You won’t find us promoting Kajabi from Andy Jenkins here. We’ve actually had a number of clients contact us asking us what we think about Kajabi.
Well, we’ve watched the video, we’ve read between the lines and we’ve looked at the service Kajabi is offering as any business owner should look at it – from an investment perspective. And we can say with confidence – “We Are NOT Impressed!”
Kajabi is being promoted as a “Marketing and Content Management” platform. So let’s look at that in detail.
In the video, Andy tries to “Wow” us with “Kajabi This and Kajabi That” – however, we’ve seen “smoke and mirror” promotions before. So let’s look at the “features” in detail.
Content Management – Kajabi boasts the ability for subscribers to create “posts” with an easy to use post editor. Hmmm, has Andy ever heard of WordPress? WordPress is a free platform – has loads of support, an enormous amount of plugins already developed and you can find developers specializing in WordPress all over the place.
Timed HTML Elements – In the video Andy mentions the ability to hide certain HTML elements on your sales page – like the Buy Button – until a certain amount of time has passed. Well, we’ve looked into it and it is just a simple JavaScript that is running to do this. Do you really want to pay $99/month, every month, for a simple JavaScript?
Membership Ability – The feature of having protected content is also mentioned in the video. Well, as WishList Member Certified Developers, all we can say is that nothing comes even close to the membership functionality that is offered with a $97 license of the WishList Member plugin for WordPress. Did we mention that is a ONE-TIME license? We think it is very interesting that the exact details of the membership functionality are not mentioned. Hmmmmm? Does this mean there is nothing to mention?
Drip Content – This “feature” really made us laugh! Andy implies Kajabi is the only solution for dripping content – outrageous! WishList Member has the ability to create sequential membership levels and if that’s not enough, the MW Gradual Content Delivery plugin does exactly what Andy says only Kajabi can do. It drips content based upon how many days a member has been active for. Professional clients of WishListMemberCoder get the MW Gradual Content Delivery plugin included free.
Members Following Other Members – We must admit, this one had us stumped – for about 5 minutes. Then we thought about BuddyPress. Seems like BuddyPress has all of this built in plus a whole lot more. And Yes, you can easily integrate WordPress, WishList Member and BuddyPress to create a super membership site that you have complete control over that doesn’t cost you $99/month.
Rumors About Andy Jenkins – There are some individuals on the net who are not too happy with the business practices of Mr Jenkins and others of the so called “Syndicate”. You can read about price-fixing allegations and other revealing comments at the Salty Droid.
The Cost of Doing Business with Kajabi – look at these startling facts about creating just 1 website with Kajabi:
- $99 set-up fee – this isn’t overly clear, but if you look for it, it’s there.
- $99/month
- $0.48 per GB you go over your usage restrictions. Did you know that same overage is actually costing Andy about $0.10 from Amazon?
- Shopping Cart fees – yes, that’s right. If you go with Kajabi you have to get your own shopping cart service. This could easily cost you another $99/month with a service like 1ShoppingCart or PremiumWebCart.
So in just your first year of doing business with Kajabi, your one single website is going to cost you: $2,763.00 with your 2nd year costing you $2,664.00*
And, let’s say you wanted to add a second site to your online empire. That’s going to cost you another: $1,200.00 Every Year!
When you work with WishListMemberCoder, once we’ve designed your custom graphics and created you site, you get an additional site license for that design for only $500 – and Yes, that’s a one-time fee.
Scalable VPS Cloud Hosting: One of the big things that Andy goes on about is that Kajabi is hosted on Amazon and comes with the Amazon CDN – content delivery network. In our experience, most of our clients don’t really understand what a CDN is. A CDN is a network of servers across the globe that delivery the static content for your site from the closest server to where ever you visitors are located. It improves the visitor or member experience be helping make sites super fast.
When we build a site for our clients they get the vast sum of our membership site experience at their disposal. Membership sites are ALL we do and because of that we are in a great position to advise our clients how to structure and launch their membership sites.
Our Conclusion – The title of this post sums up our opinion completely. If you are serious about succeeding in business, then run the other way when it comes to Kajabi. If you are still not convinced to stay away from Kajabi, then ask yourself these important questions:
- What are you going to do about payment integration? Kajabi does NOT include any kind of payment facilitation.
- What happens when you want to leave Kajabi? You know, when you’ve finally figured out that $1200/year plus all of the overage fees you will be paying for extra storage and bandwidth are really just way too much to justify. Can you easily transfer all of your business contacts, custom code modifications and customer info? We think not.
- What happens when you need help with custom development for your Kajabi site? You will most likely be held hostage by Kajabi.
