Pricing and fees

Thinkific plan comparison: Basic vs Start vs Grow vs Plus

In this guideThinkificPricing →LearnWorldsPricing →

The four plans at a glance

Thinkific keeps unlimited courses on every tier and caps current students at 10,000 below Plus. What changes as you climb is admin seats, communities, selling model and a shrinking surcharge if you bring your own payment gateway.

Read the grid by your constraint, not by the feature count. Most buyers land on a plan because of one hard blocker, usually a second admin seat or the ability to sell seats to companies.

What forces each upgrade

Move up only when a specific need crosses a line. Here is what pushes you off each plan.

• Basic to Start: you need a second person in the admin. Basic includes 1 admin seat, Start includes 2. Start also adds completion certificates, live sessions via Zoom, assignments and grading, which matter for structured cohorts.
• Start to Grow: anything B2B. Group and B2B selling, invoicing, branding removal and API access all begin on Grow. Grow also lifts admin seats to 6 and communities to 3. If you sell to companies or bill on invoice, Grow is the floor.
• Grow to Plus: SCORM, single sign-on and CRM integrations such as HubSpot and Salesforce. These three are listed on Plus only. Communities become unlimited and student counts go custom above 10,000.

Communities scale 1, 1, 3, unlimited across Basic, Start, Grow and Plus. If a discussion space per program matters, that ladder can also decide the tier.

Fees: the surcharge you can avoid

Thinkific charges no platform transaction fee when you use Thinkific Payments, which processes cards at standard processor rates of about 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. If you insist on your own Stripe or PayPal, Thinkific adds a surcharge on top: 5% on Basic, 2% on Start, 1% on Grow, and none on Plus.

The lesson is simple. On lower plans, using your own gateway is expensive. At $10,000 in monthly sales, the 5% Basic surcharge is $500 per month, far more than the plan itself. Either use Thinkific Payments, or budget the surcharge into your plan choice. The fee guide works the break-even math.

Where the Plus wall sits

Plus is custom pricing, so we never quote a number for it. That matters because three common training requirements sit behind that wall: SCORM course delivery, SSO for corporate learners, and CRM sync. If your buyer list includes any of those, plan for a sales call and a quote, not a self-serve checkout.

For SCORM specifically, LearnWorlds publishes it far earlier and cheaper: 20 packages on Pro Trainer and unlimited on Learning Center. If SCORM is your reason for looking at Plus, compare the two on the SCORM capability page before you request that quote. For the head to head on selling and portals, see Thinkific vs LearnWorlds.

Frequently asked questions

Keep deciding