Nearpod Pricing and Nearpod Cost From $159 a Year

Nearpod costs $0 on Silver, $159 a year on Gold and $397 a year on Platinum. Schools and districts get a quote. All three individual plans are billed once a year, Nearpod publishes no monthly price, and an individual license is paid by card because Nearpod does not take purchase orders for it. The tiers differ mostly in scale: 40, 75 or 90 students in one lesson and 300 MB, 1 GB or 5 GB of storage.

Those figures come from the live Nearpod pricing page and the Nearpod FAQ, read in October 2026. Several review sites still list 100 MB of storage for Silver. The vendor page now says 300 MB.

Nearpod pricing at a glance

Plan	Price	Students in one lesson	Storage	Largest lesson	How you pay
Silver	$0	40	300 MB	40 MB	Nothing to pay
Gold	$159 a year	75	1 GB	40 MB	Card, from a signed-in teacher account
Platinum	$397 a year	90	5 GB	40 MB	Card, from a signed-in teacher account
Schools and districts	Quote	250	Unlimited	250 MB	ACH, wire, check or card

Spread over twelve months, Gold works out to about $13.25 a month and Platinum to about $33.08. That is our arithmetic, not a plan Nearpod sells: there is no way to pay Nearpod month by month. Per student seat in a single lesson, Gold costs about $2.12 a year and Platinum about $4.41, so Platinum is the more expensive way to buy capacity.

Is Nearpod free for teachers?

Yes. Nearpod Silver is free and includes the core lesson features, more than 20 formative assessment types, the Nearpod Library up to your storage limit, live and student-paced lessons and post-session reports. The limits are 40 students in one lesson and 300 MB of storage.

Storage is what most teachers hit first. Every uploaded slide deck, PDF and video counts against it, and a lesson file can be at most 40 MB on any individual plan. Nearpod builds lessons from .ppt, PDF and Google Slides uploads, so a unit that only exists as a handout has to become slides first. If that is your starting point, you can turn a PDF or Word handout into a slide deck and upload the result as a Nearpod lesson.

Silver also gets the AI Create Question Generator, but only five free generations. Full access starts on Gold.

How much does Nearpod Gold cost?

Nearpod Gold costs $159 a year, charged once when you buy it. It raises the cap to 75 students in one lesson and 1 GB of storage, and adds full access to the AI Create Question Generator, the Google Slides add-on, Drag and Drop activities, running several sessions at the same time, lesson code expiration and Sub Plans for days you are out.

The AI Create Question Generator writes multiple choice questions only and works in English only. Nearpod says it runs on an OpenAI model. The questions go into a lesson, an Interactive Video or a Time to Climb game, which matters later: they stay in Nearpod.

For a teacher with classes of 30 who runs one section at a time, Gold is mostly a storage purchase. For a teacher who combines sections into a single live session of 50 or 60, Gold is the cheapest plan that fits.

Is Nearpod Platinum worth it?

Nearpod Platinum costs $397 a year, $238 more than Gold. For that you get 90 students in one lesson instead of 75, 5 GB of storage instead of 1 GB, and student notes. Everything else on the plan matches Gold.

Platinum is worth it if you regularly run sessions of 76 to 90 students or you store a lot of video. If neither applies, Gold does the same job for $238 less. Above 90 students in one lesson, no individual plan fits and you need the school license, which allows 250.

Can you pay for Nearpod monthly?

No. Nearpod individual plans are charged annually, and the FAQ says payments are nonrefundable, with no refunds for partly used periods. There is no monthly toggle on the pricing page and no monthly price anywhere on it. A teacher who only needs Nearpod for one semester pays for the full year.

Can a school pay for Nearpod with a purchase order?

Only for a school or district plan. Nearpod states that it does not process purchase orders for individual licenses. You buy Gold or Platinum by card, signed in to your own account, and Nearpod gives you an invoice so the school can reimburse you. School and district plans are quoted and can be paid by ACH, wire, check or card.

What does a Nearpod school license include?

The school and district plan is quoted per school, so there is no list price to compare. What it adds over Platinum is listed on the pricing page:

• Unlimited storage and up to 250 students in one lesson, with lesson files up to 250 MB.
• AI Create for whole lessons, not only questions, and the Live to Student-Paced switch.
• Virtual math manipulatives, co-teaching and co-editing, and shared school libraries.
• Nearpod Math and Social Studies programs, student accounts and live annotation.
• Admin dashboards, LMS integration over LTI 1.3, rostering and a Customer Success Manager.

The LMS integration is the line to read carefully if your grades live in Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard. It is not on Gold or Platinum at all.

Does Nearpod work with Canvas?

On a school or district plan, yes, through LTI 1.3. According to the Renaissance support article for the Canvas integration, the teacher opens the Nearpod Student Activity Report inside SpeedGrader and enters each grade by hand. A Nearpod link placed in a module or in an assignment description has no gradebook connection at all.

The questions themselves stay in Nearpod. Reports download as PDF or CSV and a lesson prints as a PDF, but the help articles describe no export of the questions as a QTI package, so they cannot go into a Canvas item bank or a Moodle question bank without retyping. If the graded quiz has to live in your LMS, importing questions into Canvas needs a QTI zip, and that is a different tool's job.

Nearpod pricing compared with other classroom tools

Tool	Individual paid plan	Free plan limit	Questions as an LMS quiz file
Nearpod	Gold, $159 a year; Platinum, $397 a year	40 students a lesson, 300 MB	No; reports as PDF or CSV
Pear Deck	Premium, $149 a year with the educator discount	No participant cap	No; responses to a Google Sheet
Edpuzzle	Pro Teacher, $15 a month or $165 a year	20 activities	No; LTI app with grade passback
Gimkit	Pro, $14.99 a month or $59.88 a year	Featured game modes only	No; questions copy out as text
Diffit	Premium, $14.99 a month or $149.99 a year	PDF and print, 90 days of history	No QTI, Moodle or Blackboard file
VidQuiz	Starter, $49 a month or $288 a year	A free demo	Yes; QTI 1.2, GIFT and Blackboard on every paid plan

The other rows come from our Edpuzzle pricing breakdown, the Gimkit Pro pricing breakdown and the Diffit pricing breakdown. Nearpod and Pear Deck are the two built around a live lesson, and neither offers a monthly price; the Pear Deck pricing breakdown compares the two plan by plan.

VidQuiz costs more than Nearpod Gold and does far less in a live classroom: no join codes, no polls, no drawing, no lesson library. What it does is write multiple choice questions from a YouTube link, put a timestamp on each one and export a quiz file your LMS imports and grades itself. The Nearpod alternative comparison puts the two side by side, including the rows Nearpod wins.

How to choose without overpaying

• Count students per session, not per class list. If you never run more than 40 at once, Silver covers you and the upgrade is only about storage.
• Clear storage before you buy Gold. Old uploads and duplicate videos fill 300 MB quickly. Deleting them is free; Gold is $159.
• Skip Platinum unless you need 76 to 90 seats or 5 GB. The only other addition is student notes, and the gap is $238 a year.
• Ask about a school license if several teachers already pay. It goes on a purchase order, adds the LMS integration and lifts the cap to 250 students.
• Start from where the grade has to live. If a graded test belongs in a Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard question bank, a YouTube video to quiz workflow that exports QTI, GIFT or a Blackboard file does that part, and Nearpod can keep running the lesson.