Key Takeaways
- Thinkific has three self-serve paid plans in 2026: Basic ($40/mo), Start ($82/mo), and Grow ($164/mo), billed annually, plus a custom-quote Plus tier. It also has a plan called Expand ($499/mo) which is not marketed on its pricing page.
- "0% transaction fees" is only true if you use Thinkific's own payment processor, which is available in 35 countries. Route sales through a third-party gateway, and Thinkific adds its own cut on top of the processor's fee.
- Branding removal and standard API access start at Grow, not Plus, which most comparison content still gets wrong.
- Thinkific's Groups feature supports cohort-style organizing and reporting from the Start plan up. SSO, SCORM, full API access, and dedicated support are Plus-only, which has no published price anywhere.
- Thinkific is a strong, honest choice for a solo creator or a small team running limited cohorts, selling courses directly to a consumer audience.
- It runs into a real ceiling for a training business running multiple batches concurrently, corporate SCORM delivery, or B2B programs. Edmingle (from $89/month) is built for that use case specifically and delivers these on plans with published pricing.
Thinkific advertises 0% transaction but that is not always true in final calculations. On its Basic plan, a seller routing payments through Stripe rather than Thinkific’s own processor pays close to 8% in combined fees. That gap between the marketing line and the actual payout is where this piece starts: what Thinkific really costs in 2026, plan by plan, checked against its own live pricing page and support documentation rather than carried over from an older draft that still shows a free plan that Thinkific retired.
This helps us build a clearer use case for the platform. For a solo creator building a first course or a small team running a handful of cohorts, it remains a capable, well-reviewed platform. What changes the calculation for a training business is everything past the subscription price: how the transaction-fee math actually plays out, which features are gated at which tier, and the specific point where the platform’s architecture stops covering the job, once an operation is running concurrent cohorts with multiple instructors, formal reporting, or enterprise procurement requirements.
How Much Does Thinkific Plans Cost in 2026
Thinkific has three marketed self-serve plans called Basic ($40/month), Start ($82/month), and Grow ($164/month), all billed annually. The monthly subscription of each plan ends up being $54, $109, and $219, respectively. Above these sits its custom plan called Thinkific Plus, an enterprise tier with no published price, and available only after a sales conversation.
The platform’s pricing was last updated on August 13, 2026, with a mention of a fourth plan called Expand ($499/mo) that does not normally appear in much of its documentation online. A sales call is also required to confirm the availability of this plan for each business.
The pricing change that stumps many people is that there is no free plan. Thinkific used to offer one; it doesn’t anymore. What it offers instead is a 30-day free trial on the paid plan, a different commitment option that removes the usage limits.
| Plan | Price (billed annually) | What it actually adds |
| Basic | $40/mo | Unlimited courses, video lessons, quizzes, student discussions, 1 community |
| Start | $82/mo | Live cohorts and coaching, unlimited Zoom sessions, bookable calendars, attendance tracking, completion certificates |
| Grow | $164/mo | Standard API and webhook access, bulk CSV enrollment, Thinkific’s own branding removal, 3 communities |
| Expand | $499/mo | Jumo in monthly video bandwidth to 1,000 GB and a lower transaction fee (0.5%) on third-party payment processors (Needs verification with sales team for feature inclusion, current pricing and availability) |
| Plus | Custom, contact sales | SSO, SCORM, AI teaching assistant, Custom roles and dashboards, dedicated support |
USD pricing confirmed in August 2026
Here’s how the tiers actually build on each other:
- Basic comes without any live-delivery or platform-control tools. No live cohorts, learner assessment like quizzes and assignments, and membership monetization. It’s an entry tier into the platform and is built for one job: publishing and selling a self-paced course catalogue.
- The jump from Basic to Start isn’t about capacity; it’s about format. Start is where Thinkific stops being a static-course tool and comes closer to supporting a live, scheduled program, with attendance tracking and completion certificates to match.
- Grow is where the real capability appears. It’s the first tier with any API access, and where you can stop showing Thinkific’s name to your own learners. Options like priority support, multiple communities, and engagement reporting become available here. If your business needs these, Grow will be your starting point.
- Each tier roughly doubles the price of the one before it. Basic to Start to Grow runs $40, $82, $164, a consistent enough curve that Grow’s jump doesn’t read as an outlier. Even Expand comes close with its $399 marker. Plus breaks this pattern: there’s no number to double to, a different kind of gap than the rest of the ladder.
- The real decision is to find and stay on the most cost-effective tier. A solo creator staying single-course and self-paced can start on Basic and treat upgrading to Start as a later problem. A training business that already wants live cohorts or API access should budget for Start or Grow from the outset.
Which Thinkific Plan Is Best for You?
