Teachable

Teachable pays 30% recurring for up to twelve months on every paid plan you refer. It's one of the few course-platform programs that keeps paying after the first invoice, and the twelve-month cap is the detail worth planning around.

What you're promoting

Teachable is a hosted platform for selling online courses, coaching and digital downloads. Creators get a course builder, checkout, student management and payouts without touching a server or a plugin. Paid plans start around $39 a month and run to several hundred for teams with multiple admins and no transaction fees.

Your referral is a creator who has already decided to sell something. They're not browsing.

How the 30% adds up

Thirty percent of a $39 monthly plan is under $12, which sounds thin until you multiply by twelve. One referral on a mid-tier annual plan is worth a few hundred dollars over its life. The commission stops at the twelve-month mark whether or not the customer stays, so lifetime value has a hard ceiling here.

The cookie is 30 days and the payout threshold is $50, which is low enough that a new site can actually reach it. Annual plans pay their full year's commission upfront rather than dripping monthly, so push annual in your calls to action.

One thing to check before you write: Teachable moved its program to PartnerStack. Older guides still send people to an Impact signup page that no longer works.

Who converts

Course creator content converts: how to price a course, how to launch to a small list, comparisons against Kajabi and Thinkific, and migration guides for people leaving a self-hosted LMS. Coaches and consultants are the strongest segment because they need checkout and scheduling more than they need advanced course features.

Students looking for courses to take are the wrong audience entirely, and a surprising amount of "Teachable review" traffic is exactly that. Filter for the seller, not the buyer.

Teachable vs Kajabi for affiliates

Kajabi pays more per customer and keeps paying past a year, so on pure economics it wins. Teachable converts a much wider audience because the entry price is a third of Kajabi's. If your readers are first-time creators, Teachable will out-earn Kajabi on volume alone. If you write for established businesses, go the other way.

Getting approved

Apply through teachable.com/partners, which routes to PartnerStack. Approval is straightforward for sites with relevant content and typically takes a few days. Teachable does check that you have an audience of creators rather than a general deals site.

Verdict

A solid recurring program with a low bar to entry and a genuinely low payout threshold. The twelve-month cap keeps it from being a long-term annuity, so treat each referral as a fixed-value asset rather than passive income. Best suited to sites that already teach people how to build an online business.