complicated and confusing, even for those who are willing to learn. Kajabi creators created the platform so that it is accessible and easy to understand even for those with problems with computer work.
The platform utilizes a visual layout that makes it intuitive and super simple to use. Kajabi’s drag-and-drop editor will make it easy to start an online business, even if you don’t know how to code.
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Almost “all-in-one”
Kajabi can be used for most things, with the exception of a few features that are still being developed by developers. As mentioned earlier, you would not need to spend a lot of time finding out which plug-ins or extensions work together well. Imagine, one update could cause these plug-ins to disrupt your business processes.
If you want to save yourself the headache, Kajabi already has excellent tools for creating landing pages and sales funnels and converting visitors into customers. This platform allows you to create courses and market them. To entice students to your courses, you can offer discounts, follow up leads, and manage payments from the Kajabi website.
Kajabi’s email marketing and funnel creations are a great fit for me as a busy entrepreneur. It was easy to automate my follow-ups and it is very simple. Kajabi Designer
Overall, Kajabi fulfills more than other platforms can do with what it offers.
Tutorials
For people who are complete beginners, there could be some doubt on the truthfulness of this “easy-to-use” claim. But they will be pleasantly surprised to find out that it is indeed true.
Kajabi provides a lot to its users. The Kajabi Assistant Bar gives you access to many searchable tutorials. Just head to the top and enter any query. It will display related tutorials.
You can also find videos and tutorials on the Kajabi University to help you get started in creating and growing your business. These topics include creating online courses, marketing on social media, setting up payments, and creating your product pages.
These tutorials come in both video and text format for your convenience.
The third and most important feature of the onboarding process, is the 28-day Hero Challenge. It is basically a month-long crash program to help you launch your website and make your first sale. This challenge will teach you everything about the platform and give you strategies to market your products.
Kajabi offers one of the best customer service in the industry. If you are a member of the Growth or Pro Plan you will have access to live chat support 24 hours a day. With a Basic Plan, customer chat support is available at limited times during the day. Despite this, the support team responds very quickly. I have had no problems so far with their handling of things.
Kajabi also offers a rewards program that provides incentives to creators who achieve their revenue goals and includes some exclusive perks.
Customer Support
If you have got a query that cannot be found in the Kajabi online guides, the next thing you can do is contact customer service. If you have any questions, they can help you. Kajabi Designer
With the Growth and Pro Plan, you can access the 24/7 Kajabi customer support team live chat.
The Basic Plan does not have 24/7 customer support if you choose to opt for it. However, staff members will only be available Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 7 PM. Although it functions as a ticket system you will receive an answer within one day. They always respond promptly, even with this. They never take too long to reply.
If you’re not confident in your computer skills, the more expensive plans can be worth it. The other two Kajabi plans offer around-the-clock access to support, while the Basic Plan does not.
How to use Kajabi:
Creating a Class:
Kajabi’s course creation is quick, easy, and customizable. After you have given a name to your product, you will see “New Product” in the upper right corner of your screen. There are three pre-built product blueprints that can be used for different digital products. You also have the option to create a custom listing. Let’s go through them one by one:
- Mini-course
- Although it contains less material than the Online Courses, a mini-course is very easy to complete. You can use this to gauge customer interest and also build your brand value.
- Online course
- These are full-blown courses your students can take, from workshops to seminars and lectures about your expertise.
- Evergreen Training
- The Evergreen Course allows you to keep your product advertised and constantly making sales. It will generate passive income for you even after it is launched. Marketing aside, this option allows you to trickle feed your content to your students and keep them interested.
- Blank
- If you’re an advanced user and want to fully customize your content, this is a good option for you.
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To upload your courses, you can use Kajabi’s intuitive editor. These can be uploaded from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Kajabi supports a wide variety of file types, so you can include videos, audio, pdf, and text documents in your lessons. Wistia offers video hosting for Kajabi. You can also upload bulk files. Kajabi Designer
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi provides built-in streaming through Wistia as a video host. You will see an icon and be asked to upload a video or assessment.
You can upload multiple videos at once without worrying about bandwidth. In all the Pricing Plans of Kajabi, you are provided with unlimited bandwidth. Uploads can be made from your computer, Dropbox or Google Drive. You can also upload via URL links. However, take note that it would not accept URLs from Youtube or Vimeo as the uploader looks for the file type in the URL.
