Best Payment Platforms for Career Coaches: Top 12 for 2026

The best payment platforms for career coaches handle three kinds of money at once: one-off fees for a resume or LinkedIn review, multi-month job-search packages that clients between jobs often need to split into instalments, and invoices paid by an employer or outplacement budget rather than the person you coach. Most tools do one of those well. The right pick depends on which of the three makes up most of your revenue, and on whether you also want the payment to open the door to the coaching itself.

Our pick is Coachful. We make Coachful, so weigh that, but the reasoning is simple: it takes payments through your own Stripe or Razorpay account with a 0% platform fee, sends the coaching agreement before the first call, and drops the paying client straight into their program, sessions and check-ins under one login. The other 11 platforms below are ranked honestly, with listed prices, limits and a clear "pick it over Coachful if" line for each.

This is a decision guide first. Answer five questions about your practice, use the table to see which platforms match your answers, then read the sections for the two or three that fit. If you want the broader comparison across every coaching niche, start with our guide to payment platforms for coaches.

What do career coaches need from a payment platform?

Career coaches need a checkout that can sell a fixed-scope deliverable, a time-bound package and a recurring retainer, plus a way to invoice a company. That mix is specific to career work and it rules out a lot of tools built for one type of sale.

Here is how the money usually moves in a career coaching practice:

• Fixed-scope deliverables. Resume rewrites, LinkedIn profile reviews and cover letter edits are one-time purchases with a clear end. They need a simple checkout, a place to collect the client's current documents, and an invoice.
• Job-search packages. A 6 or 12 week program of strategy sessions, mock interviews and accountability is the core offer for many career coaches. Clients who are between jobs often ask to pay in instalments, so payment plans matter more here than in most niches.
• Session credits. Interview prep before a specific final round, or a salary negotiation call, is often sold as a single session or a small bundle of credits the client books when the date is set.
• Employer-paid coaching. Leadership transition, outplacement and internal mobility work is often paid by an HR or L&D budget. That means a manual invoice to a company, sometimes with a purchase order number, while the coaching goes to an individual employee.
• Retainers for promoted or newly hired clients. After landing a role, some clients stay on a monthly subscription for their first 90 days. Recurring billing with easy cancellation keeps that clean.

Two scope issues shape the payment setup. First, career coaches cannot guarantee a job offer, so your agreement should say what is delivered and what is not, and it should be signed before money changes hands for larger packages. The ICF Code of Ethics asks coaches to agree clearly on fees, scope and terms before coaching starts. Second, refunds for job-search packages are a frequent source of disputes, so a platform that records exactly what the client agreed to, and when, saves you trouble later. Our coaching contracts page covers how agreements work in Coachful.

Five questions to answer before you pick a platform

Answer these honestly and the shortlist writes itself. Keep your answers in mind for the table in the next section.

1. What share of your revenue is employer-paid? If companies pay for a meaningful share of your work, manual invoices with your business details and the client's company name are not optional.
2. Do you deliver programs or just sessions? If clients get weekly tasks, application targets, interview reflections or a course between calls, the payment platform should hand them into that delivery. If you only sell calls, a booking-plus-checkout tool can be enough.
3. Do your clients need payment plans? Clients in a job search are watching cash flow. If you sell packages of a few months, you want instalments that charge automatically and stop when they are done.
4. Where do your clients find you? Career coaches selling through LinkedIn content need a link that opens a checkout or a booking page in one tap. Coaches selling through referrals and HR contacts care more about invoices and agreements.
5. How many tools do you want to log in to? Some coaches are happy with a processor plus a scheduler plus a contract tool. Others want one bill and one login. Count the tools you pay for today before you decide.

Which payment platform fits your answers?

Match your answers to the rows below. The first column is the platform, the second is the answer pattern it suits, and the third is the trade-off you accept.

How did we rank these 12 payment platforms?

We ranked on what a career coach pays for and what the client experiences after paying, using vendor pricing pages and documentation, not hands-on testing. Vendor prices are as listed in October 2026; Stripe, CoachAccountable and Dubsado prices come from their pricing pages loaded on October 27, 2026.

