Is Kajabi Too Expensive?

Is Kajabi too expensive? Is Kajabi worth the price?

Valid question.

With the many tools available to purchase to start, run, and grow your business, you need more than a superficial review to make an informed decision. 

For those of you wanting the -  

Short answer - Look at the math and Kajabi is the clear winner and then add in the customer experience they provide for your customers, not to mention your own experience with the customer service + experience we receive as Kajabians - I challenge you to find a better tool + value. Double your 14-day free trial to 28 days now and have my experience at your fingertips.  

Use this checklist for yourself as you are comparing different products and services. 

To Make Money Your Business MUST Be Online

You need a professional website that stays up and running and working for you and your customers at all times.

Here are the various components that make up a professional website and serious business. 

Start With the Website Basics

As we get started, let me address decision fatigue. This is real and shows up for all business owners as we must make the decisions all day regarding our businesses. 

My first four years in business (2011-2015) I suffered from decision fatigue because there was always a latest and greatest tool that needed to be evaluated and decided on. When you decide to bring Kajabi onto your team, the decision fatigue is eliminated. You now have access to all that wasted energy and can use it to make purposeful decisions for your business that move the needle in the direction you want. 

Also keep in mind that if you do not know how to use each tool you purchase, you are required to either: 

• Acquire the knowledge yourself by watching weeks of videos on YouTube; or
• Hire trusted help to do what you don't know how to do.

With Kajabi + my white-glove service delivered from within PBK, the Preneur Business Klub, it's all included.

You Need a Custom Domain

A custom domain is how your customers find your business. Nike.com is a custom domain. Kajabi has a seamless straight-forward way to add your custom domain to your site.  

• Custom domain - GoDaddy.com is where you can purchase your businessname.com for about $30 USD/year for the domain and added privacy protection (a good idea to keep your personal contact information hidden on the internet). There are discounts for multi-year purchases.
• Even as a Kajabian, I need to purchase my domains from GoDaddy.com and then with a quick click of a button, I use that domain with my Kajabi site.

You Need Hosting for Your Custom Domain

After you purchase the domain.com, then you purchase hosting from a website site hosting company like Bluehost.com

What is web hosting? A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet. Websites are hosted or stored, on special computers called servers.

• Bluehost.com pricing starts at about $3.95/month but that is a grab-you rate and your fees will continue to increase each renewal period. And buyer beware, there is no such thing as "1-click Wordpress installation" it is totally misleading ... ask any Kajabian who ran their business on Wordpress prior - we all have tales to tell. 
• Kajabi includes hosting. You can cancel your web hosting subscription.  

You Need a Website Platform

All websites run on code and there are many different options (similar to foreign languages) on what to use. What is and has been popular for many years is Wordpress.org

What is WordPress.org? aka “the real WordPress”, is the popular website platform that you have heard all the great things about. It is open-source and 100% free for anyone to use. All you need is a domain name and web hosting. This is why it is also referred to as self-hosted WordPress.

• Wordpress.org is free but keep in mind that what you get with Wordpress.org is the stripped-down framework of the code that then you build on. To achieve the physical look of the site you want, you need to purchase themes and plugins and then either hire help or watch hours of videos on YouTube. 
• Kajabi is its own platform and stunning themes and templates to fit every need. 

You Need a Website Theme

Unlike Kajabi which has a stunning theme ideally suited to your business, you need to purchase a theme and install that theme onto your Wordpress.org site.  

What is a WordPress theme? In WordPress, a theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress powered website. 

• Divi is a popular Wordpress theme, $89/year (subscription fee) or $249/one-time (lifetime fee). There are thousands of options available to you and why decision fatigue is real as a business owner.
• Kajabi provides all-access to classic, modern, and even trending styles across its website, pages, and product themes. All the updates and improvements are always included allowing you to cancel your theme subscription.

You Need Website Back-Up

I don't know about you but I never thought a hacker would be interested in my website. Boy was I wrong!

Websites are compromised all the time. The majority of website security breaches are not to steal your data or mess with your website layout, but instead attempts to use your server as an email relay for spam, or to set up a temporary web server, normally to serve files of an illegal nature. Other very common ways to abuse compromised machines include using your servers as part of a botnet, or to mine for Bitcoins.

As I was setting up my Wordpress site, I researched and implemented the recommendations for backing up and securing my site. Again more decision fatigue. 

• Back-up Buddy is a popular service for scheduling regular back-ups of your self-hosted site. It is currently $39/year and includes other services as part of the JetPack it is included in. 
• Site security - there are hundreds of free options but if you are at all like me and don't know what you don't know, then find a person who you can pay to pick the tool, install on your site, and regularly check to keep your site safe. I was paying $50/month after my site was hacked and fixing the hack cost $2,000 USD.
• With Kajabi other than backing up my content on my external hard drive and Dropbox account, they handle the protection of my business. I canceled Back-up buddy and my site security. I'll be honest the thought of an all-in-one site having my entire livelihood used to terrify me but what I have since learned is that going it on my own like I did pre-Kajabi was far more dangerous and expensive! 

