Migrating to systeme.io (2026): The Free Move's Fine Print

systeme.io will move your pages, courses, emails, automations and contacts from another platform for nothing. Its help article on the service puts the condition in one line: "Systeme.io offers free business migration with either Unlimited or Annual subscription plans." Its terms add the line that turns that into a purchase decision: "Please note that our subscription plans are not refundable."

So the migration costs nothing, and the plan that buys it costs whatever you picked, for as long as you picked it. The same help article adds a second condition most people skim past: "Depending on your plan's limits, the migration includes" the contacts, pages, blogs, courses, emails and automations. The team fills the plan you bought. If the business you're moving is bigger than that plan, the migration itself pushes you over.

That makes this a sizing question. Count the business, buy the smallest annual plan that holds it, and for most small course and coaching businesses that's Startup at $170 a year.

What qualifies

Two kinds of subscription qualify, and they're worded the same way across systeme.io's pages:

• The Unlimited plan on monthly billing, $97 a month.
• Any plan on annual billing: Startup at $170 a year, Webinar at $470, Unlimited at $970.

Startup and Webinar on monthly billing don't qualify, and neither does Free. The platform guides for ClickFunnels and Podia promise a "complete migration of your business free of charge" on "an Unlimited monthly plan or one of our annual plans," and add that the work is "manually performed by our team." Nothing on any of the pages I read gives annual Startup a different scope from the other qualifying plans. What changes between them is the plan's limits, and the help article ties the migration to those.

The pricing page's FAQ ties migration to Unlimited: it describes Unlimited as including "sub-accounts, and free migration service" and says nothing about migration for the other plans. Click the annual billing toggle on the same page, though, and two labels appear beside it: "2 months free" and "Free migration." The help article and the dedicated migration page agree with the toggle. So did a commenter in r/elearning who said clients of theirs were moving to systeme.io and offered help in the same comment: "They have free migration services if you sign up on any of the annual plans or take the highest monthly plan."

Seven ways to pay for a free move

Every route that qualifies, priced for the first year at October 9 prices:

Annual Startup is the cheapest route by $114, and the gap grows the longer Unlimited stays on. The month-of-Unlimited routes also depend on two things you don't control. The first is timing: the move has to finish inside the months you paid for. The second is the step down. systeme.io's article on how plans are managed says a downgrade goes through support, who send a custom order form, and it warns that an account over the smaller plan's limits "may result in your account being automatically upgraded or restricted."

So the month of Unlimited buys flexibility you only use if you leave within the year. If you expect to stay, it's the more expensive path to the same Startup account. Annual billing itself is ten months' price for twelve, which I covered with the rest of systeme.io's plan list and billing rules.

The plan's limits are the migration's limits

The size of the ticket matters more than its price, and the terms show why. systeme.io's terms, in the article on usage limits, say that when an account goes over its paid plan's limits "we will notify you via email," give "a 3-day period to reduce your usage," and then "your subscription will be automatically upgraded to the appropriate plan to ensure service continuity."

A migration is the fastest way to go over a limit. The team imports your contacts at the end, after a check by the deliverability team, and recreates your funnels, courses, campaigns and automation rules one by one. If the old account had 7,000 contacts and you bought annual Startup, the import lands 2,000 over the line on the day it finishes. The three days and the upgrade play out step by step in my systeme.io-and-GetResponse page, where one tag too many moved a Startup account up.

Too small a ticket gets upgraded for you. Too big a ticket is paid for and stays paid for. The cheap way through is to count first.

Count what you're moving

These are the rows on systeme.io's comparison table that a migration fills, with the two plan columns that matter for most small businesses:

Before opening a migration request, put the old account next to this table and write a number in each row. The plan is the first column where every row fits. If one row breaks Startup (a list of 6,000, or 12 tags), that row decides, and it's either cut before the move or it means Webinar.

Three counts need more care than the rest:

• Contacts, after cleaning. systeme.io's own migration guidance asks you to sort contacts by engagement first, defining an active contact as one who has "opened or clicked on your emails recently (e.g., within the last 30-90 days)," and recommends "deleting contacts who have not interacted in a long time (6 to 12 months, depending on your sending frequency)." Count the list you'll actually import, not the list you have.
• Students and customers. The migration page's table says customer and student records are "Imported as contacts in the CRM." So they go in the contact count, not beside it. How that count grows after the move, as buyers enrol, is the subject of the course creators' plan guide.
• Unsubscribed contacts. You can bring them. The help on migrating without hurting your sending says they're "automatically… assigned an 'unsubscribed' status and will not receive any communication through the platform." Decide whether you need their history before you count them in.

