Thinkific Pricing: Basic Wins on Fees, the Caps Decide the Rest

Thinkific costs $54 on Basic, $109 on Start, or $219 on Grow with monthly billing, dropping to $40, $82, and $164 when billed annually. Sales carry a 0% platform fee on Thinkific Payments, so on a $2,970 month you keep $2,820.87 on Basic. The free plan is gone, prices rose about 10% this year, and every self-serve plan now caps at 10,000 students. Run your course numbers below.

Thinkific pricing plans and the new caps

Thinkific sells three self-serve plans plus a custom Plus tier. Monthly prices are $54, $109, and $219; annual billing cuts them 25% to an effective $40, $82, and $164 per month. Every self-serve plan includes unlimited courses and caps at 10,000 students.

The branded mobile app is a separate $199 per month add-on, included only on select Plus contracts. Plans and limits come from Thinkific's pricing page.

The fee system: 0% on Thinkific Payments, a penalty on your own Stripe

Thinkific Payments charges standard card processing, about 2.9% plus $0.30, with no platform cut on any plan. Route sales through your own Stripe instead and Thinkific adds a gateway fee: 5% on Basic, 2% on Start, and 1% on Grow, waived only after $1 million in yearly sales.

That penalty is the fact worth planning around. On a $2,970 month on Basic, the 5% gateway fee adds $148.50 and nearly doubles your selling costs from $149.13 to $297.63. A legacy Expand tier pays 0.5%, and Plus pays none. The schedule is published in Thinkific's own cost breakdown.

One practical note: Thinkific localizes its price cards, so visitors in Europe see euro figures such as €39 for Basic. The dollar schedule above is what US accounts pay.

What you keep at three course sizes

These totals come from the calculator above: the Basic plan on monthly billing with Thinkific Payments processing. Because the card rate never changes by tier, Basic is the cost floor at every size.

Annual billing trims the middle example to $135.13 in monthly costs, keeping $2,834.87. Switch the calculator’s billing toggle to see your own annual number.

Basic always wins on fees. The caps decide upgrades.

Every Thinkific plan pays the same card rate on Thinkific Payments, so upgrading never lowers the cost of a sale. There is no revenue point where Start or Grow becomes cheaper. Upgrades buy capability: memberships and bundles arrive on Start, and branding removal, API access, and phone support on Grow.

The Basic ceilings are specific: no paid memberships or subscriptions, no product bundles, 5 digital downloads, 5 coaching or webinar sessions, and 100 GB of monthly video bandwidth. Recurring revenue is the usual forcing function, because subscriptions simply do not exist below Start.

What changed in Thinkific pricing this year

Three changes matter. The free plan is gone, replaced by a 30-day free trial. Sticker prices rose roughly 10%, from an annual-effective $36, $74, and $149 to $40, $82, and $164. And self-serve plans picked up hard ceilings: 10,000 students and metered video bandwidth per month.

Most third-party pricing pages still quote the old schedule, and some still describe the retired free plan. If a review references a $36 Basic plan or unlimited students, it predates the current structure. Thinkific Plus remains quote-only.

Is Thinkific worth it?

For selling courses without a marketing suite attached, Thinkific’s numbers are hard to argue with: $40 a month on annual Basic and total costs near 5% of revenue at $2,970 a month. The 10,000-student and bandwidth caps are the only structural reasons to look elsewhere at scale.

• Choose Basic if you sell one-off courses or downloads. No fee math ever forces you off it.
• Choose Start when you want memberships, subscriptions, bundles, or payment plans. That commerce layer is the real product.
• Choose Grow for white-label branding, API and webhooks, three communities, and phone support.
• Skip Thinkific if you need email marketing and funnels in the same bill. That is the job Kajabi prices at $179 a month, a different budget class.
• Skip it too if the community is the product rather than the course. Our hands-on Skool review covers the platform built around that shape.

To see where Thinkific lands against Kajabi, Teachable, Podia, and seven others on your exact volume, run the numbers through our fee comparison tool.