We make Drry, a Thinkific competitor, so read this with that in mind. Thinkific costs $109, $219 or $499 a month, or about a quarter less on each tier if you pay annually ($82, $164, $374), with a custom-priced Plus tier above that. There is no free plan, only a 30-day trial. And Thinkific takes no cut of its own from your sales, as long as you use their payment processor rather than yours. Those are the four sentences most pages about Thinkific pricing stop at, and the two facts that actually decide it are further down.
Everything below is our honest read of their published page as it stands, and we will tell you plainly where our own product enters the picture (one section, clearly labeled, near the end).
What do Thinkific's four plans include?
Thinkific has four plans and the price roughly DOUBLES at each step, which is unusual in this category. The gap between tiers is worth reading carefully rather than assuming it is more of the same:
- Start, $109 a month ($82 annually): unlimited courses, one community, 10,000 current students, 200 GB a month of video bandwidth, quizzes, live cohorts and coaching sessions, completion certificates and assignments, memberships and subscriptions, a custom domain, and two administrators.
- Grow, $219 a month ($164 annually): everything in Start, plus removal of Thinkific's own branding, three communities, 400 GB a month of bandwidth, group and B2B orders, invoicing, API access and webhooks, phone support, and six administrators.
- Expand, $499 a month ($374 annually): everything in Grow, plus ten communities with 200 spaces, 1,000 GB a month of video bandwidth, unlimited group sizes, email white-labeling and custom SSL, revenue sharing with up to ten partners, dedicated launch support, and 15 administrators.
- Plus, custom: the enterprise tier, with no published price. Single sign-on, SCORM and learning paths, CRM integrations, custom roles, custom analytics, and seats past 10,000.
Which Thinkific plan do you need for memberships?
"Memberships and subscriptions" is a line item on Start, and Start is the cheapest plan on their page, so every Thinkific plan can charge monthly. Quizzes, assignments, completion certificates and live cohort sessions sit on the same tier, so a growing course business does not discover a feature it needs one rung up.
If your plan is a paid community, a cohort, or anything that charges monthly, your Thinkific quote is $109 a month from the first day, and the tier above it is about branding, communities and support rather than billing.
Does Thinkific charge transaction fees?
No, on the condition that you process through Thinkific Payments, which is the best fee story in this category and is genuinely to Thinkific's credit. We will not pretend otherwise. Their page says that customers processing on Thinkific Payments will not incur a third-party payment gateway fee, and that their own processing runs at 2.9%, in line with Stripe or PayPal. Card processing is a cost every platform's processor charges, so what that describes is a platform margin of zero. Against a 10% revenue share, or a tier that only drops its fee once you pay for the expensive plan, it is a better deal than most of the market offers.
The condition is what the fee section says next: using Stripe or PayPal instead means an additional third-party payment gateway fee applies, and it varies per plan type. Their pricing page states that the fee exists without naming the rates, which live in their help centre, and a third sentence adds that fees for the payment methods TCommerce enables by default vary too, offering Apple Pay and Google Pay as its examples without naming a rate for either. Three fee statements on that page, and exactly one number across all three. The help centre fills both gaps in: the gateway fee runs 2% on Start, 1% on Grow, 0.5% on Expand and nothing on Plus, for your first $1M of sales in a calendar year (the same table still lists 5% on Basic, a plan the pricing page no longer sells), and of the default methods the two wallets cost nothing extra while Cash App, Link and Amazon Pay are 3.9% + $0.30 and buy-now-pay-later is 6.5% + $0.30.
So the honest summary is not "Thinkific is 0%" and not "Thinkific charges a fee". It is that the zero is real and it is priced in ownership: the cheap path is the one where the payment relationship, the processor, and the payout schedule are theirs. If that is a trade you are happy with, it is a good trade. If you want your own merchant account and your own Stripe dashboard, you are on the path whose rate their pricing page does not name: 2% of sales on Start, falling to 1% on Grow and 0.5% on Expand. Read that as part of the plan price, because on Start it passes the $109 subscription for anybody selling more than about $5,500 a month.
Does Thinkific limit video bandwidth?
Yes, and almost nothing else in this category does: the plans carry 200, 400 and 1,000 GB of video bandwidth a month on Start, Grow and Expand, which ties your bill to how much of your video your students WATCH rather than to how much of it you store. A single popular course with long lessons consumes the allowance faster than a large library nobody has opened yet.