Ranking criteria: one login for the whole client journey from payment to delivery, between-session delivery, total stack cost including fees, and setup effort (including the free white-glove build that Coachful offers).

1. Coachful: payments that lead straight into the coaching

Coachful is a coaching platform where taking the payment is the first step of the client journey, not a separate system. A career coach can sell a resume review, a 12-week job-search program or a monthly retainer, collect the money through their own Stripe Connect or Razorpay account, and the client lands in their program, sessions and check-ins inside a branded app.

How payments work in Coachful

Coachful connects to your own Stripe Connect or Razorpay account, so payouts go to you and the processor relationship is yours. Since August 2026 Coachful charges a 0% platform fee on sales; you pay only Stripe or Razorpay processing. Checkout supports:

• One-time payments for fixed deliverables like a resume rewrite or LinkedIn review.
• Subscriptions for monthly retainers with clients in a new role.
• Payment plans for job-search packages, which matter when a client is between jobs.
• Order bumps and coupons, for example adding a mock interview to a resume package at checkout.
• Refunds, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and Stripe Tax for sales tax and VAT.
• An invoice for every transaction, plus manual invoices for employer-paid coaching.

That last point matters for career coaches. When an HR team pays for an employee's transition coaching, you raise a manual invoice to the company while the employee gets the coaching experience. Both live on the same client record. The walkthrough below shows the invoices view.

Selling the offer and signing the agreement

Offers in Coachful bundle what you sell: a program, sessions, session credits, a course or downloads. You can sell them from your Coachful website, a booking or checkout funnel, or a link-in-bio page that sells, which suits career coaches who get most clients from LinkedIn posts. Booking pages can take payment for paid sessions and ask intake questions, so a client booking interview prep can tell you the company, the role and the date of the final round before you meet.

Coaching agreements with e-signature go out before the first call and are stored on the client record. For a job-search package, that is where you state that coaching does not guarantee an offer, what the refund terms are, and how many sessions are included.

What the client gets after paying

This is where Coachful differs from a processor or a storefront. The client who pays for a job-search program gets a branded home inside the Coachful app with multi-week programs, weekly goals, daily tasks, habits, morning and evening check-ins, and goals with progress bars. A career coach can set weekly application targets, a networking habit and a Friday reflection, and see each client's status as thriving, active, quiet or at risk. Courses with drip, downloads like interview question banks, and a community with cohort groups created on enrollment are included in your Coachful membership.

Michelle, the built-in AI assistant, works from your live practice data: it can brief you before a session, summarize recorded sessions and draft follow-up emails. If you are working toward an ICF credential, Coachful counts coaching hours and distinct clients against ACC, PCC and MCC thresholds and exports an ICF client coaching log with paid and pro bono hours. See ICF hour tracking for details.

Why Coachful stands out: a free white-glove service. From Create, the "We'll build it for you" option lets you describe what you want built, such as a website, a sales page for your job-search program, a booking funnel, an email sequence or a program outline, and attach up to 8 reference links and up to 10 files like your logo, headshot and existing copy. The Coachful team builds it inside your own account, usually within about 24 hours. Nothing is invented: no fake credentials, testimonials or prices, and gaps are left for you to fill. It does not cover recording videos, logo design, ad management or ongoing marketing. A leadership coach with a Squarespace renewal days away, for example, got one clean homepage with a repeated "talk with me" button. Read more about the white-glove build service.

Limits to know

Coachful does not take PayPal. It has no permanent free plan, though there is a free trial. The client app ships under the Coachful listing with your branding, not under your own App Store account. It has no Salesforce or HubSpot integration and no multi-stage sales deal board for large teams, which matters only if you sell to enterprises through a formal pipeline. It is not HIPAA-certified, which rarely affects career work but is worth knowing.

Pricing is a flat monthly plan; lower plans cap the number of clients, Pro is unlimited and team plans add coach seats (current plans: Lite: $29/month for up to 5 clients; Solo: $49/month for up to 20 clients; Pro: $99/month with unlimited clients; Studio: $199/month with unlimited clients). Monthly plans cancel in one click. More on fit for this niche is on our page for career coaches and the coaching payment software overview.

