Kajabi started as a simple idea of Kenny Reuter wanting to begin a side business teaching people to make toys online. Although he was not that passionate about teaching people online, he was passionate about making it easier for people to sell their knowledge online.
It was easy to see the vision. The Kajabi founders, Kenny Rueter & Travis Rosser, knew that they wanted to help others monetize their knowledge online. They needed a platform that made it easy for entrepreneurs to do this.
Kajabi is a popular online course creator. It is one of the most popular online learning platforms today. Kajabi has grown to be the online learning platform it is today since its inception in 2010. It has helped thousands of people escape from jobs that don’t suit them anymore and have enabled them to realize their dreams.
This review will cover the basics of what you need to know about Kajabi. This includes online course creation, marketing, pricing, and so much more. With this, you will have a good idea of what you will get should you choose Kajabi as your platform.
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 Techcrunch
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
- Students cannot be issued custom certificates of completion by users on the platform.
- Assessment customization is limited.
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi, in a nutshell, is an online course platform that allows its users to take care of their business using only one site. Kajabi can take care of everything, from course creation to marketing and much more.
How does Kajabi work?
Kajabi is built to sell. It boasts how simple it is to use. You can start by purchasing a plan. You have three options: Basic, Growth, and Pro. These options will be discussed later in this review.
After you’ve selected a plan, you can set up an account and upload your content. Using the lesson editor, you can upload your video lectures and give the lesson description and titles.
You can easily complete assessments by simply typing the questions and selecting the options (if you’ve chosen the multiple-choice option).
Now you can market your products. In Kajabi, you can build pipelines. These mechanisms allow you to achieve high conversion rates by turning prospects into potential students by giving efficient marketing funnels. Landing pages can be added, as well as freebies to get leads to submit their email addresses. Video marketing is another option.
When the prospect becomes a student, you can process payments through the site. All without having to leave Kajabi. Kajabi Techcrunch
Now, some features make Kajabi an almost “all-in-one” platform. I will talk about them in the later sections of the review. But, Kajabi can go head-to-head and over most online course platforms with the features and benefits it offers.
Why choose Kajabi?
As an entrepreneur, of course, you would want to make sure that you make the most out of your investment. 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.
It’s more than simply uploading course content and waiting for students 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. Kajabi allows you to do all of these things and more.
- Build a website
- Make course offerings
- Keep track of student progress
- Manage subscriptions/payments
- Run email marketing campaigns
Kajabi’s price is one thing that has been criticized. Admittedly, it is pricier than some alternatives. But, take into account that this takes away the hassle of using expensive plug-ins for your business. There is also the added stress of figuring out how to seamlessly make these plug-ins work with each other. This is time-consuming, expensive, and requires a lot of effort. All of which could be avoided under one single platform.
Good platforms think of what their users want and need. These platforms will provide valuable tools for creating sales pages, emailing your students, and doing all sorts of marketing activities.
So, if you’re a professional looking to sell your knowledge, I would say, with Kajabi, you will be in safe hands. 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. Even with the willingness of some to learn, the process can be complex and confusing too. Kajabi creators created the platform so that it is accessible and easy to understand even for those with problems with computer work.
It uses a visual layout which makes it easy to use and intuitive. Even without learning how to code, you will be able to create an online business in no time with Kajabi through its drag-and-drop editor.
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Almost “all-in-one”
Kajabi is suitable for almost everything, save for a few minor features that developers are still working on. You don’t need to spend too much time trying to find the right extensions or plug-ins. 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. You can provide coupons for discounts to entice your potential students, follow-up leads, and handle payments without leaving 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 Techcrunch
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 offers a lot of support to its users. First, the Kajabi Assistant Bar provides access to a lot of searchable tutorials. Just head to the top and enter any query. It will show you related tutorials.
Second, under the Kajabi University, you can check out a catalog of tutorials and videos to get you started with creating and developing 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.
Third, one unique feature about the onboarding process is the 28-day “Hero Challenge.” It is essentially a month-long crash course to help you get your website launched and your business making its first sale. The challenge covers all you need to know about the platform, as well as some strategies for successfully marketing your products.
Kajabi offers one of the best customer service in the industry. Now, if you have the Growth or Pro Plan, you get access to 24/7 round-the-clock customer chat support. 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. So, if you are stuck on an issue, you can always rely on them to provide you with the answers. Kajabi Techcrunch
With the Growth and Pro Plan, you can access the 24/7 Kajabi customer support team live chat.
Although, if you opt for the Basic Plan, the staff will only be available on Mondays to Fridays 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. I do not have to wait too long for my answers.
This is one of the reasons why the more expensive plans are worth the extra money if you are not confident about your computer skills. 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. Once you provide a name for the product, head over to the upper right side of your screen, and you can see “New Product.” There are 3 pre-built product blueprints for various digital products. You also have the option to create a custom listing. Let’s go through them one by one:
- Mini-course
- A mini-course contains lesser material than the Online Course, but it is pretty easy to complete. This can be used to gauge customer interest as well as build your brand’s value.