Their pricing page publishes the allowance and does not say what happens when you pass it, so treat this as a question to ask before you migrate a video-heavy library rather than as a number we can interpret for you. Estimate honestly: hours watched a month, times your bitrate, is the calculation, and it is the one most people discover after the fact.
Who is Thinkific right for?
- Large audiences on one course. 10,000 current students on the $109 entry tier is a lot of headroom, and if you are selling a single course to a big list, Start is a fair price with no cut on top.
- Anyone happy to use their processor. The 0% is not marketing, it is the arrangement, and it is worth real money against a percentage platform.
- Structured teaching. Quizzes, assignments, certificates, SCORM and learning paths are a real course-delivery product rather than a video list, and if you are teaching a curriculum that matters more than the community around it, that is what you are buying.
And where it is the wrong shape: you want to validate at $0, you want your own payment account without an unnamed fee, or what you are actually building is a community that happens to contain courses rather than a course catalogue that happens to have a forum.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Thinkific?
This is the section where we sell you something, so weigh it accordingly. Drry is built on the other side of the trade Thinkific makes on fees: 0% of member payments on every plan, through your own Stripe account, with no version of the arrangement where the zero depends on us holding the payment relationship. Only Stripe's standard processing applies, and the customer, the card, and the billing history are yours.
- A genuinely free plan: 100 members, unlimited courses, a landing page and member email, no card and no 30-day clock. The thing Thinkific does not offer at any price.
- Recurring membership starts at $0. Charging monthly works on every plan, including the free one. Every Thinkific plan can do it too, so the difference is the floor rather than the feature: their cheapest way to charge monthly is $109 a month.
- Then flat $29 or $99 a month. Custom domain, unlimited landing pages and analytics arrive at $29, which is less than half of Thinkific's membership-capable tier, and the bill never grows because your revenue did.
And the honest limit, because the rest is worth nothing without it: we cap storage, not people. Every paid plan here carries unlimited members, where Thinkific's cheapest tier stops at 10,000 current students, so the audience ceiling that used to be our concession on this page is now theirs. What we do meter is the video and files you upload, and our largest plan carries 1 TB. A library big enough to run past that is a real reason to price a platform that bills storage differently, and you should go and do the arithmetic rather than take our word for which way it lands.
If you want the feature-by-feature version, see Drry vs Thinkific, and if you are weighing the course platforms against each other rather than against us, Teachable vs Thinkific does that comparison directly. Our Teachable pricing guide reads the closest competitor's plans with the same disclosed honesty as this page.
Questions coaches ask
Does Thinkific have a free plan?
No. Thinkific's own pricing page answers this directly: there is no free plan, and what you get instead is a 30-day free trial of the paid product. The cheapest way to keep a Thinkific site running past that trial is Start at $109 a month, or $82 a month if you pay for the year up front. If a $0 way to test the idea matters to you, that is a reason to look elsewhere rather than a detail.
Does Thinkific take a cut of my sales?
Not of its own, if you use their processor. Thinkific Payments charges 2.9% to process a card, which is ordinary processing rather than a platform cut, and their page states that customers on Thinkific Payments will not incur a third-party payment gateway fee. The condition is the interesting part: bring your own Stripe or PayPal instead and their page says an additional gateway fee applies and varies per plan type, without naming the rates. Their help centre does name them: 2% on Start, 1% on Grow, 0.5% on Expand and nothing on Plus, for your first $1M of sales in a calendar year (the same table still lists 5% on Basic, a plan their pricing page no longer sells). So the 0% is real, and it is the price of letting Thinkific own the payment relationship.
Which Thinkific plan do I need to sell a membership?
Start, at $109 a month, which is also the cheapest plan on their pricing page, so every Thinkific plan can sell a membership. "Memberships and subscriptions" is a Start line item, alongside quizzes, assignments, completion certificates and live cohorts.
Is Thinkific worth $109 a month?
For a course business that will use it, it is a fair price: Start carries unlimited courses, 10,000 current students, memberships and a custom domain, which is more headroom than most new course businesses will use. It is poor value if you need what starts one tier up (branding removal, API access, phone support), because then you are really being quoted $219. And it is the wrong shape entirely if you want a free plan to validate with, or your own payment account at 0%.