Podia pricing and fees: when Shaker beats Mover.

Plan comparison

Podia Mover vs Shaker at a glance

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Payment processing, taxes, refunds, currency conversion, and optional add-ons are separate. Confirm current checkout pricing for your country.

Billing commitment

Annual equivalents are not monthly invoices

The $42, $84, and $150 monthly equivalents mean annual bills of $504, $1,008, and $1,800 for Mover, Shaker, and Earthquaker. Regular monthly billing is $49, $99, and $179 instead. Podia currently offers a 14-day trial without a credit card.

On monthly billing, Mover and Shaker tie at $1,000 in monthly gross revenue: $49 + 5% × $1,000 = $99. Above that, Shaker costs less on subscription and platform fees. On annual billing, the equivalent tie is $840: $42 + 5% × $840 = $84. Choose the billing commitment first; the explorer below uses annual equivalents and excludes payment processing and other costs.

Current plan limits

Price is only one upgrade trigger

A product allowance does not establish how a file reaches the buyer. Check Podia download and free-delivery routes before budgeting a streaming or account-library workflow.

Podia's current plans also cap products, hosted videos, community spaces, assistants, and included email subscribers. These are hard plan limits rather than overage allowances, so a creator who reaches one must reduce usage or upgrade.

Podia says customer and community-member counts are not capped by these subscriber limits. The subscriber figure controls the included email-marketing tier; larger email tiers can change the bill.

Podia Email bills by subscribed people, not all contacts or the number of messages sent. Unconfirmed and not-subscribed contacts do not count. Above the selected subscriber tier, broadcasts and campaigns stop; scheduled broadcasts become drafts and campaigns pause. Restoring capacity also requires rescheduling or resuming those messages. This is not an automatic charge for each excess email, and the base-plan upgrade is not the only way to buy a larger email tier.

Examples

What Podia costs at three revenue levels

These examples count the subscription and Podia transaction fee only, keeping payment processing out so the plan difference stays clear.

Refund-adjusted example

Refunds can reverse the fee-only upgrade result

Podia's refund guide says its transaction fees are returned when a purchase is refunded; Stripe processing fees are not returned. This is separate from refunding your Podia subscription. Partial refunds and PayPal refunds use the processor's workflow, and external changes may not be reflected in Podia. Confirm the actual fee return and reconciliation before applying the same assumption to those routes.

Fictional example: ten $100 purchases, either no refunds or two full refunds in the same modeled period. Both plans use annual subscriptions divided by twelve, not monthly invoices. The table excludes processing, tax, email tiers and other costs.

At a fictional 20% fully refunded revenue share with the Podia fee returned, the annual-plan tie becomes $1,050 in original gross revenue: $42 ÷ (5% × 80%) = $1,050. The regular-monthly tie is $1,250. This is sensitivity analysis, not a predicted refund rate, recommended refund policy or claim that Mover is always cheaper.

Using an illustrative 2.9% + $0.30 processor charge on all ten original purchases leaves $32 of processing on either plan. After two refunds, the modeled remainders are $686 for Mover and $684 for Shaker, before production, marketing, tax and other costs. The processor rate is an example, not a Podia or Stripe quote.

In the profit calculator, set reachable audience to 100 and conversion to 10% for ten expected sales, course price to $100 and refunds to 20%. Choose Podia Mover for its $42 annual monthly budget, 5% platform fee and no fixed platform fee. To reproduce this example, set production and advertising to $0 and processing to the illustrative 2.9% + $0.30. Select Platform returns its percentage and per-sale fees; leave Processor returns its percentage and per-sale fees off for this documented Stripe example. For Shaker, change subscription to $84 and platform fee to 0%. Use your actual costs when planning a real launch. The general defaults remain conservative and do not automatically apply Podia's policy. The fee-only explorer above has no refund input; use the separate fee-return explanation for that distinction.

Refund and email-limit documentation checked October 4, 2026. These are scoped source checks, not a new full pricing audit or a guarantee of refund timing, account eligibility, total profit or sales demand.

The decision

Upgrade for economics—or for the missing tools

The upgrade calculation answers which subscription has lower modeled platform fees, not whether the course is profitable. Use the fee glossary to separate selling costs from profit, and the course profit calculator to test those costs alongside refunds, launch spending, and a conservative sales forecast.

Revenue is not the only reason to choose Shaker. Podia positions it as the plan for creators who need affiliate marketing, PayPal, and Zapier. If those tools replace separate software or unlock an important sales channel, Shaker may make sense before $840.

Mover remains the more economical starting point when monthly sales are below the threshold and its feature set covers the business.

Earthquaker is not a fee-saving upgrade from Shaker: both publish a 0% Podia transaction fee. Its extra $66 annual-billing equivalent is a capacity and collaboration purchase, so compare the value of unlimited products, videos, spaces, and assistants before upgrading.

Integration documentation checked October 5, 2026

An integration is not a completed software replacement.

Separate Podia's native external-email integration from Zapier. A plan inclusion does not prove that your existing audience, signup path or suppression workflow transfers.

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A blank integration decision record

Record the required event, account-completion stage, historical audience, suppression owner, destination, remaining tools and unresolved dependency. An existing manual workflow can be sufficient for a small audience; count only genuinely cancellable costs, not assumed revenue or time savings.

This review used public documentation, not an account trial. No connection, import, email or customer action was performed. These qualifications do not refresh the September 2 full pricing audit, change modeled fees or establish savings.

Primary sources: Zapier plan and trigger limits · Native external-email integration boundaries.

Important distinction

Podia has two different affiliate concepts

Shaker lets a creator run an affiliate program for their own products. Separately, Podia operates a partner program that pays approved publishers for referring new Podia customers. CourseProfit Lab has not added a Podia partner link; the button below remains a direct, non-affiliate link.

Frequently asked

Podia fee questions