My back-up and security plan as a Kajabian - If anything happens to Kajabi, then it's also happening to Brendon Burchard, Chalene Johnson, Frank Kern, James Wedmore, and Amy Porterfield (just a few people who have their courses and memberships on Kajabi) - and I personally know that Brendon is going to call Kenny on his cell phone and get it fixed. So my gods-honest plan should anything happen is to shut down my computer and go to the beach! I don't have to fix my site like I did when I was on my own with Wordpress - I've got an entire industry making sure my site gets fixed. All of my content is kept in a password-protected Dropbox account and external hard drive. Kajabi will fix the platform (if a catastrophe ever happened) and I could easily be back up and running in a day or two.

You Need SPAM Filters

With a blog come all kinds of trolling robots that leave all kinds of Ray-Ban ads on your site if you don't have a spam filter to catch them. Once caught, then you can go into your admin dashboard and review + delete them.

• Akismet, $5/month wrangles in the SPAM and then you decide whether and when to delete.
• Kajabi has the option of adding Facebook comments or Disqus and no SPAM filter is needed. I canceled my Akismet subscription. 

You Need SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Get me to the front page of Google!

That's all we want SEO to do.

• Yoast SEO, $89/year is a popular plugin for SEO on self-hosted sites. 
• Kajabi includes the SEO functionality and is consistently updating to make Kajabians land on page 1 at Google. I canceled Yoast SEO plugin. I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination but if you have specific SEO questions or concerns send Kajabi an email and they do have the programming experts that can answer your questions. 

You Need Personal Information to Market Your Business 

With your website decisions made, now you need to make the decisions concerning how you

• Get personal information (name + email) on your customer leads with list building; 
• Begin marketing to those warm customer leads;
• Continue nurturing the customer relationships you are making.

List building is like an old school customer Rolodex, or the enter to win the giveaway at a mall or a grocery store. What you are doing is you're generating leads so that you can grow the relationships. To capture and generate leads you need opt-in forms, landing pages, and the ability to store contact information so you can send out email communications to nurture the relationships with your customers. 

• Leadpages is a popular service at $79/month you can create the opt-in forms and landing pages but you will need a different service like ConvertKit starting at $29/month to store contact information and send email communications. With ConvertKit my list size is $119/month, so as your list grows so does your bill.
• If you want to keep your third party services + Kajabi, you totally can and Kajabi makes the integration so incredibly easy. Here's just one example of integrating ConvertKit with Kajabi. 
• Kajabi includes landing pages, opt-in forms, and email marketing - I am so pleased and proud to say that all the opt-in forms, landing pages (gorgeous themes + solid functionality) AND the ability to store your contact information and send email communications are 100% included. I canceled Leadpages and Convertkit when I chose Kajabi. 

You'll also want to make your landing pages + opt-in forms look good and so you'll need to learn how to customize or hire someone to help you. With Kajabi, the themes are solid, stunning, and 100% user-friendly. I am NOT a techy person by nature and Kajabi has over-delivered on its promise that it is easy to design a landing page time and time again. 

You Need to Integrate LeadPages + ConvertKit

Unlike Kajabi where all the tools you need are in the same system and do not need to be tied together. With LeadPages (opt-in forms + landing pages) + ConverKit (store contact information, send emails) you need to tie the two systems together. 

Tying systems together is a big deal. This caused me days of decision fatigue - what to buy and then how to get them to talk to each other nicely! While it's not always difficult and there is support help. When one system makes an update there is often a trickle-down affect on all the other tools you are using. And often you don't know that one update to a tool or plugin caused another tool or plugin to stop working until you stumble on the mess or worse yet - you have a customer send you a screenshot of the mess. 

The Integrations Just Don't Stop

Generating leads is one part of the business, then you need to take a lead and transform them into a buyer so the integrations continue. Every time you do a different action, you need a different tool, and that tool must be integrated with all the other tools. 

This vicious cycle is what I shout from the rooftops because no one told me. Everyone just kept saying how easy starting an online business was. What I know now and want to share with you - to give you the chance to skip over the 4 years of frustration I had is - the tools you use matter and simplify to amplify. 

With Kajabi - life becomes simplify to amplify. All the opt-in forms + landing pages + emails + automations + sales pages + thank you pages + product delivery or membership access ... all done. Not a single integration needed.

You (will likely) Need Pop-ups

"Would you like to save 20% off your order?"

We've all seen them and probably added our information into them on more than one occasion - the dreaded pop-up!

• LeadPages will handle your pop-ups as part of your fee.
• Kajabi includes beautiful pop-ups and you have complete control over their timing and frequency - polite pop-ups if you will. 

You Need to Collect Money

Businesses sell products and services.

You must have a way to collect payment on your website and there are specific banking laws that are involved so you'll need to have valid payment gateways and use services like PayPal or Stripe.

• Self-hosted sites require you to purchase a payment processor and there are various plugins available for that. The theme you choose might even include this. Then typically you link up your PayPal or Stripe accounts. 
• Woocommerce is a popular plugin and I found it to be difficult and confusing especially as I tried to sell individual products and bundle products and services together. 
• Kajabi includes native PayPal and Stripe integrations that are super simple to set up. And the way that Kajabi structures offers makes single purchases, bundled items, and memberships or even coaching a breeze!

