Somebody Sat Down and Read 90 Teachable Creator Reviews. 44 Gave One or Two Stars.

Somebody actually did the boring work. A review audit published this week read Teachable's recent Trustpilot page one review at a time and sorted it by who wrote it.

Of 202 recent reviews, 90 came clearly from creators running a Teachable school, and 8 from students who bought a course from one.

Among those 90 creators, 44 gave one or two stars and 37 gave four or five. Twenty-one of the 44 were about price rises, transaction fees or being moved onto a more expensive plan. Eleven were about slow support. Four reported payout or payment problems.

That is not a platform people hate. That is a platform people resent paying for.

The detail that explains the 3.3

Teachable's Trustpilot page shows 1,110 reviews and a 3.3 score. The audit found the score is really two different populations.

Of the 32 reviews written without an invitation, 22 gave one star — while 95 of the 170 invited reviews gave five.

In other words: the people Teachable asks are happy. The people who show up on their own came to complain about a bill.

One caveat worth stating plainly. The site that published the audit also builds CartMango, a checkout tool that competes for the same creators, and says so. The counts are checkable against the live Trustpilot page, which is why we're running the numbers rather than the verdict.

What creators are actually paying now

Teachable's current public pricing: Starter at $39/mo ($29 annual) with a 7.5% transaction fee, Builder at $89/mo ($69 annual) and Growth at $189/mo ($139 annual). Builder used to be $39/month before the 2025 restructure. And as of June 30, 2026, the free plan is gone permanently — new schools get a 7-day trial, then a subscription.

This is the whole category, not one company

Here is the part that makes the anger structural rather than personal.

Thinkific no longer has a free plan, only a 30-day trial. Podia retired its free plan in October 2024.

Kajabi went furthest. In January 2026 it moved Basic from $119 to $143 a month on annual billing, Growth from $159 to $199, Pro from $319 to $399, and pulled the Kickstarter plan off public pricing. The Basic plan also lost 75% of its contact capacity, dropping from 10,000 to 2,500. Existing customers hit the new rate on their first billing date on or after January 13, 2026.

And on the marketplace side, Udemy cut the instructor subscription share three years running: 25% to 20% in January 2024, to 17.5% in 2025, to 15% in January 2026. Organic marketplace sales still pay instructors 37%, with Udemy keeping 63%.

Free course plans are now mostly gone across the board — Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi and Podia sell trials.

The one-star reviews read like personal grievances. Stacked up, they're a category-wide repricing arriving at every creator's door at roughly the same time.