After your files are uploaded, Kajabi will automatically convert them into articles you can edit later. This saves you the hassle of going through the posts and uploading videos one by one.
With Wistia being the video host, your subscription will be worth it. Wistia standalone subscriptions can cost $99 per month. If you take a look at the cost, with $20 more, you can already get Kajabi’s Basic Plan at $119/year with its features. This is a fantastic deal.
Assessments
Assessments are great tools to gauge student learning and engagement. Students can gauge their understanding of the material by seeing how they do with lessons. This can motivate them to work harder. You can also use this feature to get feedback from students about your products and if you opt for content locking.
It takes less than two minutes. You can create assessments by opening the People tab from the Dashboard. Choose Assessments and then +New Assessment and finish the prompt to begin customizing.
One of the coolest features is the ability to set it to automatically send additional materials to students if they fail to complete their assessments.
There are some limitations. First, I have observed that the user cannot include both a video and an assessment under the same category.
Second, it does not allow users to randomize the questions or have question banks. It does however support assessment such as multiple-choice and paragraph-style questions.
Students can also upload files to be checked through the assignment submission feature.
Photos
You can upload a poster photograph for your lessons. Pictures help to set the tone for your website and give your students a visual preview.
You can easily upload images by clicking on the Pick File button on the right side of the editor.
Certificates
I would consider Kajabi as an almost “all-in-one” platform because of its inability to natively provide certificates to students who complete the courses. Kajabi allows creators to issue certificates of completion but they cannot be issued onsite.
To create these certificates, you would have to rely on third-party services like Canva, Google Slides, Accredible, or SmartDraw.
Personally, I do not mind this for my business, but some would find it a minor hassle.
Another thing, Kajabi does not indicate the amount of time spent studying the courses or any continuing education credit. This can be a huge deal for people who wish to choose eLearning to earn credit. I think that the Kajabi creators should highly consider this.
Downloads
Even if we call it online students, some do not necessarily stay online for the whole duration of the course. Some students download course materials and complete tasks offline. This feature was added by Kajabi to make things easier for students. This can be found in the Downloads section on the right side of the page.
Students will be able download any material that you have placed while they are in a lesson.
Body
You have the option to add a description, or even a transcript to your videos. Some students prefer to read transcripts rather than watching entire videos when they review.
It is best to add a brief description. This will allow students to understand the content of the lesson and the topics that will be covered in the video. Kajabi Designer
Student Interactions
Community
With eLearning, it would be great for platforms to provide an avenue where students and members can engage with each other and discuss subjects in their course materials, similar to how they would do if they were in a traditional classroom setting. Some have used Facebook groups over the years. To join the group, you will need to be a member of Facebook.
Conveniently, you do not need to exit Kajabi to interact with your students and with each other. Kajabi has a fully integrated feature called the Community. This is one of their student engagement tools.
You can even set your Community behind a paywall for patrons to gain access. This will enable you to address student questions directly and allow students to share their experiences with one another.
Because the Community can be used as a standalone product. You can also buy access to the discussions for those who don’t want to purchase the whole course.
Organizing Your Topics
One problem that forums have is the lack of organization. It may be hard for both the creator and the students to keep track of specific topics. This is what I observed in a lot of Facebook groups. This makes it difficult to understand your audience and listen to them.
Kajabi allows the administrator to organize and reorganize feeds. They can organize the posts by topic or pin specific posts to improve viewability.
Overall, the Community feature is one advantage Kajabi has over its competitors. This feature is very beneficial to entrepreneurs who run an online school.
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Content Access
Kajabi allows you to choose how your students will receive your courses. You can either allow them to receive all the classes and resources at once, drip-feed them on a schedule, or lock your content. The last one tends to increase student engagement as there is a requirement to finish the lesson first before accessing the next one. Kajabi Designer
Dripping Course Content
Instead of giving your students everything at once, drip-feeding your courses can be an option.
You can keep your students coming back to your page to see new content by drip-feeding it. Second, this will prevent them from jumping too far ahead and skipping possibly essential parts of your course.
It is also a useful feature when choosing a type of membership.
