Even with multiple new online course platforms coming online every year, Thinkific is still one of the most popular options available. One reason it’s so sought-after is the flexible pricing model that it uses, which can make it a fantastic choice no matter where you are in your course creation career.
What are Thinkific’s pricing plans? Thinkific offers a free plan, as well as paid Basic, Pro, and Premier plans ranging from $39 to $399 per month. You gain access to additional features for each tier you move up. The Growth Package may be necessary on top of your base plan for some extra features.
One of the most common questions that I get about Thinkific is helping people decide which pricing plan is right for them.
So in this article, I’ll provide an outline of what benefits you get on each plan to help answer that question. Then you can select the best plan for your situation.
The free plan is a good way to test out Thinkific and get a feel for how the platform operates and what some of its core features are.
However, this plan is quite limited. You’re only allowed to have up to 3 courses. And you miss out on a lot of useful features like certificates, sales and marketing tools, content dripping, certificates, and more.
You also can’t make an affiliate program or even use an email service provider to send out information to your students.
But on the bright side, even Thinkific’s free plan has no transaction fees. So you can start selling online courses and it literally won’t cost you a penny.
So it could be an excellent way to test the water if you’re making your first online course and you’re worried that you may not sell enough to even cover the lowest fees.
But if you’re serious about using Thinkific to sell your online courses, you’ll want to upgrade to a paid plan before long. Especially if you want a more active way to market your products.
-> In this review I’ll take a look in-depth at Thinkific, one of the most popular online course platforms.
The Basic plan will cost you $39 per month. Like with most platforms, this price assumes that you’re paying annually instead of monthly, which will save you 20% on any of Thinkific’s plans.
This plan will provide you with everything that you need to launch your first course.
It’s got everything that the free plan does. Plus you can now have an unlimited number of courses, and you’re able to drip or schedule your course content.
Email integrations are available with Aweber, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp on this plan.
So you can start sending out emails to your students. You also get the ability to use Zapier, which can help you to integrate with other third-party tools.
Probably the most essential thing that the Basic plan gives you is extra marketing tools. You get the ability to use a custom domain, plus you can use coupons and start to do affiliate marketing to promote your courses.
This is quite necessary if you really want to start driving traffic to your courses.
However, even Thinkific’s Basic plan doesn’t give you access to a lot of the powerful tools that the platform has available. Which I guess is understandable at its low price point.
The Pro plan costs $79 per month and Thinkific states that it’s their most popular plan.
I can understand why, because it really gives you access to a full suite of tools that you’ll need to build and maintain a successful online course business.
There is quite a jump up in the features that you get with the Pro plan compared to the Basic plan.
The first is that you can offer memberships and bundles. This is pretty critical as memberships give you a way to earn recurring revenue, and bundles can let you combine products together to upsell customers.
You’re also able to use a bunch of advanced pricing options. Free, one-time payments, payment plans, subscriptions, and other choices are available.
You unlock advanced quiz features and assignments on this plan, as well as being able to offer certificates of completion to students who successfully make it through your course.
The Pro plan also gives you the ability to create 1 community, which can help boost engagement and interaction with your students.
If you’re looking for advanced customization to your course, you’ll need at least the Pro plan to do it.
This plan lets you edit HTML/CSS, use custom themes, create custom members-only pages, and many other ways of customizing the experience of your students.
You get 2 site admin accounts, and 5 course author/admin accounts. So the Pro plan is also a good choice if you’re working with other people to help deliver your content, instead of just doing it on your own.
If you thought the jump up between the Basic and Pro plan was significant, then Thinkific’s Premier plan is probably out of your reach.
This plan will cost you a staggering $399 per month. So it’s really only an option that you should consider if you’re a very advanced course creator that is looking to deliver a wide range of courses to a large number of students.
But if you’re looking to deliver online education at scale without any limitations, it’s a choice worth considering.
Besides all of the features of the Pro plan like unlimited courses and students, most of the features that the Premier plan adds are to help with the admin side of your business.
You’ll get 5 site admin accounts, 15 group analysts, and 50 course admin/author accounts. So you can practically create your own catalog of different instructors and courses similar to Udemy at this stage.
When you sign up for the Premier plan, you’ll get a full onboarding package that includes an onboarding call, training, and a launch preparedness review.
You also get unlimited access to all of the Growth package features, which I’ll be discussing next.
Thinkific’s pricing plan is made a bit more difficult to navigate than other platforms because of its Growth package. You’ll need this add-on in addition to their Pro plan to get many additional features.
If you want the Growth package, it will cost you $0.10 per active student. Your first 100 students are free, and you’ll be charged a maximum of $499 per month for the package.
You will need the Growth package if you want to remove Thinkific branding and white label your website.
You also need it if you want to send emails to multiple students at once directly through your Thinkific dashboard.
While you can email students with the Pro plan, you can only send individual emails without the extra package.
It’s necessary for many advanced integrations that use webhooks or API, or to integrate with Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign.
If you need to create more than one community for all of your courses, you’ll also need this package to create additional ones.
You get access to Brillium exams through the Growth package, which lets you create much more customized exams that include attempt caps and time limits.
The package is necessary to do a bunch of other things as well. Including easily importing students from CSV or XLSX files, bulk enrolling students, and many other actions.
You could potentially get by without the Growth package at all. But if you need many of the features that the package offers, it’s worth considering before you sign up for Thinkific.
Especially since if you have thousands of active students, it may end up costing you hundreds of additional dollars per month on top of your base plan.
Inspire from real-life Thinkific Course Examples created by people who have taken a passion and turned it into an online course that now earns them money each month.
There is a reason why Thinkific is such a popular online course platform.
Their free plan is one of the most generous around, and gives you access to many of the platform’s basic features for free.
Their Basic, Pro, and Premier plans give you flexible options no matter what stage your online course business is at.
One downside is that many of the platform’s best features are locked behind the Growth package, which can significantly increase the amount that you’re paying to use the platform each month if you decide to opt in.
But if you’re still unsure if Thinkific is the right online course platform for you then read these 7 Best Thinkific Alternatives.
You can also compare Thinkific with these online course platfroms:
Jacob has a background in finance and engineering. Outside of his day job, he is a lifelong learner, who enjoys reading, taking online courses, and writing about what he's learned.
Session expired
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.