If every row fits Startup with room to spare, annual Startup is the ticket. If the contacts row alone is between 5,000 and 10,000, it's annual Webinar at $470, still $144 less than a month of Unlimited followed by Webinar monthly.

What the team asks of you

The help article on the service sets out how it runs. The team works "on a first-come, first-served basis": "First, we will ask for your old account credentials to add you to the queue. When it's your turn, we use those credentials to access and replicate your content on systeme.io." Your old platform is left as it is, "Your old account will not be modified," and you're asked not to edit content while it's being copied.

Done well, that's close to a project plan. A Trustpilot reviewer who gave five stars in September, and who had chosen the annual subscription over monthly and got the migration with it, moved a website, funnels, landing pages and automations. The specialist assigned to them "created a spreadsheet-based project plan detailing each element that needed to be recreated and provided an estimated timeline," and ticked items off as they went. Their summary: "What would have taken me a month or two to do, he did in 2-3 weeks." If your migration agent doesn't offer a list like that, ask for one: it doubles as the checklist for the page-by-page check at the end of the buying order below.

Two parts of the move need you directly:

1. A consent check before any sending. "A simple form with a few questions will be sent to you to confirm the compliance and consent of the contacts." The Kajabi guide describes the same step: the contact list goes to the deliverability team, and "Once approved, the contacts and their tags will be imported."
2. Student imports in stages. Adding a contact to a course on systeme.io sends them a login email automatically, so for past students who haven't heard from you in a while, the help says "we strongly recommend staggered imports."

What the pages list as moved is long: the Kajabi guide goes through sales funnel pages, blog pages and posts, courses with their modules, lectures and quizzes, physical products, newsletters and campaigns, contacts and tags, automations rebuilt as rules and workflows, and the domain. The migration page adds that payment and transaction history "Stays with your original payment processor." Neither list mentions customers who pay you every month through the old platform's checkout. If you have them, put that question to support before you buy the plan, not after. If the old site is a WordPress blog with search traffic, the addresses matter more than the copying, and my guide to moving a WordPress blog starts there.

Sending from systeme.io after the import has its own rules, which I went through in the review of systeme.io's email side.

How long the queue runs

systeme.io gives three different answers, depending on the page:

• The help article: "On average, a migration takes 17 days," with an estimate from "the agent in charge of your ticket" once work starts, and a wait that "depends on the volume of requests we receive."
• The migration page's FAQ: a simple move "typically takes 2 to 5 business days," and larger ones "can take 1 to 2 weeks."
• A customer: the reviewer whose move into systeme.io was quoted at four weeks and ran past eight, whose review I paraphrased on the page setting systeme.io against GetResponse.

Customers' own figures sit across that range. A five-star reviewer in September, moving a website, an email service and a meeting scheduler, wrote that "it took the migration folks 6 weeks to transfer everything for me from so many different services," and called it a fantastic job. A two-star reviewer in May, moving from Kartra, had planned for about 25 days before the old platform rebilled: "They gave me an estimate of 5-6 weeks, yet it’s taken more than 9 weeks and they still aren’t complete, thus costing me 2 extra months already." systeme.io's reply pointed to the size of the job, "a significant volume of content across websites, blogs, funnels, courses, and videos," and to "access challenges related to two-factor authentication," and said the team was still working through the remaining items with the customer.

Two things I take from that pair. Sort out how the team will get past two-factor sign-in on the old account before your turn in the queue comes. And I'd plan around the help article's average and the queue, and keep the old platform paid until the systeme.io version is checked. For the month-of-Unlimited routes, that's the risk: the move only has to run a few days past the month for a second $97 to come due, and three months of Unlimited come to $291 before Startup starts.

People do book these. On X in September, @WritesCole posted a to-do: "schedule onboarding call with @systeme_io to discuss the migration." systeme.io's own account has posted migration stories, such as a Kajabi customer who "moved everything over": website, email marketing, sales funnels and coaching programs. Those posts are the company's marketing, and I read them as that.

