Charge $197 to $497 for a self-paced flagship course, the range we see across course businesses on Kajabi. Mini-courses run $27 to $97, courses with live components go $497 to $997, and premium programs with substantial access to you land between $997 and $2,997. The stakes of that choice are bigger than most experts know: among experts on Kajabi who have made at least one sale, those whose most expensive offer stays under $50 typically earn $178 on the platform. Total. Lifetime. Experts with at least one offer priced $2,500 or higher typically earn $174,730, and 62.4% of them cross $100,000.
That gap deserves its own paragraph. It's the most important fact in course pricing.
Quick credentials, so you know where these numbers come from: we run Kajabi, the all-in-one platform experts use to sell courses, coaching, communities, consulting, and certifications. Since 2010, that adds up to more than $11.7 billion earned by experts on Kajabi. Every stat in this post comes from real transactions through our own checkout. Zero surveys, zero "industry estimates."
What does the pricing data show?
Here's the staircase, plainly. Everything below covers experts on Kajabi who have made at least one sale, and "typical" means the middle of the pack: line up every expert in the group from lowest lifetime earnings to highest, and read the number off the one standing dead center. (We use the middle instead of the average because a few giant earners drag averages up so far they describe almost no one.)
Top price under $50: typical lifetime earnings of $178. Only 2.6% ever reach $100,000.
At least one offer at $2,500 or more: typical lifetime earnings of $174,730. 62.4% reach $100,000.
- Top price under $50: typical lifetime earnings of $178. Only 2.6% ever reach $100,000.
- At least one offer at $2,500 or more: typical lifetime earnings of $174,730. 62.4% reach $100,000.
An expert whose catalog tops out under $50 typically earns $178. Enough for a decent office chair. Those are the two ends of the staircase, and they're far enough apart to settle the argument on their own. Every rung in between, plus benchmarks by niche, is in the full pricing report across every price band and vertical.
Notice what the staircase measures: your most expensive offer, whatever shape it takes. A course, a coaching package, a paid community, a consulting engagement, a certification... whichever one carries your top price sets your rung. A course is one of five models for selling what you know, and if you're still deciding which one deserves your flagship, start with how to choose among the five business models for selling your expertise. The rest of this post prices the course.
Now the honest part, because the caveat matters as much as the stat. Price, confidence, offer quality, and audience trust all move together in the $2,500-plus group, and we can't tell you which one is doing the pulling. Neither can anyone else, including the people selling you pricing courses. Typing a bigger number into a price field moves exactly one of those four. What we can tell you is which group we'd want your odds in: 2.6% versus 62.4% is a bet you only get to place once per business.
So here's the position we'll hold for the rest of this post: underpricing is the default failure mode of the expert business, courses very much included. The people who fail at this rarely fail because they charged too much. They priced themselves into the $178 club without ever seeing this staircase.
What are the standard price ranges for online courses?
Four bands cover nearly everything we see on the platform:
Most experts pricing their first course should aim their flagship at $197 to $497 and treat everything below that band as a marketing expense... a front porch that exists to get people into the house. If you're sorting out what belongs on the porch versus in the house, the done-by-you, done-with-you, done-for-you pricing ladder walks through how the rungs stack.
"But my course is only two hours of video. I can't charge $400 for that."
You're pricing the wrong thing. Buyers pay for the distance between where they are and where your course gets them, and a two-hour course that closes that gap fast is worth more than a forty-hour course that buries the same answer in module 31. Runtime pricing puts you in competition with YouTube. YouTube wins that one.
Why do so many experts price under $50?
Three reasons, and we've watched all of them play out at scale.
Marketplace anchoring. You looked at Udemy, saw courses at $12.99, and concluded that's what courses cost. Udemy prices are Udemy's business model: a giant library sold on volume, where the platform owns the customer and runs the promotions. You're selling a specific transformation to a specific person on your own site. Those are different products that happen to both contain video.
Fear wearing a generosity costume. "I want this to be accessible" is what an expert says out loud. "I'm scared no one will pay more" is usually what's underneath. We say this with some tenderness, because we've watched the pattern play out hundreds of times: a $39 course, lovely reviews, income that never covers the software bill. The experts who finally triple the price tend to sell fewer seats and make more, and here's the deflating part... the audience mostly doesn't notice. Coaches run the same pattern with their session rates, and community builders run it with memberships priced like a streaming app. The costume fits every model.