2. Stripe: is a raw processor enough for a career coach?

Stripe on its own is enough if you only need to get paid and you already have scheduling, contracts and delivery handled elsewhere. It is the processor underneath many of the platforms in this list, including Coachful, so going direct mostly removes the layer that turns a payment into a client experience.

Stripe's pricing page varies by country. The version we loaded on October 27, 2026 was served for the Netherlands and listed 1.5% + €0.25 for standard EEA credit and debit cards, 2.8% + €0.25 for premium EEA cards, 3.15% + €0.25 for international cards, plus 2% when currency must be converted. Stripe Invoicing Starter is listed at 0.4% per paid invoice. US and UK rates differ, so check the page for your country before you model costs.

For career coaches, the useful pieces are Payment Links (a no-code link you can paste into a LinkedIn message after a discovery call), Invoicing for employer-paid work, and subscriptions through Billing for retainers. What Stripe does not give you is the rest of the engagement: no booking page with intake questions, no signed agreement before the first session, no client portal, no tasks or check-ins. You stitch those together from other tools, and each one adds a login and a bill.

Watch the currency point if you coach internationally. A career coach in London with clients relocating to the US, or a US coach working with expats, will see conversion charges on top of card fees. Pricing in your client's currency where your setup allows it avoids some of that.

Pick it over Coachful if you only need card payments and invoices, you are comfortable wiring Stripe into your own website and scheduler, and you have no need for programs or client tracking between sessions.

3. HoneyBook: the strongest fit for employer-paid work

HoneyBook is a client management tool for service businesses with proposals, contracts, invoices, a scheduler and a client portal. It suits career coaches whose work looks like consulting: an HR lead asks for a proposal, approves it, signs and pays an invoice.

As listed in October 2026, Starter is $29 a month billed annually (the monthly price is not shown), Essentials is $59 a month or $49 billed annually, and Premium is $129 a month or $109 billed annually. Starter includes unlimited clients and projects and 2 live lead forms; Essentials allows up to 2 team members and 10 lead forms; Premium adds unlimited team members and multiple companies. The pricing page FAQ lists a 30-day free trial with no credit card.

Payments must run through HoneyBook's own processing. The page conflicts on card fees: the FAQ lists 2.7% + 10¢ while the plan comparison shows 2.9% + 25¢. ACH is listed at 1.5% and instant deposit at 1%. Premium accounts processing over $500k a year may qualify for discounted rates. The scheduler and automations are not on Starter, so a career coach booking discovery calls will need Essentials.

The gap for career coaches is delivery. HoneyBook has no programs, courses, habits, check-ins or community, so once the client has paid for a 12-week search, the tracking of applications, interviews and weekly goals happens somewhere else.

Pick it over Coachful if most of your revenue is proposal-led corporate work, you deliver coaching in meetings rather than between them, and you want proposals as the front door.

4. Dubsado: contracts and invoices on an annual plan

Dubsado gives you forms, contracts, invoices with payment plans, client portals and workflows, priced as an annual subscription. Its site groups customers into licensed and specialized services, creatives, and management, events and coordination businesses.

The pricing page we loaded on October 27, 2026 lists the Starter plan at $335 a year and Premier at $525 a year, in USD, with a note that annual billing saves two months. Both include unlimited projects and clients, invoicing and payment plans, client portals, calendar connection and mobile app access. Premier adds scheduling, automated workflows, public proposals, bookkeeping integration, Zapier and unlimited lead capture forms (Starter has 1). Extra brands cost $10 a month each, 3 additional users are included, and larger teams pay $25 to $60 a month by user band. The trial is 21 days with full Premier access and no credit card.

For a career coach, payment plans on invoices are the useful part: a client paying for a three-month search can be put on a schedule without a separate subscription tool. The pricing page does not state Dubsado's own transaction fees, so check the help center before you sign up. Like HoneyBook, it does not deliver coaching: no programs, check-ins or courses.