Where systeme.io's pages disagree

• Who gets migration. The pricing FAQ ties it to Unlimited; the toggle, the help article and the migration page say any annual plan as well. The help article is the more specific of the three, so I'd go by it.
• How many funnels Startup has. The same FAQ gives Startup no funnel cap, a mismatch I flagged in the pricing guide too. The plan card says "up to 10 funnels" and the comparison table says 10. A migration fills what the table allows, so count against 10.
• How long it takes. The 17-day average and the two-to-five-day estimate can't both describe the typical move. Plan on the longer one.

When annual Startup is the wrong ticket

• You're not sure you'll stay a year. A year of Startup paid upfront doesn't come back. A month of Unlimited at $97 qualifies, and moving yourself on Free or Startup monthly costs nothing but the hours. If the old account is small, rebuilding one funnel yourself on the Free plan answers the stay-or-go question before any money is spent.
• The business is bigger than Webinar. Over 10,000 contacts after cleaning, or over 20 courses, and annual Unlimited at $970 is the plan the migration will end on anyway. Buying it first is cheaper than being upgraded into it.
• Customers pay you monthly through the old checkout, until support has told you in writing how they move.
• You're moving for a feature systeme.io doesn't have. Check that first. If it's course tools, the comparisons with Kajabi and Teachable go through what each one meters; the vendors' own pages are at kajabi.com and teachable.com.

The first case is the one the reviews bear out. A two-star reviewer bought annual for the move alone: "It's the only reason I opted for an annual plan instead of trialing it for a few months on a monthly plan." By their account, the request went unanswered for the year. After the review, systeme.io got in touch and, in the reviewer's update, offered the migration along with a year's free subscription; they declined and asked for a refund, which was declined. In another case, systeme.io's public reply spelled out how it sees the purchase: "the payment you made was for your annual Systeme.io subscription," and "The migration service is an additional free option we provide to help our customers transition their content more easily." It declined a refund there, saying the work had paused for more than two months waiting on replies and then been completed; the customer disputes that account in an update. Either way, that's the point of this page in the company's own words. You're buying the plan, and the move comes with it, so buy the plan you'd keep if the move took longer than you hoped.

What I couldn't check

• I haven't had a migration done by systeme.io's team, so I haven't seen one of its estimates; the customer accounts above are theirs, not mine. Everything here is from its help center, terms and pricing page as published on October 9, 2026.
• The migration page's table is a summary. For anything specific to your old platform, the help center has guides for ClickFunnels, GoHighLevel, Kajabi, Kartra and Podia; for any other platform, ask support before you buy.

Buy the ticket in this order

Clean the list on the old platform first, using systeme.io's own definition of an active contact, and keep a copy of the original. A commenter in r/kajabi, writing about leaving that platform, put the copy first: "Export everything NOW regardless of what you decide — emails, progress, purchase history." In a thread on r/elearning about moving between course platforms, another commenter added the piece that's easy to forget: "make sure you remember to download any reports or metrics before migrating. They probably won't be available afterwards."

Then count every row in the table above, students and customers inside the contact count, and pick the first column where every row fits, with room for what you'll add in the next twelve months. If that's Startup, buy annual Startup at $170 and contact support with the details of the old setup, asking about any subscribers on the old checkout in the same message. Keep the old platform running until the systeme.io version is checked page by page and course by course. The Kartra reviewer above found that "Modules for one course were swapped with another one."

If the count lands on Startup, start with systeme.io and switch the billing toggle to annual before you choose the plan.

FAQ

Is systeme.io's migration really free? There's no fee for the work. It requires the Unlimited plan on monthly billing or any plan on annual billing, and those plans aren't refundable.

Does annual Startup qualify for free migration? Yes. The help article says "any annual plan," and the pricing page shows "Free migration" beside the annual toggle. The work is limited by the plan's limits.

How long does a systeme.io migration take? The help article gives a 17-day average; the migration page says 2 to 5 business days for a simple move and 1 to 2 weeks for larger ones. It's a queue, first come, first served.

What happens to my old account? systeme.io says it won't be modified. The team copies content across using your old account's login.

Do students count as contacts after the move? The migration page says customer and student records are imported as contacts in the CRM, so count them toward the plan's contact limit.

Can I downgrade after a month of Unlimited? Through support, with a custom order form, and only if the account fits the smaller plan's limits.