Four profiles cover most of the people evaluating Thinkific out right now, matched below to the tier that can fit them.
| Buyer profile | Best fit |
| Basic | Solo creator selling a self-paced course catalog |
| Start | Course business adding live delivery with commerce requirements |
| Grow | Training business running several cohorts |
| Plus | Enterprise buyer needing SSO, SCORM, full API access, or dedicated support |
The first three profiles all land on a tier with a real, checkable price; the fourth doesn’t. While we will circle back to this again, we will first look at the elements that impact the final costs of Thinkific pricing that you pay: transaction fees and feature gates like the mobile app add-on.
Thinkific Transaction Fees You Actually Pay
The “0% transaction fees” claim is a repeated line in Thinkific’s pricing discussions, and it’s also the part most businesses get half right. It’s accurate, but only under a specific condition that rarely comes to the forefront when evaluating platforms or choosing Thinkific plans.
Using Thinkific’s own processor, Thinkific Payments, the fee is 0% on top of standard processing. You pay a per-transaction fee, one you’d pay a processor like Stripe directly, and Thinkific doesn’t add anything on top of that, regardless of which plan you’re on. This also relies on the availability of Thinkific Payments in your region. According to Thinkific documentation, it currently works in 35 countries, including the US, Canada, Singapore, and Australia.
Using a third-party processor instead, Stripe or PayPal, changes the math entirely. Thinkific adds its own fee on top of whatever that processor charges, and that fee is tiered by plan:
| Plan | Thinkific’s fee on top of Stripe/PayPal |
| Basic | 5.0% |
| Start | 2.0% |
| Grow | 1.0% |
| Expand | 0.5% |
| Plus | 0% |
This fee applies to a seller’s first $1 million in sales through Thinkific in a calendar year, after which Thinkific waives it. But under that threshold, the number on a seller’s payout looks nothing like “0%.” If you are in a country outside Thinkific Payments support, you will need to pay this tiered rate regardless of plan or preference.
Here’s what that means in real dollars. A training business on Basic doing $10,000 a month in course revenue pays Stripe its processing fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (roughly $290 to $320 a month, depending on transaction count), and then hands Thinkific an additional 5% on top of that, another $500. That’s around $800 a month leaving the business before it ever reaches a bank account, on a plan where the transaction fee is technically 0%. The same $10,000/month seller will pay less here if it tiers up, but the final platform cost becomes double without the need for more features or usage limits.
The honest version is this: If your business runs its payments through Stripe, PayPal, or a processor tied to accounting or tax infrastructure you don’t want to rebuild, the real number of the transaction fee is up to 8% of revenue rather than 0%.
Feature Gates in Thinkific Pricing Change the Math
Several features that training businesses treat as standard requirements sit behind specific tiers in Thinkific, and a couple of them aren’t where most comparison places them. These are beyond the subscription price and fee structure.
The branded mobile app is a $199/month add-on, not a plan feature. This is the most common sticker-shock moment for buyers who assume a mobile app comes bundled with a paid subscription. It’s available as an add-on across paid plans, priced separately from whichever tier you’re on.
Branding removal and standard API access both start at Grow, not Plus. Grow, the top self-serve plan at $164/month, removes Thinkific’s branding from your website and products, and includes standard API and webhook access for connecting to a CRM or automating enrollment. What’s still Plus-exclusive is the deeper version of each: full enterprise white-labeling and full, custom API access with dedicated integration support.
SCORM is Plus-only, and it’s worth knowing exactly what that covers. Thinkific supports SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 4th Edition specifically. It does not support xAPI or cmi5. For a training business delivering compliance content to a corporate client, that distinction matters: if that client’s own LMS or reporting requirement specifies xAPI, Thinkific’s SCORM support doesn’t cover it, regardless of plan.
SSO is Plus-only, with one notable gap even there. Thinkific supports single sign-on through OpenID Connect, covering identity providers like Okta, Auth0, JumpCloud, AWS Cognito, and ActiveDirectory. What it doesn’t support at all is the SAML standard, a common default enterprise SSO protocol at many large organizations. An IT team standardized on SAML rather than OIDC needs to confirm compatibility before assuming Plus’s SSO solves the problem outright.
Cohort tools exist, but stop short of per-batch administration. Thinkific’s Groups feature, available from Start, lets you assign students to named cohorts for filtering and reporting, bulk-enroll by group reference, and pull reports showing average completion and a timeline for each cohort. What’s missing is a dedicated instructor assigned to a single cohort or an admin view scoped to just one batch, so running several cohorts side by side still means working across the whole account rather than one at a time.
A pattern shows up here that matters more than any single feature: neither Grow nor the lesser-known Expand plan includes SSO, SCORM, or full custom API access. Those sit specifically behind Thinkific Plus, its custom-quote plan, and something a training business will have to evaluate if it needs any of the three.
Thinkific Plus: Unpredictable Pricing to Budget For
Thinkific Plus is where the hard-cliff features actually live: SSO, SCORM, full API access with integration support, AI teaching assistant, and dedicated customer support. These sit behind the same wall: a sales conversation with no public number attached anywhere.
A training business shopping for SSO or SCORM usually means an L&D manager or procurement lead working through a formal budget-approval process that needs a number before it can even start, and “contact sales” doesn’t provide one. The gap isn’t the jump; it’s the move from Grow to Plus with ambiguity of Expand between them, while you still have to pay for branded apps separately in most cases.
The mismatch is specific, not general. You can test-drive Basic, Start, or Grow with a credit card and know exactly what it costs before committing to anything. The moment its business actually needs the two features Plus exists for, that ability disappears entirely, and the only way to find out if the platform still fits is to trade a published price for an unknown one.
Where Thinkific Works Well, and Where It Doesn’t
The gaps above reinforce that the platform’s architecture works well for its primary purpose. The pricing structure is also precisely designed for particular types of businesses, and favors their needs.
Where Thinkific earns its price:
- Speed from a blank page to a live, sellable course. The drag-and-drop builder needs no developer help, and there’s no infrastructure to stand up before a first course can go live.
- A well-bundled toolkit for a first-time solo seller. Checkout, landing pages, and community all live in one subscription, so a creator starting from zero isn’t stitching together three or four separate tools just to take a payment and deliver a course.
Where a training business hits Thinkific’s ceiling:
- Cohort reporting exists, but not per-instructor structure. Groups covers that from Start; a dedicated instructor or admin view for a single cohort still doesn’t.
- SCORM, SSO, and full white-labeling stay Plus-gated, not B2B as a whole. It handles basic company and team structuring below Plus; the compliance and identity requirements a corporate client actually asks for don’t clear that bar.
- Analytics stop at group-level completion. No dropout-risk signals or instructor comparisons on self-serve plans, the kind of detail a formal board or client update usually wants.
If it’s Thinkific specifically that you’re likely pricing out right now, the next comparison makes things concrete instead of abstract: what does a platform built around the training business operating model from the start actually look like next to Thinkific, tier for tier?
| Read our guide on the 7 best Thinkific alternatives for training businesses to compare as well as find suitable platforms. |
Thinkific vs. Edmingle Pricing Comparison
Thinkific and Edmingle are not substitutes. The former is built for an individual creator monetizing a personal brand or a straightforward course catalog. Edmingle, on the other hand, is a training operations platform built for a training business running structured programs: multiple instructors, multiple concurrent cohorts, and often both B2C and B2B delivery at once. This table will make the difference clearer.
| Factor | Thinkific | Edmingle |
| Entry-tier | Basic ($40/mo) | Core ($89/mo) |
| Mid-tier | Start ($82/mo) | Prime ($179/mo) |
| Highest-tier | Grow ($164/mo) | Power ($349/mo) |
| Custom plan | Thinkific Plus | Edmingle Maxx |
| Multi-batch / cohort management | Cohort reporting from Start; no per-cohort instructor or admin view | Included in all tiers |
| SCORM | Plus only | From Prime; SCORM Reporting from Power |
| SSO | Plus only | From Power |
| B2B sub-organizations | No dedicated sub-organization portals confirmed | Yes, from Power |
| Branded mobile app | $199/mo add-on, any plan | Available and included from Prime |
The comparison reveals these insights:
- The $40 vs. $89 entry-price gap looks bigger than it is. Thinkific Basic covers unlimited self-paced courses but none of the live-cohort or platform-control tools that show up starting at Start. Edmingle Core already includes multi-batch management, a main training business requirement. Comparing the two on price alone compares different products.
- Multi-batch management isn’t an upgrade on Edmingle; it’s the starting point. It’s included from entry-tier because the platform was built around cohort delivery from day one, not layered on as you tier up.
- Edmingle doesn’t charge extra for the branded app. There’s no $199/month line item on Edmingle’s side. Which parts of the branded experience you get still depend on your plan; you just aren’t paying a separate fee to get any of it.
- SCORM and SSO are the two rows a procurement team actually cares about, and the two with the starkest price gap. Edmingle publishes a number for both. Thinkific requires a sales call for either, at any budget level.
- Both publish tiers before a custom quote, but they cover different ground. Edmingle’s published tiers reach all the way to SSO, SCORM, B2B delivery, and priority resolution support. Thinkific stops at branding removal and basic API access, which stay behind the undisclosed Plus quote.
Browse the Edmingle pricing page to see a full feature breakdown of each plan.
Is Thinkific’s Pricing Right for Your Training Business?
The sticker price was never the real question here. What matters is the delivery model and the enterprise requirements your training business actually has and then which is the lowest Thinkific tier that actually covers them.
A solo creator or a small team running a handful of cohorts usually finds that answer somewhere between Basic and Grow. Anything that needs SSO, SCORM, full API access, or a number instead of a sales call runs into the same ceiling we keep circling back to: no self-serve tier gets you past it, Expand included.
If your operation runs on recurring batches, multiple instructors, and B2B delivery, put that workflow up against a platform built for training operations from the start before deciding on subscription cost alone. Edmingle publishes a price at every tier up to Power for exactly that model: SCORM, SSO, and B2B delivery, so your team has a real number instead of a sales call.
Book a demo or start your 7-day free trial to see firsthand how Edmingle supports your training operations.