Scheduling is Premier only. If you book discovery calls and sessions through the tool, budget for the higher plan.

Pick it over Coachful if you prefer paying once a year, your work is mostly contract-and-invoice admin with a small support team, and you already run delivery in another app.

5. Stan Store: selling from your LinkedIn link

Stan Store is a link-in-bio storefront for digital products, courses, memberships and paid calls. Career coaches who post on LinkedIn or Instagram use it to sell resume templates, interview question packs and short calls from a single link.

As listed in October 2026, Creator is $29 a month ($25 billed annually) and Creator Pro is $99 a month ($79 billed annually); both have unlimited products and customers. Stan states a 0% Stan fee, with standard Stripe or PayPal processing. The help center lists a 14-day free trial on either plan, with the first month charged when the trial ends. Public reviewers rate it 4.7 on Trustpilot from 2,205 reviews (seen October 25, 2026).

The limits show up as soon as you sell more than a template. Email marketing, upsells, discount codes and affiliates are only on Creator Pro. Stan has no contracts, invoices or client records, and no programs with tasks or check-ins, so a job-search package sold on Stan still needs another tool for the agreement and the work. No team seats are advertised.

Pick it over Coachful if your income is mostly low-priced digital products sold to a social audience, and one-to-one coaching is a small side line.

6. Paperbell: simple session packages

Paperbell is an all-in-one admin tool for solo coaches covering booking, packages, payments, contracts, a client portal and a simple website. For a career coach selling "4 sessions plus a resume review" to individuals, it covers the sale and the scheduling in one place.

As listed in October 2026, Paperbell is a single plan at $97 a month or $80.83 a month billed annually, with unlimited clients, sessions, files, packages and traffic. It states no additional transaction fees, with Stripe or PayPal processor fees applying. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee; the help center described a 7-day trial in July 2026 with the public site offline and client messages and SMS turned off during it. Trustpilot shows 3.5 from 14 reviews (seen October 25, 2026).

Older profile data from September 2026 notes no courses, community, or goal and habit tracking, and no native mobile app. For career coaches, that means the weekly application targets and interview reflections that make a job-search program work live outside Paperbell. The price is also per coach, so adding an associate coach doubles it. See our Paperbell alternatives page for more options.

Pick it over Coachful if you sell only sessions, want PayPal at checkout, and will never run programs, courses or a community.

7. CoachAccountable: priced by active clients

CoachAccountable is a coaching management system with one pricing structure for everyone, scaled by the number of active clients. Every plan includes the full system, and unlimited coach and administrator accounts are included at no extra cost.

The pricing page we loaded on October 27, 2026 lists Starter at $20 a month for 2 clients, Level 1 at $40 for 5, Level 2 at $70 for 10, Level 3 at $120 for 20, Level 3.5 at $200 for 35, and Level 4 at $250 for 50, rising to $4,000 a month for 1,000 clients. Only active clients count, and you can deactivate and reactivate them while they keep access to their records. There are no setup or cancellation fees, and the 30-day trial needs no credit card and has no limits. The page does not list transaction fees.

The client-count model suits career coaches with short, intense engagements: deactivate a client when they accept an offer and the bill goes down. It is less friendly when you run a group job-search program, because each participant counts as a separate client. The page's own FAQ confirms that each person in a group or company counts individually.

Pick it over Coachful if you coach a small number of clients at a time, rotate them quickly, and want unlimited coach accounts for a team without paying per seat. Compare more options on our CoachAccountable alternatives page.

8. Kajabi: when courses are the main product

Kajabi is a course, community, website, funnel and email platform for selling knowledge products. It fits a career coach whose main income is a self-paced job-search course or a paid community, with one-to-one coaching sold as an upgrade.

As listed in October 2026, Basic is $179 a month ($143 billed annually) with 5 products, 2,500 contacts and 0 AI credits; Growth is $249 a month ($199 billed annually) with 50 products and 25,000 contacts; Pro is $499 a month ($399 billed annually). Kajabi Payments in the US costs 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% + $0.30 on Growth and 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro. Any other processor except PayPal adds a Kajabi fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro. On Basic, that is an extra $20 on every $1,000 collected through a non-Kajabi processor. The standard trial is 14 days.

