What It Actually Costs to Run 5 Separate Subscriptions as a Solo Business Owner

A lot of solo business owners end up with a stack that grew one tool at a time: a landing page tool for a launch, an email platform because the landing page tool didn't really do email, a course host once they had something to sell, a separate website because none of the above covered a real blog or homepage, and eventually an affiliate tracker once other people wanted to promote the product for a commission. None of these decisions is unreasonable on its own. Added up, they're five separate bills, five separate logins, and five separate tools that don't talk to each other unless you build the integrations yourself.

Here's what five realistic, currently-shipping tools in those categories cost separately, at the cheapest plan that reasonably covers the job, verified live rather than pulled from memory.

The five tools, priced individually

A few notes on how we got these numbers, so you can spot-check them yourself:

• Leadpages ($99/mo, Grow plan): confirmed on leadpages.com/pricing. Leadpages also sells a cheaper "HTML Pub" publishing-only tier starting around $10/mo, but it skips the A/B testing and conversion-optimization features that are the actual reason most people choose Leadpages over a basic page builder, so we used the Grow plan as the realistic comparison.
• Mailchimp ($13/mo, Essentials): confirmed on mailchimp.com/pricing — this is the entry price for 500 contacts; Mailchimp's pricing scales up from there as your list grows, and it also bills for unsubscribed and duplicate contacts, so a growing list will cost more than this starting figure over time.
• Teachable ($39/mo, Starter, billed monthly): confirmed via Teachable's own pricing page and cross-checked against multiple independent sources. Worth flagging: Starter carries a 7.5% transaction fee on sales, which the higher Builder tier ($89/mo) removes — so a course seller doing meaningful volume may realistically need the pricier tier to avoid losing a chunk of revenue to transaction fees, which would push this comparison higher, not lower.
• Squarespace ($19/mo, Basic, billed monthly): confirmed on squarespace.com/pricing. Paying annually instead drops this to roughly $12/mo — we used monthly billing here since that's the realistic cost for someone testing whether they want to keep a tool before committing to a year of it.
• Tapfiliate ($89/mo, Essential/Launch plan): confirmed on tapfiliate.com/pricing.

Add those up at the cheapest realistic tier for each and you land at roughly $259 a month, before counting the time cost of keeping five separate logins, five separate billing cycles, and no shared contact list across any of them — if someone buys your course, your email tool and your affiliate tracker don't automatically know that happened unless you build a connection between them yourself.

Want your own real number instead of this example stack? List out every tool you're actually paying for and see the real monthly and annual total — it's saved in your browser only, nothing is sent anywhere.

What Systeme.io bundles instead

Systeme.io is a single subscription that includes funnels/landing pages, email marketing, course and membership hosting, a blog, and affiliate program management — the same five categories above, natively connected since they're one product rather than five. Its current pricing (also confirmed live on systeme.io/pricing as of August 29, 2026):

Even the paid entry tier, Startup at $17/mo, covers the same five categories in the table above for a fraction of the combined $259/mo cost of running them separately — and the free plan covers a genuinely usable version of all of it (2,000 contacts, 3 funnels, 1 course) if you're still validating whether your offer sells at all.

Where this comparison doesn't tell the whole story

Bundled pricing isn't automatically the right call for everyone, and it's worth being honest about the trade-off. Each of the five standalone tools above is a deeper, more specialized product in its own category: Leadpages' conversion-optimization tools (A/B testing, Smart Traffic, heatmaps), Mailchimp's broader automation and integration ecosystem, Teachable's course-specific features, and Tapfiliate's dedicated affiliate-management tooling are each more built-out than the equivalent feature inside Systeme.io. If your business genuinely depends on best-in-class performance in one of those specific categories, paying separately for a specialist tool can be worth the extra cost. If you're a solo business owner trying to keep your monthly software bill low while you get a single offer off the ground, the combined cost of five separate subscriptions is the real number to weigh against a single bundled plan.

For pricing details, what's included at each tier, and where Systeme.io genuinely falls short (multi-client agency use and high-end funnel design are two areas it's not built for), see our full Systeme.io review.