- Online course
- From short workshops to seminars to lectures about your area of expertise, these are full-blown courses that your students can avail.
- Evergreen Training
- The Evergreen Course allows you to keep your product advertised and constantly making sales. Essentially, after you launch it, it will keep creating passive income for you. Marketing aside, this option allows you to trickle feed your content to your students and keep them interested.
- Blank
- This is an excellent option if you are an advanced user who wants to customize your content.
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You can use Kajabi’s intuitive editor to upload your courses. 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 provides video hosting for Kajabi, and it is great because you can upload in bulk too. Kajabi Techcrunch
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi provides built-in streaming through Wistia as a video host. There will be an icon that you can spot immediately, and it will ask you to upload either a video or an 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.
Once your files have been uploaded, Kajabi can automatically transform these uploads into articles that you can edit later on. This saves you the hassle of going through the posts and uploading videos one by one.
Now, with Wistia as the video host, rest assured that alone makes your subscription worth it. Wistia standalone subscriptions can cost $99 per month. You can get Kajabi’s Basic Plan for $119/year if you add $20. 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. Open the People tab in the Dashboard to create assessments. Select Assessments, then +New Assessment, and follow the prompt to start 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.
It does not support randomizing questions, nor question banks. It does however support assessment such as multiple-choice and paragraph-style questions.
Your students can also upload files for you to check through its assignment submission feature.
Photos
For your lessons, you can upload a poster photo. Pictures help to set the tone for your website and give your students a visual preview.
Click on the Pick File button to upload images.
Certificates
Kajabi is almost an “all-in” platform. This is due to its inability to provide certificates to students who have completed 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.
This is something I don’t mind doing for my business. However, it would be a hassle for some.
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. To make it easier for your students, Kajabi included this feature. 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 can choose to add a description or even a transcript for your videos. Students may prefer to review transcripts over watching the entire video.
If you choose to only add a description, it will help students know what the lesson is all about and what topics will be discussed in the video. Kajabi Techcrunch
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.
You don’t need to leave Kajabi in order to interact with your students or with each other. Kajabi has a fully integrated feature called the Community. This is one of their student engagement tools.
Your Community can be protected with a paywall so that patrons have 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. Those who are not too keen on purchasing the entire course could just buy access to the discussions.
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.
In Kajabi, the page administrator is allowed to organize and reorganize the feeds. They can sort the posts by topic and also ‘pin’ specific posts for better viewability.
Overall, the Community feature is one advantage Kajabi has over its competitors. It is beneficial for entrepreneurs with an online course business.
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Content Access
Depending on your style, Kajabi gives you the option of how your students 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 Techcrunch
Dripping Course Content
You can choose to drip-feed your courses after a pre-set duration instead of allowing your students to receive everything all at once.
When you drip-feed your content, you can keep your student interested in returning to your page to check for new content. This will also prevent your student from skipping important parts of the 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. An assessment can be given at the end of lessons. 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.
Therefore, it shows you information on your courses, affiliates, students, and sales transactions that can help you optimize your products.
Play Rate
Play rate is a way to see how many people have viewed a particular video. I mentioned that some students prefer to download the course material and read the transcript rather than watch the video.
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. I find this quite handy as a visual learner myself. Information presented in text blocks is not the best way to process it. I prefer having my data in graph form.
The Visual Engagement Viewer displays a report on your students’ engagement with specific parts 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 Techcrunch
With the Viewer Heatmap, you can now check which segments of the viewers were not that interesting to your students and which parts they repeatedly watched. It could mean that these are parts that they found interesting or they found difficult. Thus, there was a need to rewatch to review.
Kajabi can provide valuable analytic tools that will help you improve 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. Current students can receive updates and more information about your products and services while new customers are introduced to them. Having a solid blog boosts traffic for you and generates leads that would transform visitors into potential students.
Admittedly, Kajabi has plenty to improve on in this feature. This is not as good as WordPress. Despite its limitations, Kajabi’s ability to store everything in one place makes up for them.
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.
You will need to learn basic programming to personalize your Kajabi blog’s photos. When you upload a photo on top of a blog post, it will show up in the recommended image size. Kajabi works with HTML. You would have to fiddle with HTML to change some of the dimensions. Of course, this is not too much of a problem. You can find many tutorials for basic coding by doing a quick internet search.
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Another thing that would probably concern you is text wrapping. You cannot edit the way the text wraps around a picture in the body of your blog unless you deal with the HTML.
Kajabi does not have an image bank. You would have to upload a photo you’ve used previously in another article. These are the things Kajabi will hopefully focus on in his subsequent updates.
Tagging
While I enjoy most of Kajabi’s features, one thing that gripes me is the hassle of being unable to pick from existing tags in my post. 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 Techcrunch
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most important support for its customers. Kajabi is built to sell. Your business will be safe with so many marketing tools. You have pipelines, automation, and so much more. We will be discussing a few of these features in this section.
