Podia

What it is

Podia bundles the tools a solo creator business usually assembles from separate vendors: online courses with drip scheduling and certificates, a topic-based community with chat and tiered access, 1:1 or group coaching bookings, digital downloads, live and recorded events, a website and blog builder, and its own email marketing tool, Podia Email. It runs on one login and one bill instead of four separate subscriptions.

There is no free plan anymore. Podia dropped its free tier in October 2024 and now runs new signups through a single 14-day trial with full feature access and no credit card required, at the end of which a paid plan is the only way to keep the store, the email list, or the community running.

Who should use it

A creator running a course plus a paying community plus a handful of digital downloads who wants to stop paying for and logging into four separate tools. It suits someone ready to commit to a monthly bill from the start rather than testing slowly on a free tier, since that option is gone. It fits less well past a few thousand email subscribers or a few hundred products, where Mover and Shaker’s caps start to bind and only Earthquaker at $150/mo (annual) removes them.

What stands out

The three plans, Mover, Shaker and Earthquaker, split mainly on transaction fees and hard caps rather than core feature access; courses, coaching, community and events ship on every tier. Mover at $49/mo ($42/mo billed annually, $504/year) keeps a 5% Podia fee on every sale on top of Stripe or PayPal’s own processing cut, and caps a store at 50 products and 25 community spaces. Shaker at $99/mo ($84/mo annually, $1,008/year) removes Podia’s fee entirely and raises the ceiling to 150 products and 100 spaces, adding affiliate marketing and upsells. Earthquaker at $179/mo ($150/mo annually, $1,800/year) removes the product and space caps altogether.

Email is metered separately by subscriber count rather than bundled flat: Mover includes 100 subscribers, Shaker 500, Earthquaker 1,000, with larger lists costing more on any plan. Podia’s own pricing page does not publish the exact per-tier overage rates, so a creator with a sizable list should confirm the number for their exact count before committing rather than assume it scales linearly with the base price.

User sentiment lands solidly positive but not uniform: a 4.1 out of 5 average on Trustpilot across 143 reviews, with the more pointed recent complaints describing new accounts held or paused over a weekend with no advance notice, and support that leans on an AI assistant first and can run slow outside the team’s US East Coast hours. Today’s caps are also newer than they look. Shaker and Earthquaker carried unlimited products and spaces until a June 2026 restructuring introduced the current tiered limits and added the Earthquaker plan itself, according to third-party pricing trackers that watched the change happen.

The verdict

Podia’s case is consolidation: courses, community, coaching, downloads and email marketing under one bill, with Shaker at $84/mo billed annually the plan most reviewers settle on once Mover’s 5% transaction fee stops paying for itself. That case gets weaker at the edges Podia itself caps or omits: no free tier to test on, product and space limits below the top plan, unpublished exact email-overage pricing, and support reports that skew rougher on weekends.

It is a reasonable buy for a creator who has already decided to run courses and a paid community from the same login and is comfortable paying from the first day. Skip it if a mobile app for students matters, if the community needs to feel more like Skool’s gamified format than a basic discussion space, or if lesson-level quiz analytics and embedded discussion are part of how you teach, since those are the specific gaps Podia’s own users raise most often.