Content Locking
Content locking forces your student to finish a lesson before they can gain access to the next one. You can end your lessons with an assessment to be completed. You can increase their participation and keep track of how they understand the lesson material.
Course Analytics
Kajabi is proud to offer the best tools for entrepreneurs to manage their businesses with the course analytics. It creates heatmaps and videos stats. It will give you insights into which parts of your courses are performing well and which need to be improved.
It also provides information about your affiliates, students, sales transactions, and other relevant information that could help you optimize your products.
Play Rate
The play rate gives data on how many people have watched a specific video. Early on, I mentioned how some students opt to read the transcript of the video and download the course material rather than watching.
Average Engagement
This data shows you the average percentage of video your students watched. Since some students prefer to skip some segments of the video, you can get an idea of how well you can keep your students engaged in what you need to say.
Visual Engagement Viewer
This will create a graphic overlay for your video. This is a great feature for visual learners like me. Information presented in text blocks is not the best way to process it. I prefer to have my data presented in graphic form.
The Visual Engagement Viewer presents a report of your students’ engagement in specific points of the video. Usually, there is a general downhill trend wherein people tend to stop watching at the start of the outro.
Viewer Heatmaps
Now just because your students opened your videos does not mean that they are watching them. It could have been running in the background, while they did something else. Kajabi Designer
The Viewer Heatmap allows you to see which parts of the viewers are not interesting to your students, and which ones they have viewed repeatedly. It could mean that these are parts that they found interesting or they found difficult. This meant that they needed to watch the video again to make sure they understood what was going on.
You can trust that Kajabi will provide you with a valuable array of analytic tools to better your content. Your data can be used to create a strategy that will guide your business decisions.
Blogging
A strong blog can do wonders for promoting your business. Students can get updates and additional information about your products, while new customers are introduced. A solid blog can increase traffic and generate leads that could lead to potential students.
Kajabi still has a lot to do in this area, however. It is not on the same level as what you would have with something like WordPress. But still, the fact that you can place everything in one place without needing to exit Kajabi makes up for its shortcomings.
Basic HTML Know-How
It is unnecessary for you to code to build your website and customize most things in Kajabi; it is still a good idea.
If you want to personalize the photos in your Kajabi blog, you need to do some basic coding. Uploading a photo to a blog post will display it in the recommended size. Kajabi works with HTML. To change certain dimensions, you would need to play with HTML. This isn’t too difficult. With a quick search on the internet, you will find plenty of tutorials to do some basic coding.
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Text wrapping is another thing you should be concerned about. Without HTML, you cannot change the way text wraps around images in your blog.
Kajabi does not have an image bank. If you wanted to add a photo that you have previously used in other articles, you would need to upload it from your computer or sites like Google Drive again. Hopefully, Kajabi will focus on these things in their subsequent updates.
Tagging
Kajabi has many great features. However, I find it frustrating that I can’t pick the tags I want to use in my posts. The tags don’t show up as suggestions, unlike other blogs that allow you to refer to past tags.
It can be a hassle to remember the tag you used, or to put it on a separate list for each blog post. Kajabi Designer
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most important support for its customers. Kajabi is built to sell. With so many marketing features, your business will be in safe hands. You have pipelines, automation, and so much more. We will be discussing a few of these features in this section.
Pipelines
Kajabi has a pipeline built into platforms that will simplify sales and marketing. The name itself refers to Kajabi’s goal of transforming the same number of leads to the same number of paying customers. You can have three, fifteen or 100 pipelines depending on which Price Plan you choose.
Kajabi will give you a visual representation of your schematics, and editing is easy and intuitive. There is a drag-and-drop editor for you to add videos, offers, images, and other elements that can help you achieve high conversion rates. There are suggestions if you don’t know where to start.
Kajabi provides blueprints to help you start your pipelines. Your chosen blueprint will guide you through the setup of funnels, including landing pages, email automation, offers, and much more. This template was carefully crafted by Brendon Burchard, one of the world’s leading high-performance coaches.
With the Pipeline Stats feature, you can monitor the progress of your marketing plans and use it to evaluate the areas that are lagging. This feature allows you to see each page and email of the pipeline and data on your earnings per view.