For career coaches selling individual packages, Kajabi's model is products and communities rather than per-client plans: there are no habits or daily check-ins. The 5-product cap on Basic fills quickly if you sell a resume review, an interview prep bundle, a course and a group program separately. Our Kajabi alternatives for career coaches covers this in depth.

Pick it over Coachful if a course and community business is your main revenue, you have a large email list, and one-to-one work is a minor upsell.

9. Podia: a small catalogue at a lower price

Podia is a storefront for courses, downloads, webinars, coaching sessions and community. A career coach with a resume course, a salary negotiation webinar and a few paid calls can sell all of them from one simple store.

As listed in October 2026, Mover is $49 a month ($42 billed annually) with a 5% Podia transaction fee, Shaker is $99 a month ($84 billed annually) and Earthquaker is $179 a month ($150 billed annually); Shaker and Earthquaker have no Podia fee. Stripe or PayPal processing applies on top. The trial is 14 days with full access and no card. On Mover, the 5% fee is $50 on every $1,000 you collect, which makes Shaker the cheaper choice once you sell around $1,000 a month.

Email allowances are small: 100, 500 or 1,000 subscribers included depending on plan. Older profile data notes no mobile app and no native video calls, and Podia has no habits, check-ins or per-client plans. For job-search programs with weekly accountability, you would run delivery elsewhere.

Pick it over Coachful if you sell a handful of digital products to a small list, rarely run multi-week programs, and want PayPal at checkout.

10. PayPal: for clients who will only pay one way

PayPal is on this list because some clients ask for it, especially internationally, and Coachful does not support it. We could not verify PayPal's current merchant fees today, so check PayPal's fee page for your country before you rely on it.

What we can say from the vendors in this guide: Stan Store, Paperbell and Podia list PayPal as a supported processor, and Kajabi exempts PayPal from its extra processor fee. So if PayPal is a hard requirement for a meaningful share of your clients, those platforms let you offer it inside a checkout instead of sending a standalone PayPal request.

For a career coach, the downside of using PayPal on its own is the same as using Stripe alone: the payment is disconnected from the agreement, the booking and the work. A standalone request also makes payment plans and employer invoices harder to track in one place. Before adding PayPal, ask how many clients have actually refused a card or Apple Pay; for many practices the answer is very few.

Pick it over Coachful if you have a large group of clients who will not pay by card or digital wallet, and you are willing to manage delivery in a separate tool.

11. Everfit: only for wellbeing-led practices

Everfit is a fitness coaching app with workouts, habits, nutrition and messaging, priced by client count. It appears here because some career coaches run burnout recovery or performance tracks with a physical component, and because it shows up in general "coach payment" searches. For most career coaches it is not a fit.

As listed in October 2026, Starter is free for up to 5 clients. Pro starts at $19 a month ($16 billed annually) for 5 clients and scales to $29 for 10, $49 for 20 and $95 for 50. Studio starts at $105 a month ($88 billed annually) for 50 clients. The trial is 30 days with no card. Transaction fees are not shown on the pricing page, and payments, automation and meal plans are paid add-ons.

There is no course builder, website, funnels or email marketing, and nothing aimed at resumes, interviews or job applications. Trustpilot shows 2.7 from 16 reviews (seen October 25, 2026).

Pick it over Coachful if your career work is a small part of a fitness-led practice and you already run that practice in Everfit.

12. ABC Trainerize: a fitness app with a payments add-on

ABC Trainerize is a personal training app for workouts, habits, nutrition tracking and messaging, priced by client seats. Like Everfit, it belongs on this list only for coaches who combine career work with fitness clients.

