Kartra Pricing 2026: Plans, Limits and Fees

Kartra costs $59 a month on Essentials, $119 on Starter, $229 on Growth, and $549 on Professional, dropping to $52, $99, $189, and $429 on annual billing. There is no free plan. The number that decides most Kartra bills is not the subscription, though: Essentials carries a 5 percent Kartra transaction fee on everything you sell, and every plan above it charges 0 percent. Pricing verified on Kartra's own plans page in August 2026. Last updated August 2026.

That single fee is why the advertised entry price is misleading in a specific, calculable way. Above roughly $1,200 a month in sales, the $59 plan costs you more than the $119 plan. Most Kartra pricing articles mention the fee and then never do the arithmetic, so here it is, along with the two other places this ladder behaves differently from how it looks.

Kartra pricing: all plans compared

Every figure above came off Kartra's plans page in August 2026. Video hosting is unlimited on all four tiers, which is unusual in this category and genuinely worth money if you sell course content.

Essentials is not a cheap Kartra, it is a different product

The gap between $59 and $119 reads like a normal price step. It is not. Essentials caps you at one product, one membership or course, five pages, 500 contacts, and 10,000 emails a month. Starter makes all four of those unlimited except contacts, which go to 2,500.

So the jump is not more of the same for twice the money. It is the difference between selling one thing and selling anything. If you plan to run a single evergreen course and nothing else, Essentials is a real plan and the cheapest way into Kartra. The moment you add a second product, an order bump on a different offer, or a sixth page, you are on Starter whether you budgeted for it or not.

Automations are the other hard gate, and they sit higher than most people expect. Tagging leads by behavior and running dynamic marketing sequences start on Growth at $229. Both plans below it are, in practice, a page builder with a cart and a broadcast email tool attached.

The 5 percent fee: where Essentials stops being cheaper

Essentials costs $60 a month less than Starter and charges 5 percent of your sales. Starter charges nothing. So the fee eats the saving at the point where 5 percent of monthly sales equals $60, which is $1,200 in sales a month.

On annual billing the crossover arrives sooner, because the subscription gap narrows to $47 while the fee stays at 5 percent: Essentials stops being the cheaper plan at $940 a month in sales. At $10,000 a month, staying on Essentials to save $60 on the subscription costs you $440. At $25,000 it costs $1,190, which is more than the Professional plan.

None of this includes card processing, which you pay separately through Stripe or PayPal at their usual rates. The 5 percent is Kartra's own cut on top.

Cost per contact: the ladder inverts at the top

Contacts are what Kartra actually meters, so divide each plan by the contacts it includes and the shape of the pricing becomes clear.

Growth is the cheapest contact you can buy from Kartra, and Professional is the only rung on the ladder that gets more expensive per contact rather than cheaper. Professional doubles your contacts and more than doubles the price, so you pay a 140 percent increase for a 100 percent increase in list size. The same inversion holds on annual billing, at 1.5 cents on Growth against 1.7 cents on Professional.

That is not a pricing error, it is what Professional is actually for. You buy it for five custom domains instead of three, live chat support, and the agency capacity to run client accounts. If you are buying it for headroom on your list, you are buying the most expensive contacts Kartra sells.

How Kartra compares at the same price

Kartra sits in the all-in-one bracket, so the honest comparison is against the platforms that also bundle pages, carts, email, and memberships rather than against a landing page builder.

Against ClickFunnels the crossover is $760 a month in sales: below that Kartra Essentials is cheaper even with the fee, above it ClickFunnels Launch wins. ClickFunnels publishes no transaction fee and states plainly that you keep what you make, though several reviewers report a 1 percent surcharge for connecting your own Stripe, which we have not been able to confirm at source. The full ladder is in ClickFunnels pricing, and the wider set is compared in the best ClickFunnels alternatives.

Kajabi is the closest peer on course delivery and roughly triple the entry price, with its own surcharge that runs 5 percent down to 0.5 percent by tier. It is the more finished course product and publishes its fee structure more plainly than anyone else here. Details in Kajabi pricing.

Systeme.io is the honest cheap answer: a genuinely free forever plan with 3 funnels, 2,000 contacts, one custom domain, and 0 percent fees on every tier, up to $97 for unlimited everything. The editor is plainer and the templates look their price, but no fee and no bill is difficult to argue with when you are testing whether an offer sells at all.

One category note worth making, because it sends people down the wrong path every month: if the courses you are building are internal training for your own staff rather than products you sell to the public, none of these platforms is priced for you. A platform built to onboard and certify employees charges by seat and tracks completion and compliance, which is a different job from metering marketing contacts.

The trial, and what we could not confirm

Kartra's plans page shows a 14-day trial alongside a 30-day risk-free money-back guarantee, and does not state on that page whether a card is required to start. Third-party coverage variously reports a $1 fee for the 14-day trial and a 30-day trial at Growth level. Those may well be accurate, and they may be offers that vary by campaign, but they are not what the vendor page shows, so treat them as reported rather than verified and check what you are actually offered at signup.

We would rather flag the gap than repeat a number we cannot stand behind. It is the same reason the Starter tier price on Kajabi is labeled as reported in our breakdown of that platform: pricing pages change quietly, and a confident wrong figure is worse than an honest gap.

How much does Kartra cost?

Kartra costs $59 to $549 a month depending on tier, or $52 to $429 billed annually. Essentials is $59 for 500 contacts and one product with a 5 percent transaction fee. Starter is $119 for 2,500 contacts and unlimited products with no fee. Growth is $229 for 12,500 contacts and automations. Professional is $549 for 25,000 contacts.

Does Kartra have a free plan?

No. Kartra has no free tier on any plan, and the cheapest way in is Essentials at $52 a month billed annually. The plans page shows a 14-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee instead. If a free plan is the requirement, Systeme.io is the only platform in this bracket that offers one that does not expire.

Does Kartra charge transaction fees?

Only on Essentials, where Kartra takes 5 percent of your sales on top of what Stripe or PayPal charge for processing. Starter, Growth, and Professional all charge 0 percent. That makes Essentials the wrong plan for anyone selling more than about $1,200 a month, because the fee overtakes the $60 subscription saving at that point.

Which Kartra plan should I choose?

Pick from two numbers: what you sell in a typical month, and how many separate products you offer. Under $1,200 in monthly sales with exactly one product, Essentials is genuinely cheapest. Above that, or with a second product, Starter at $119. If you need behavioral tagging and automation sequences, that gate is Growth at $229.

Is Kartra cheaper than Kajabi?

Yes, at every rung. Kartra starts at $59 against Kajabi's $179 Basic, and Kartra Growth at $229 sits close to Kajabi Basic on capability while costing $20 more than Kajabi's entry. Both charge a percentage on some configurations, Kartra only on its cheapest tier, Kajabi on outside payment processors across all tiers.

Is Kartra worth it in 2026?

It is worth it if you would otherwise pay for a page builder, an email tool, a cart, video hosting, and a membership platform separately, because unlimited video hosting on every tier alone offsets a real bill. It is poor value if you use it as a landing page tool, where $59 buys five pages and a 5 percent tax on revenue.

Before you blame the platform

Pick the tier from your monthly sales figure and your product count, not from the feature grid. Almost every Kartra upgrade regret traces back to one of two things: someone chose Essentials while selling enough to make the 5 percent fee expensive, or someone bought Professional for list headroom that Growth priced better.

And if the reason you are shopping is that sales are flat, the platform is rarely the cause. Sales pages fail for the same reasons everywhere: a headline about the curriculum instead of the outcome, a buy button that never appears above the fold on a phone, proof placed after the price rather than before it, and a checkout asking for more than it needs. Moving those problems to a different platform does not fix any of them. The same logic applies when you are shopping page builders rather than funnel platforms, which is covered in the best Leadpages alternatives comparison.

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