Affiliate Program
The Growth and Pro Plans are required to access the affiliate program. Now, you and your partners can efficiently market your goods and with the program. It becomes easier for you to give them the agreed-upon commission. A private dashboard will be available to you. It will allow you to see statistics about clicks and conversions as well as other relevant data that can be used to market your business.
Automation
Email Marketing
Kajabi is your business made easy. Depending on your schedules, you can launch email marketing campaigns quickly. This feature allows you to decide on the sequence of the mails, add multiple emails to be sent out in the set sequence, and upsell additional offers. Templates are also available to fit your email’s purpose. Not a lot of alternatives offer this much freedom.
Let’s say a visitor adds a product to their cart, but they have not made a decision to buy. Kajabi can send them an email reminding them about your offer. With this, you do not have to manually track the number of sign-ups from your email campaign. Just relax and see the improvement in your conversion rates.
Of course, if you choose to use other email platforms, you will find that you have many options Kajabi can integrate with.
Marketing Partners
Kajabi integrations allow you to manage your entire business from one platform. Currently, Kajabi has 10 native integrations. To name a few, it has ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and Active Campaign. Kajabi Designer
How to Price Your Products
There are several factors that you need to consider when pricing your courses – time spent in planning the content and creating it, charging for your expertise, operational costs, and so on.
Once you have determined the price, Kajabi gives a simple method for pricing your products. Head over to the Offers tab found on the left side and click ‘Add New Offer.’
You can sell them individually or package them as a set. After you create a new deal you will be prompt to enter title offers, product and cost. Now, you will only be able to choose one product, but there will be some options for you to choose from in terms of bundles and payment options on the following pages. You can also choose the currency for your product’s pricing.
If you are worried about people not being able to afford your course, you can set it up in multiple ways:
- Free
- One-time Payment
- Multiple Payments
- Recurring Payments
You can also generate coupon codes, bulk coupons codes and special offers to apply to your coupon from this page.
Payment Methods
Kajabi uses Stripe and Paypal for payment processing. You will be able to customize checkout and create flexible payment options for your students. This comes with the convenience of not paying for transaction fees as Kajabi does not charge you. But, you do have to answer to the cost of its payment method partners.
Partnering with Paypal makes it easy to pay affiliates via Paypal Mass Pay. This includes an exported list of all sales.
Refunds are also made more straightforward. Kajabi makes it easy to request refunds from the site without leaving it.
Kajabi Pricing
As mentioned earlier, Kajabi’s pricing can seem higher than other platforms. \Most people would probably hesitate to use the platform because of its price.
Kajabi is a never-ending investment. Kajabi is not just a course-building platform. Even though it’s a bit more expensive than other platforms, keep in mind that you do not need to pay separately for three or more different tools for email services, blogs, and sales pipelines. All of these come with your Kajabi subscription. Because of the extensive tool set, prices are greater than those of competitors. But, Kajabi still provides the best value for money out of all other platforms.
Unrestricted bandwidth, unlimited Wistia video hosting, and 0% transaction fees are included in all three pricing plans. It also has chat support and assessment features.
To check how the plans differ, below is a thorough discussion of each pricing plan. Kajabi Designer
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Basic Plan
The lowest-priced plan starts at $149 monthly. If billed annually, you will only pay $119.
The basic plan is the most affordable option. However, you are limited to having only 3 products, 1 website, 3 sales pipelines, and around a thousand members. The Kajabi logo branding will remain on all products.
However, landing pages and marketing emails are unlimited. The Basic Plan might not contain some of the essential marketing tools you would like to use for your business. Despite Kajabi’s superb customer service, you’ll want to keep your questions to office hours. In contrast to the higher plans, who gets access to a live chat with customer care 24/7.
Growth Plan
For $50 more, you can upgrade to this tier and get five times more courses. The monthly payment sets you back $199, but if billed annually, it will cost only $159.
Fortunately, though, even the basic pricing plan has a lot of features to play with. Most plans have the same basic suite of functions, but they scale according to the pricing plan. For example, the Basic plan only allows for 3 products and 3 pipelines, while the Growth plan allows for 15 products and 15 pipelines. As a result, when you purchase a higher-tier plan, you are not paying for new features, but rather for the expansion of existing ones. In addition, Kajabi does not charge a transaction fee for any sales made on the platform.
The second level allows you to create more products and pipelines as well as members. More reasons to get this plan: white-labeling, affiliate marketing, and automation.