As listed in October 2026, Basic is free for 1 client, Grow is $10 a month for 2 clients, and Pro starts at $25 a month for 5 clients with tiers up to 200 clients; Studio Plus starts at $275 a month. The trial is 30 days with unlimited clients and no card, after which the account reverts to the free 1-client plan. In-app payments require the Stripe Integrated Payments add-on, with Stripe fees on top. Scheduling, selling products and video are also separate paid add-ons below Studio.

There is no course builder, website, funnels or email marketing. Older profile data notes that client data export does not include messages, photos or attachments, which matters if you ever switch.

Pick it over Coachful if most of your clients are personal training clients and career coaching is an occasional extra.

What will you pay at 5, 15 and 40 clients?

The table shows the listed monthly software cost for each platform at three practice sizes, before card processing. Annual-only prices are converted to a monthly figure for comparison. Where a plan you would realistically need is higher than the entry plan, that plan is shown.

Two notes on reading this table. First, the cheap rows are cheap because they do one job. A career coach running Stripe direct still needs a scheduler, a contract tool and somewhere to deliver the program, and those subscriptions are not in the row. Second, percentage fees grow with revenue while flat plans do not. A 5% fee is small at a few hundred dollars a month and large once a single job-search program brings in several thousand. The guide to platforms for selling coaching packages runs the same comparison for package-based offers.

For US coaches, payment processors report gross payments to the IRS on Form 1099-K above the reporting threshold; the IRS guide to Form 1099-K explains how that works. Tax treatment varies by country and state, so check with an accountant before you set prices that include or exclude tax.

How does a career coach set up payments in Coachful, step by step?

Here is a worked example for a career coach selling three offers: a resume and LinkedIn review, a 12-week job-search program, and employer-paid transition coaching. The steps follow what Coachful documents; set your own prices.

1. Connect Stripe. Link your own Stripe Connect account (or Razorpay if you are in India) and turn on Stripe Tax if you need to collect sales tax or VAT.
2. Write the agreement. Create a coaching agreement that states the scope of each offer, that coaching does not guarantee a job offer, how many sessions are included, and your refund terms. Set it to be sent before the first call.
3. Build the program. Set up the 12-week program with weekly goals (for example, target companies researched, applications sent, interviews prepared), a daily networking task, and a Friday evening check-in. Start from one of the program templates if it helps.
4. Create the offers. Make the resume review a one-time offer with an intake question asking for the current resume and target role. Make the job-search program an offer with a payment plan option, and add a mock interview as an order bump.
5. Set up booking. Create a paid interview prep session type with intake questions about the company and interview date, and a free discovery call with a minimum notice and buffer.
6. Handle the employer route. For employer-paid coaching, enroll the employee and send a manual invoice to the company.
7. Publish the links. Put the offers on your website and link-in-bio page so a LinkedIn post can send people straight to checkout or a discovery call.

If you would rather not build any of this yourself, describe it in a white-glove build request and the Coachful team will set it up inside your account. For the full software picture beyond payments, see our guide to the best software for career coaches and the scheduling software comparison for career coaches.

Red flags and switching costs to watch for

The expensive mistakes in payment software rarely show up on the pricing page. These are the ones that bite career coaches most often.

• Percentage fees on top of processing. Podia Mover's 5% and Kajabi's extra 0.5% to 2% on non-Kajabi processors stack on top of card fees. On high-ticket job-search programs, they add up quickly.
• Processors you cannot leave. HoneyBook requires its own processing. If you later move platforms, your saved cards and subscriptions do not come with you. Platforms that use your own Stripe account keep that relationship in your name.
• Active payment plans when you switch. Clients halfway through a three-payment plan are the hardest part of any migration. Plan your switch for when most plans have finished, or keep the old tool running for those clients until they do.
• Agreements stored in the wrong place. If signed agreements live in one tool and payments in another, a refund dispute means hunting through both. Keep them on the same client record.
• Exports that leave things out. Check what a platform exports before you commit. Older profile data notes that ABC Trainerize's export omits messages, photos and attachments. Coachful exports a full client data ZIP (roster, notes, check-ins, goals, habits, sessions and form responses) plus courses.
• Per-client pricing with group programs. CoachAccountable and the fitness apps count each person. A 20-person group job-search cohort can move you up several tiers at once.
• Trials that hide features. Paperbell's trial keeps the public site offline, and Kajabi keeps some features locked until a paid plan starts. Test the parts your clients will see before the trial ends.