They never ran the math. So let's run it.
The math on a $47 course vs. a $497 course
Say you want your course to pay you $100,000 a year.
At $47, that's 2,128 checkouts. Call it 41 sales a week, every week, all year. At a typical 2% email-to-sale conversion rate, you'd need to move over 106,000 subscribers through your funnel to get there. If you already have that audience, congratulations, you own an asset rarer than any course.
At $497, the same $100,000 takes 202 sales. Four a week. A well-nurtured list in the low five figures can produce that.
And here's the part that stings: the workload barely changes between the two. Sales page, email sequence, webinar, objection handling... you build the same machine either way. The $47 price just forces that machine to find and convince about 1,900 additional strangers per year, forever, for the same paycheck. This is also why the marketing engine matters more than the curriculum, which is the whole story behind why most online courses never sell.
"What if I just sell way more units at the low price?"
That's the plan almost everyone has, and the staircase already told you how it ends for the typical expert: $178. Volume at rock-bottom prices works for platforms with millions of visitors. For an expert with an email list, it's a treadmill with the speed set by someone else.
There's a commitment cost too. A $39 buyer clicked an impulse; a $497 buyer made a decision. People who make decisions show up, finish, and become the results your next launch is built on. Coaches see the same physics: the client who paid real money does the homework. A price is also a filter, and a low one filters for window shoppers.
Is course pricing going up?
Yes, and faster than most experts have noticed. The typical price of a newly created product on Kajabi has risen 24% since 2023.
Think about what that means if you set your price in 2022 and haven't touched it. The market repriced around you, buyers kept buying, and every year you hold the old number you're running a quiet, permanent sale nobody asked for and nobody thanks you for.
It also runs against the loudest instinct of the moment. These were supposed to be the years AI made knowledge products worthless. Through exactly those years, experts raised prices by a quarter and the market paid. Information got free; guided outcomes got more valuable. Price accordingly.
Should you discount instead of pricing low?
You'll probably discount either way, so price for it up front. Across the platform, 22% of transactions use a coupon, and the typical discount takes 40.3% off. Roughly one in five of your future sales will ride a promo. That's the weather your price has to survive.
Run the stress test. A $497 course at the typical discount still clears about $297 per sale, which is flagship money. A $97 course at the same discount clears $58, a nice dinner. The expert who priced high gets to run launch promos, holiday sales, and scholarships all year and still earns triple per discounted sale what the underpriced expert earns at full price.
Discounting is a tool. Underpricing is a policy. One of them you pick up and put down; the other one you live under.
How do you pick your exact number?
Work backward from the income you want. Self-doubt is a terrible pricing consultant.
- Set the annual number. What does this course need to pay you? Write it down for real.
- Pick a band. Self-paced flagship: $197 to $497. Live elements: $497 to $997. Be honest about which one you're building.
- Divide. Income goal ÷ price = sales needed. Divide by 52 for your weekly quota.
- Check the audience math. At a 2% conversion rate, your list needs to be roughly 50 times your annual sales number. If your list can't carry the quota, the fix is audience growth or a higher price. It's almost never a lower price.
- Gut check. If the weekly quota made you laugh out loud, change an input.
For scale: a $497 course in front of an engaged 6,000-person list produces roughly $60K a year at ordinary conversion rates. Whether that's a business or a side dish depends on your goals, and if you want the full earnings picture before you commit, here's the data on whether selling online courses is profitable at all.
One more thing, because someone reading this is about to disappear for eight months to build something worthy of a $997 price tag: don't. Price for the transformation, then ship a minimum viable course and let real students shape the rest. Polish is a stalling tactic with good PR.
The one-sentence version
Charge $197 to $497 for a self-paced flagship, more if you're showing up live, and treat any instinct to price under $50 as the failure mode our data says it is: the under-$50 club typically earns $178, the $2,500-plus club typically earns $174,730, and you get to pick which staircase you stand on.
Want the math done for you?