Pipelines
Kajabi has developed a platform that makes it easy to sell and market. The name itself refers to Kajabi’s goal of transforming the same number of leads to the same number of paying customers. Depending on what Price Plan you chose, you can have 3, 15, or 100 pipelines.
Kajabi will give you a visual representation of your schematics, and editing is easy and intuitive. You can add videos, images and offers using the drag-and-drop editor. This will help you increase your conversion rates. There are suggestions if you don’t know where to start.
Kajabi provides blueprints to help you start your pipelines. The blueprint you choose will help you set up funnels including landing pages, email automation and offers. 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
A disclaimer here: the affiliate program is only available with the Growth and Pro Plans. 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. In it, you can see statistics of clicks, conversions, and other pertinent data to help you 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 lets you choose the sequence of emails, add multiple emails to the set sequence and upsell additional products. Templates are also available to fit your email’s purpose. This freedom is not available in many other options.
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. This allows you to track sign-ups automatically from your email campaigns. Just relax and see the improvement in your conversion rates.
You can also use Kajabi to integrate with other email platforms.
Marketing Partners
You can run your business under one platform, and Kajabi’s integrations help make that happen. Currently, Kajabi has 10 native integrations. To name a few, it has ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and Active Campaign. Kajabi Techcrunch
How to Price Your Products
Pricing your courses should take into account several factors, including the time you spent creating and planning it, your fees for expertise, and operational costs.
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 decide on the currency of your product’s price.
You have several options if you’re concerned about people not being financially able to pay for your course.
- Free
- One-time Payment
- Multiple Payments
- Recurring Payments
From here, you may also create coupon codes or generate bulk coupon codes as well as special offers that apply to the coupon.
Payment Methods
Kajabi uses Stripe and Paypal for payment processing. You can customize your checkout to create flexible payment options and offer custom payment options for students. Kajabi doesn’t charge transaction fees so this comes with the convenience. However, you will have to pay for the costs of its payment methods partners.
One convenient thing about partnering with Paypal is that it makes it easier to pay affiliates their commissions through Paypal Mass Pay with an exported list of all your affiliate sales.
It is also easier to request refunds. Kajabi makes it easy to request refunds from the site without leaving it.
Kajabi Pricing
Kajabi’s pricing may appear to be higher than that of other sites as previously stated. Because of the platform’s cost, most individuals would undoubtedly be hesitant to use it.
Kajabi is a never-ending investment. Kajabi is not just a course-building platform. While pricing may be cheaper for other platforms, you may end up paying for three or more different tools for email services, blogs, and sales pipelines. All of these come with your Kajabi subscription. Prices are higher than competitors due to the large suite of tools. But, Kajabi still provides the best value for money out of all other platforms.
All three pricing plans offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited video hosting via Wistia, and 0% transaction fees. It also has chat support and assessment features.
Below is a detailed breakdown of each pricing plan to see how they differ. Kajabi Techcrunch
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Basic Plan
The lowest-priced plan starts at $149 monthly. You will only have to pay $119 if you are billed annually.
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. Some of the crucial marketing tools you’d like to use for your business might not be included in the Basic Plan. Although Kajabi has excellent customer care, you would need to limit your queries to office times. Unlike with the higher plans, they have access to a 24/7 live chat with customer support.
Growth Plan
You can subscribe to this tier for $50 extra and get five times the number of courses. The monthly price is $199, but if you pay it annually, it will just be $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.
You can build new goods, pipelines, and members at the second level. White-labeling, affiliate marketing, and automation are just a few more reasons to acquire this plan.
- White-labelling – This allows you to remove the Kajabi branding from your website and completely customize it.
- Affiliate advertising – A popular online sales tactic. Through your affiliates, your products will receive a wider reach. Your affiliates will receive commissions for recommending your products to their audiences.
- Automation – As discussed earlier, automation makes it easier for you to follow up with your students. With this, the system automatically sends out the programmed response through a prompt. For example, if a student is lagging on assessments, you can set an automated response of an email with supplemental course materials for them. No need for you to keep track of their progress manually.
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.
A bonus to getting the Pro Plan is access to the Experts Academy. In it, you will find more information on how to market your brand. Kajabi Techcrunch
If you chose Kajabi’s Pro Plan, you could set billing monthly for $399 or yearly for $319. Take note, this is a massive investment that you would need to consider. Most big companies or those with a good amount of courses to sell choose this option. 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
For those who are not new to course-creating, you probably used other platforms. It is excellent that you are still considering options for your business and thinking of 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
Kajabi is a popular choice for many creators, and it has a lot to offer to your business for the price you choose to pay. It has excellent support, a well-integrated system, and is highly beginner-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, this review has given you some insight into the benefits and downsides of choosing Kajabi. Overall, I can still say that Kajabi is a wonderful tool to manage your business from creation to marketing. Kajabi Techcrunch
Frequently Asked Questions: Kajabi Techcrunch
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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 depends on your business needs and how you can optimize Kajabi’s features. Kajabi is well known for being user-friendly and having a variety of built-in integrations for smoother 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. You may establish a custom domain using Kajabi’s branding with the Basic Plan (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.