- White-labelling – This allows you to remove the Kajabi branding from your website and completely customize it.
- Affiliate advertising – well-known online sales strategy. Your products will reach a bigger audience thanks to your affiliates. For suggesting your products to their audiences, your affiliates will be paid commissions.
- Automation – Automation, as previously said, makes it easy for you to follow up with your students. The system then uses a prompt to automatically send out the predetermined response. If a student is falling behind on examinations, for example, you can send them an automatic email with extra course materials. There’s no need for you to manually follow their progress.
As a creator, we are aware that you are not in the business to only make money. You want your products to be of value as well. Business-wise, this is valuable because if people are getting their bang for the buck, they will be more likely to return for more. It is a win-win situation.
Pro Plan
{This is the priciest plan Kajabi has to offer. But it does come with some pretty neat features. You can market up to 100 products, handle 3 sites and at most, have 20,000 members. Because of the number of courses you can market, you can have 25 admin users to help you manage. You also have access to round-the-clock customer support.|This is the most expensive plan offered by Kajabi. It does, however, have some interesting features. You can sell up to 100 products, manage three websites, and have a maximum of 20,000 members. You can have up to 25 admin users to assist you in regulating the amount of courses you can market. You also get access to customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
These features plus all features you would enjoy from both Basic and Growth Plans are included. While there are unlimited landing pages, the advertising emails are limited to two million.
Access to the Experts Academy is included as part of the Pro Plan. More information on how to sell your brand can be found there. Kajabi Designer
You could schedule billing monthly for $399 or yearly for $319 if you picked Kajabi’s Pro Plan. Take notice that this is a significant investment that you must consider. This is the option that most large firms or those with a large number of courses to sell pick. But if you are just starting or your business does not warrant the need for a Pro Plan yet, then I would suggest the other two plans. Just my two cents in. You would still get to enjoy a lot of what Kajabi has to offer on the budget you set.
Moving to Kajabi
If you’re not new to course creation, you’ve probably utilized various platforms. It’s fantastic that you’re still researching company choices and looking for ways to improve. If you have decided to move to Kajabi, another concern would be how to move all of your data into the platform.
Not to worry, though. Fortunately, you can simply import your members’ names and email using a .csv file. But, you can only do this 500 members at a time. So it would require you to do multiple importations if needed.
Another thing to note is that your members will have to reset their passwords due to a security issue. This is good news for you and your members. Kajabi takes your business’ security seriously. This means that other platforms will not have access to their information once the move is made.
Conclusion
For many creators, Kajabi is a popular choice, and it has a lot to offer for the price you choose to pay. It comes with exceptional customer service, a well-integrated system, and is extremely user-friendly.
As previously said, Kajabi’s goal is to assist you streamline and profit from your business processes in one place. It gives you the advantage to take your products to new heights thanks to its numerous marketing capabilities.
Now that you’ve read this review, you have a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of using Kajabi. Overall, I believe Kajabi is an excellent tool for managing your business, from conception to marketing. Kajabi Designer
Frequently Asked Questions: Kajabi Designer
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What does Kajabi mean?
- According to its founders, it is an aboriginal word that means “to take flight.”
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Is Kajabi free?
- Kajabi does not currently have a free plan. It does, however, offer a 14-day trial period during which you can test out its features.
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Is Kajabi worth the money?
- This is dependent on your business requirements and how you can make the most of Kajabi’s features. Kajabi is well-known for being user-friendly and for having a number of built-in integrations that help streamline business processes. You also receive excellent support.
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Is Kajabi easy to use?
- Yes. Kajabi is easy to use. In fact, because of this, thousands of course creators have it as their platform of choice.
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Is Kajabi accessible via a mobile app?
- Yes. Your students have the convenience of accessing Kajabi via a mobile app. It is available in both iOS and Google Play.
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Can you use your domain?
- Yes. With a Basic Plan, you can create a custom domain with Kajabi’s branding (yourdomaintitle.kajabi.com). With the Growth and Pro Plans, you can opt to erase all traces of Kajabi’s branding and have a website solely focused on you.
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Does Kajabi have transaction fees?
- No. There are no transaction fees, but you can still be subject to pay the standard Stripe merchant processing fee.