Drry vs Thinkific
A warmer home for your community, without the cut.
Thinkific is one of the strongest course platforms there is, and its 0% transaction fee is real rather than marketing: keep your billing on Thinkific Payments and they take none of your margin. Two things are worth knowing before you choose it. The 0% is conditional, because bringing your own Stripe or PayPal costs a per-plan fee instead. And there is no free plan, so the first bill arrives before your first sale. Drry starts free and is built around the room your members come back to, with the courses inside it.
Drry vs Thinkific, the full picture
| Drry | Thinkific | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | No free plan. A 30-day free trial, then the first bill arrives whether or not you have sold anything. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | 0% on their own payment processor, which is the real thing and the best fee story of any platform on this list. The condition is where to look: bring your own Stripe or PayPal and a per-plan gateway fee applies on top of that account's processing, so the 0% is tied to keeping your billing inside Thinkific. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Courses are the product here and they are genuinely good at them. Community exists beside the courses rather than as the thing the product is organised around, so if the room is the reason people pay you, check it carefully against what you want it to do. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Lessons can teach a process, and the course builder is strong. What there is no format for is a standalone step-by-step with its own supplies list, quantities and check-off, browsable in a guides tab and shareable as a public page. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Landing pages and sales pages are built in, which is more than most course tools offer. What is a different report is views, joins and revenue attributed to the page that produced them. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Yes, a custom domain, and white label on the higher plans. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Course and revenue reporting, solid on the selling. Who is drifting away, and who is quietly about to leave, is a different question from which course sold. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | No free plan, so pricing starts at the entry tier and the biggest capabilities sit on the plans above it. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Coaching sessions are sold as a product type, and a payment plan can split the price into monthly installments offered alongside the one-time price on the same product. What is not part of it is an agreement the client signs before they pay, which stays a separate contract tool. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email and marketing tools sit around the courses. Broadcasts and automated journeys to your members are worth checking per plan, because the email allowance is where a course platform usually meters. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, a digital download sells as a product type, and it works well. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Audio can be a lesson inside a course. A private podcast feed your members subscribe to in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, so your course plays on a commute, is a different product category. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Coaching can be sold, and arranging the actual call is usually handed to an outside scheduler rather than booked on the platform. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Community messaging exists inside their communities product. Direct messages between members, and a member messaging you privately, are worth confirming against what you need from a chat. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Order and revenue reporting per student, good on the selling side. A lifetime figure per member across memberships, courses and one-off purchases is a different report. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Drip scheduling, prerequisites and quizzes are all there, which makes this one of the closer rows on the page. Check which plan each one needs before you size the bill. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Tiered memberships are supported and documented: several membership packages at different prices, each scoped to particular courses and a community. The structural difference is that each tier is built as its own separate membership rather than rungs inside one community, so the admin work grows with every level you add. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Captions are available, and worth confirming what your plan includes rather than meters, because that is where this row usually differs. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Course comments are moderated by hand and the community has the usual admin tools. An AI screen that reads a post against a policy you wrote, before your members see it, is a different thing. |
Details reflect each platform's publicly stated model and can change. Check current terms before deciding.
Moving off Thinkific is easier than staying.
Keep your margin
On Drry, every member payment stays yours on every plan, including free. 0% platform cut; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.
One tool, not five
Courses, community, payments, and funnels in one place, your brand on all of it. No bolt-on page builders or separate apps.
You own the rails
Your own Stripe account and member list. Leaving never means starting over, because your customers were always yours.
Why creators pick Drry
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
- Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
- Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.
Drry vs Thinkific, questions
Is Thinkific's 0% transaction fee real?
Yes, on their own payment processor, and it is the strongest such claim of any platform here. Two honest caveats. It is 0% of Thinkific's margin rather than 0% of the payment, because their processor still charges to handle the card, as every processor does. And it is conditional: bring your own Stripe or PayPal and a per-plan gateway fee applies instead. Check the current rates on their pricing page before you plan around either.
Is Thinkific or Drry better for a course business?
If polished courses are the whole product and the community is incidental, Thinkific is a genuinely excellent choice and we will not pretend otherwise. Pick Drry when the room is the reason people stay and the courses are what they do while they are there, or when you want to start free and prove the idea before you pay.
Does Thinkific have a free plan?
No. There is a 30-day free trial on the paid plans, and after that the bill arrives whether or not you have made a sale. That is the practical difference for somebody validating an idea: Drry's free plan carries real members and real courses with no card, so the first bill waits until the thing is working.
Can I move from Thinkific to Drry?
Your contacts export and import as a CSV. Courses and videos are rebuilt rather than transferred, because there is no importer for course content between any two platforms in this category, ours included. Plan to run both for a few weeks and move your audience deliberately rather than overnight.
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