When you do move to Coachful, clients, programs and content are imported for you during onboarding, which takes most of the switching work off your plate. Our payment platforms for business coaches guide covers the same switching questions for B2B-heavy practices.

Verdict: which payment platform should a career coach choose?

Choose Coachful if you sell job-search programs, interview prep and employer-paid coaching and want the payment, the signed agreement and the weekly work in one login. It covers one-time payments, payment plans, subscriptions, manual invoices and Stripe Tax with a 0% platform fee, then hands the client straight into their program. The free white-glove build removes most of the setup.

Choose Stripe direct if you only need to get paid and already run everything else. Choose HoneyBook or Dubsado if your work is mostly proposals and invoices to companies and you deliver coaching in meetings. Choose Stan Store if you sell low-priced digital products to a social audience. Paperbell and CoachAccountable suit coaches who sell sessions or accountability to a small roster, Kajabi and Podia suit course-led businesses, and the two fitness apps only make sense when career coaching sits inside a fitness practice.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best payment platform for a career coach?

For most career coaches who sell packages and deliver programs, Coachful is our pick because payments, agreements, booking and delivery share one login and there is no platform fee on sales. If you only need to collect money, Stripe on its own is the simplest option. If your work is mostly corporate proposals, look at HoneyBook.

Can I let clients pay a job-search package in instalments?

Yes, on several platforms. Coachful supports payment plans at checkout, and Dubsado lists invoicing with payment plans on both plans. Set the plan length so it ends before or with the program, and state in your agreement what happens if a payment fails.

How do I bill an employer for an employee's coaching?

Use a manual invoice addressed to the company while the employee gets the coaching. Coachful supports manual invoices alongside per-transaction invoices, and HoneyBook and Dubsado are built around proposals and invoices. Ask the HR contact whether they need a purchase order number on the invoice before you send it.

Does Coachful take a cut of my sales?

No. Since August 2026 Coachful charges a 0% platform fee; you pay only Stripe or Razorpay processing. Features like payments, agreements and programs are included in your Coachful membership.

Can clients pay me with PayPal in Coachful?

No, Coachful does not support PayPal. Clients can pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through Stripe, or through Razorpay. If PayPal is essential for many of your clients, Stan Store, Paperbell and Podia list PayPal as a processor.

What is Coachful's free white-glove service?

It is a build service included on every plan. You describe what you want, such as a website, a job-search program sales page, a booking funnel or an email sequence, attach references and files, and the Coachful team builds it inside your account, usually within about 24 hours. It does not include recording videos, logo design or ad management.

Should I put a refund policy in my coaching agreement?

Yes. Career coaching cannot guarantee a job offer, so a clear agreement on scope, sessions and refunds, signed before the first call, prevents most disputes. Laws on consumer refunds vary by country and state, so have a local attorney review your terms.

Is a percentage fee or a flat monthly plan cheaper?

It depends on revenue. A percentage fee costs little at low revenue and grows with every sale, while a flat plan stays the same. As an example, a 5% fee on $3,000 a month in sales is $150, which is more than many flat plans in this guide.

Do I need a separate scheduling tool if I use a payment platform?

Only if your payment platform has no booking. Stripe on its own has no booking page, and HoneyBook Starter and Dubsado Starter leave scheduling out. Coachful, Paperbell, HoneyBook Essentials and Dubsado Premier include scheduling.

How do I start with Coachful?

Start a free trial, connect your Stripe or Razorpay account, and either build your first offer from a template or request a white-glove build. Clients, programs and content are imported for you during onboarding if you are moving from another tool.

Coachful is a coaching platform for coaches who deliver programs, not just sessions, including solo career coaches growing into a small team and coaches replacing four to six tools. It does not take PayPal, is not HIPAA-certified and has no permanent free plan. To start, take the free trial and ask the team for a free white-glove build of your site, offers or program.