Sell and Deliver Online Courses

Selling online courses is your way to grab a part of the $325 billion industry

As more and more businesses move into the eLearning arena, customer experience is paramount to success. Kajabi provides the dreamiest learning experience you can imagine and your customers will notice!

• Gumroad is an entry-level option for delivering online courses, eBooks, pdfs, etc. $10/month (or $108/year), the fee on each sale is 3.5% + $0.30 (USD). I don't know about you but I don't want a business where profit sharing is built in from the get-go! 
• Pay attention to those transaction fees!
• Kajabi has NO transaction fees! Your business is yours and they do not and will not take a piece of your $325 billion share. 

With stunning product templates available to fit your needs, you can

• Upload unlimited videos and take advantage of Kajabi's use of Wistia for all your videos (included).
• Upload all formats of downloads directly into lessons.
• Choose to turn on commenting features.
• Set automations to trigger new and additional actions when a customer completes a lesson, send a certificate, notify a person on your team, and so many other advantageous business actions.

Not a single piece of digital duct tape is needed to deliver your online course. With Kajabi it's all in one place. No plugging in this piece to that piece. Kajabi is solely focused on your success and they know that your customers' experience generates the momentum for that success. 

Designing an online course is full of decisions.

Kajabi eliminates decision fatigue because you've made your decision. You've chosen the platform, the payment processor, everything - and now you make decisions surrounding what your customer experience is.

With Kajabi you have the opportunity to make better decisions in the areas that count because you aren't worn out or overwhelmed trying to just figure out which tools to buy.

Sell & Deliver Memberships

How many recurring bills do you have?

I have lots. 

There are solid reasons why creating a recurring income stream makes solid business sense. 

• Paid Memberships Pro, $24.75.mo, you can create a membership or choose one of any other hundreds of services and or plugins available.
• Kajabi includes everything you need to run a profitable membership site and the best part - everything talks to everything else and so you can't mess up any of the integrations. 
  • Want to run a paid trial? Kajabi does it.
  • Want to revoke access after 30 days? Kajabi does it.
  • Want to pre-sell? Kajabi does it.
  • Want to offer upgrades and downgrades? Kajabi does it.
  • Want to have more than one type of a product within your membership? Kajabi does it. 

Affiliates: Using Other People to Share Your Sales Pages

When it's time to move from one house to another - what do we all typically do?

Call in our best friends to help.

Thankfully we can do that same action when it comes to our businesses. 

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people's (or company's) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

• WPEngine Affiliate, $35/mo. and you can have the functionality of running an affiliate program.
• Kajabi includes affiliate functionality at its Growth Plan level ($199/mo.; and for the additional $50/mo. many Kajabians make that difference with simply one additional sale).
  • There are many creative ways to run an affiliate program with the Kajabi Basic plan and I help all my PBK Members with this all the time. Especially as you are just getting started, you might not need a full-blown affiliate functionality and so Kajabi Basic works A+

Quizzes and Surveys

We've all probably taken a quiz or two and enjoyed the experience. Or read Ask by Ryan Levesque and implemented an idea or two. With providing online courses, memberships, and customer segmentation - quizzes and surveys are a helpful tool. 

• Tryinteract.com, $29/month, is great platform for creating dynamic quizzes and surveys and also plays nicely with Kajabi. 
• Kajabi includes quizzes and surveys and calls them Assessments. You can use them on landing pages and within products. You can also have scores keep future content locked until the passing grade is reached. 

Events: live and pre-recorded

You might be most familiar with a hosted webinar and have probably even attended a few of them yourself. 

Events are so flexible in terms of how you can use them. The feature that we all love about a scheduled event is the email notifications before, at, and after the event. 

• EasyWebinar, $78-129/mo., is a popular tool and service for hosting webinars. You can purchase this service and then integrate it with your landing pages + email marketing services. 
• Kajabi includes events and you can even clone them so once you've put in all the effort on the landing page and emails - you can click a button and replicate all your work - increasing your time freedom!

Marketing & Sales Funnels

Automation is your friend.

Automation allows you to achieve time and financial freedom in your business and if you're at all like me - that is 100% what you are after. 

• Clickfunnels, $97-297/mo., is popular and delivers marketing and sales funnels but you'd need more tools or services to deliver online courses, memberships, and other elements of your serious business. 
• Kajabi includes marketing and sales funnels - inside Kajabi they are called pipelines and are genius set-ups of landing pages, sales pages, thank you pages, email marketing, and automations - all designed to deliver sales for you. 

Hidden Costs

You will run into hidden costs.

I can't tell you what they will be.

But I haven't had to fix anything on my site or business since November 2015 when I moved my entire business into Kajabi. I knew they were the best team investment I could make and they have surpassed my expectations at every single interaction. 

I trust the humans behind this company. I know them personally and I recommend them with 100% of all that I have. 

Deciding to run a business isn't easy but there are easy decisions to make. 

Give Kajabi a chance. See for yourself why there are thousands of raving fans and why you won't see us posting about tech headaches or malfunctioning software.  

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain!