Fanvault vs Kajabi: Which Creator Platform Pays More in 2026?

Fanvault and Kajabi are creator monetization platforms with very different economics: Fanvault charges a flat 8% per transaction with no monthly subscription, while Kajabi charges $179 to $499 per month plus 2.7% to 2.9% + $0.30 per sale through Kajabi Payments. The right pick in 2026 depends on whether a creator is selling structured courses to a focused list or running a fan storefront across subscriptions, drops, paid DMs, and signed memorabilia.

How do Fanvault and Kajabi actually charge creators?

Fanvault uses a single number. 8% per transaction, creators keep 92%, no monthly subscription, no plan tiers, no product cap, no contact cap. Payments run through Stripe Connect, and fulfillment for physical drops runs through Shippo.

Kajabi is a stack of two costs. The platform fee, what the company calls "no revenue share," is technically zero on the gross sale. But every account pays a fixed monthly subscription, and every transaction still pays processing. As of Kajabi's January 13, 2026 pricing reset, the public plans are $179/mo Basic, $249/mo Growth, and $499/mo Pro. The older $89 Kickstarter tier was pulled from public pricing.

Processing through Kajabi Payments runs 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% + $0.30 on Growth, and 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro, per Stripe. Use external Stripe or PayPal instead of Kajabi Payments, and Kajabi adds a 5% / 1% / 0.5% surcharge by plan.

Where does each platform win across the dimensions creators actually care about?

Here's the head-to-head across the seven dimensions that move the needle on a working creator's net.

What does the math look like at $1K and $10K a month?

The crossover between a flat-percentage platform and a subscription-plus-processing platform depends on gross volume and the size of an average transaction.

At $1,000/month across, say, 20 transactions averaging $50, Fanvault takes its 8% and the creator nets $920. Kajabi Basic at the same volume charges $179 plus roughly $35 in processing (2.9% + $0.30 x 20), leaving about $786. Fanvault wins by roughly $134/mo at that scale.

At $10,000/month across 20 transactions averaging $500, Fanvault takes $800 and the creator nets $9,200. Kajabi Growth at the same volume charges $249 plus about $286 in processing, leaving about $9,465. Kajabi wins by roughly $265/mo at that scale, and the gap widens on Pro as volume climbs further.

The practical crossover lands somewhere in the $4K to $6K/mo range for course-style revenue. Lower if transaction count is high (each $0.30 fee adds up). Higher if average order is high. Beneath the crossover, the Kajabi subscription is dead weight a creator pays before earning a dollar. Above it, the 2.7% to 2.9% processing rate beats Fanvault's 8% comfortably.

Where does Kajabi clearly win in 2026?

Kajabi is the dominant knowledge-commerce stack in 2026. Per Business Wire, the platform has paid out $10 billion cumulatively to creators as of August 2025, up 25% year over year from the $8B mark Tubefilter reported in October 2024.

The platform is built around structured courses, coaching cohorts, communities, email automations, and funnels in one account. The average six-figure Kajabi creator earns about $190K/year from just 309 paying customers, off an email list of roughly 4,000, and more than 75% of them run multiple revenue streams averaging 5 each. Financial educator Dominique Broadway scaled her Kajabi business past $10 million in revenue starting from under 100,000 followers, per the same Business Wire release.

For a coach, a financial educator, or a course-led creator who can clear $5K+ in monthly product sales, Kajabi's fixed-cost model amortizes well, and the email plus funnel infrastructure does real work that a fan-monetization platform wouldn't replicate.

Where does Fanvault clearly win in 2026?

Fanvault is built for transactional fan revenue rather than course curricula. The fee is a flat 8%, there is no $2,000+/year fixed cost to clear before the first dollar is profit, and the storefront layer is unique. Kajabi doesn't host auctions, buy-it-now drops, or authenticated memorabilia. Fanvault does, with proxy bidding, reserve prices, anti-snipe extended bidding windows, and provenance metadata on every listing.

It also covers content categories Kajabi can't. Because Kajabi runs on Stripe under the hood, accounts are bound by Stripe's restricted business list, which prohibits the sale of adult content through Kajabi. Fanvault is an 18+ verified platform with AI moderation via Sightengine and a brand-safe two-strike policy, narrower than an OnlyFans-style platform but broader than knowledge commerce.

And the conversational layer is doing actual operations work. Creators can list a memorabilia auction, schedule paywalled content, triage fan DMs, and manage orders from a chat interface or Telegram. On Kajabi, those tasks still fall to the creator or a hired VA. Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy to roughly double from $250B in 2024 to about $480B by 2027, and a meaningful share of that growth sits in transactional fan revenue rather than course catalogs.

So which one should you pick in 2026?

For most knowledge-commerce creators with a real audience and a course to sell, Kajabi is still the right answer in 2026. For everyone running a fan economy across subscriptions, paid DMs, drops, and signed memorabilia, Fanvault's 8% and built-in storefront is the cleaner stack.