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. 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.
If you’re an online course creator, you have probably heard of Kajabi before. 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 helped thousands of people escape from jobs that don’t suit them anymore and have enabled them to realize their dreams.
This overview will provide a basic understanding of Kajabi. This includes online course creation, marketing, pricing, and so 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. Do check out our article below, however, because it has a comprehensive overview of Kajabi.
General Overview Kajabi Thinkific
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
- Amazing customer service
- Intuitive course builder and highly customizable themes
- Wistia is used as a video host
Cons
- Kajabi prices are higher than average
- Students cannot be issued custom certificates of completion by users 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. 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. The first thing you can do is to purchase 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.
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 Thinkific
Now, some features make Kajabi an almost “all-in-one” platform. I will talk about them in the later sections of the review. 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. Kajabi can help you market valuable content. 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. It requires you to build out a curriculum, develop assessments or goals for your students, design your course website, and market it to your target audience. You can do the following and more with Kajabi.
- Create a website
- Make 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. 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 takes time, effort, and money. 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.
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
Many great teachers don’t have the technology skills to share their knowledge 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. 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. 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. I could easily automate follow-up sequences, and it’s effortless to do too. Kajabi Thinkific
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. Some of these topics cover creating your online courses, marketing your products on social media and other platforms, and setting up payments.
These tutorials are available in video and text formats 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. 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. If you are a member of the Growth or Pro Plan you will have access to live chat support 24 hours a day. Customer chat support is only available during business hours for Basic Plans. Despite this, the support team responds very quickly. So far, I have not had any problems with how they handle 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 Thinkific
The Growth and Pro Plan gives you access to the Kajabi customer service team 24/7 via 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. It functions as a ticket system, but you will find an answer within the day. Even with this, they always reply promptly. 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 can also create your own 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. You can use this to gauge customer interest and also build your brand 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 will help you keep your product in front of people and make 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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To upload your courses, you can use Kajabi’s intuitive editor. These can be uploaded from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Kajabi supports many file types. You can add audio, video, pdf and text files to your lessons. Wistia offers video hosting for Kajabi. You can also upload bulk files. Kajabi Thinkific
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi offers built-in streaming via Wistia as an 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. You can choose to upload from your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, or by URL links. It will not accept URLs from Youtube and Vimeo. The uploader searches for the file type in URLs.
After your files are uploaded, Kajabi will automatically convert them into articles you can edit later. This eliminates the need to go through each post and upload videos one at a time.
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 great bargain.
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. It can also aid in motivating 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. Select Assessments, then +New Assessment, and follow the prompt to start customizing.
A nifty feature is that when students do not fully succeed on the assessments, it can be set to automatically send out additional materials to help them.
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. Although, it does support assessments such as multiple-choice questions 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
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.
These certificates can only be created using third-party services such as Canva, Google Slides and Accredible.
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 is a major problem for those who want to use eLearning to earn credit. This should be something that Kajabi creators ought to seriously consider.
Downloads
Even if we call it online students, some do not necessarily stay online for the whole duration of the course. Others opt to download the course materials and do the 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 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.
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 Thinkific
Student Interactions
Community
It would be wonderful for eLearning platforms to allow members and students to interact with one another and discuss topics in their course materials. This is similar to what they would do in a 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 tools for student engagement.
You can even set your Community behind a paywall for patrons to gain access. This Community will allow you to directly address student queries and give students the chance to do the same with each other.
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 something I noticed in many Facebook groups. This makes it hard to listen to your audience and understand them.
Kajabi allows the administrator to organize and reorganize 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. This feature is very beneficial to entrepreneurs who run an online school.
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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. This last option tends to increase student engagement because they must complete the lesson before accessing the next. Kajabi Thinkific
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. 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. What it does is create heatmaps and video stats. Through it, you will get insights on which aspects of your courses are doing well and which ones need to improve on.
It also provides information about your affiliates, students, sales transactions, and other relevant information that could help you optimize your products.
Play Rate
Play rate is a way to see how many people have viewed a particular 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
With this comes a graphical overlay in 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
Your students may not be watching your videos just because they opened them. They could have kept it running in the background while they do something else, in the guise of multi-tasking. Kajabi Thinkific
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. 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. The best thing to do with your data is to help you develop a strategy to 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. 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. It is not on the same level as what you would have with something like WordPress. Despite its limitations, Kajabi’s ability to store everything in one place makes up for them.
Basic HTML Know-How
You don’t need to know how to code in order to create your website or customize any Kajabi-related items. However, it is 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. You can find many tutorials for basic coding by doing a quick internet search.
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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. You would have to upload a photo you’ve used previously in another article. 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. Unlike in other blogs where you can easily refer to previous tags, the tags themselves don’t appear even as suggestions when you type them down.
It can be a hassle to remember the tag you used, or to put it on a separate list for each blog post. Kajabi Thinkific
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most vital support for its users. Kajabi is built to sell. Your business will be safe with so many marketing tools. There are automation, pipelines and many other features. 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 provide you with a visual representation for your schematics. Editing is simple 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
The Growth and Pro Plans are required to access the affiliate program. You and your partners will be able to market your products and the program together. You can now give your partners the agreed-upon affiliate commission much easier. You will have access to a private affiliate dashboard. In it, you can see statistics of clicks, conversions, and other pertinent data to help you market your business.
Automation
Email Marketing
Kajabi makes it easy to start your own business. You can quickly launch email marketing campaigns depending on the schedules you have set. This feature lets you choose the sequence of emails, add multiple emails to the set sequence and upsell additional products. You can also use templates to suit your email purpose. Not a lot of alternatives offer this much freedom.
Suppose a visitor adds something to their cart but has not yet decided to make the purchase final; you can set up Kajabi to send an email to remind them of 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.
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 Thinkific
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. Click on the Offers tab to the left and select ‘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. You will now only be able choose one product. However, there will be many options available for bundles and payment options. 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
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. 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 allows you to do refunds without needing to leave the site.
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. 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. However, of all the platforms, Kajabi offers the most value for money.
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 Thinkific
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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. 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
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.
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 – With this, you can remove Kajabi branding from your website and fully make it your own.
- 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 – 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.
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 Thinkific
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
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
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 Thinkific
Frequently Asked Questions: Kajabi Thinkific
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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. With a Basic Plan, you can create a custom domain with Kajabi’s branding (yourdomaintitle.kajabi.com). You can choose to remove any traces of Kajabi’s branding and create a website that is purely focused on you with the Growth and Pro Plans.
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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.