Thinkific Pricing and Cost, Basic Plan Now $54

Thinkific costs $54 a month for Basic, $109 for Start and $219 for Grow on monthly billing, or $475, $978 and $1,968 a year on annual billing ($40, $82 and $164 a month). Expand stays at $499 a month and Plus is quoted per customer. Those prices took effect on August 13, 2026, when Thinkific raised Basic, Start and Grow by about 10 percent, its first subscription increase since 2022. A free plan still exists, but it has no AI Quiz Generator and routes sales through Thinkific Payments.

Many of the pages ranking for this search still quote $49, $99 and $199. Those were correct until August. The figures here come from Thinkific's own help center article on the 2026 plan pricing update, last revised September 1, 2026.

Thinkific pricing at a glance

Plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing	Before August 13, 2026	Fee on third party payment gateways
Free	$0	$0	$0	Thinkific Payments required
Basic	$54 a month	$475 a year ($40 a month)	$49 a month, $432 a year	5.0%
Start	$109 a month	$978 a year ($82 a month)	$99 a month, $888 a year	2.0%
Grow	$219 a month	$1,968 a year ($164 a month)	$199 a month, $1,788 a year	1.0%
Expand	$499 a month	Not published in the update	No change	0.5%
Plus	Custom quote	Custom quote	Not published	No fee at this time

The gateway fee column is the one people miss. If you take payments through Stripe or PayPal instead of Thinkific Payments, Thinkific adds its own percentage on each sale, on your first $1 million in sales in a calendar year. On Basic that is 5 percent, which on $2,000 of monthly course sales is $100, almost double the subscription itself. Sales processed through Thinkific Payments do not pay it, although normal card processing still applies, which Thinkific puts at around 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction for most processors.

How much does Thinkific cost per month?

On monthly billing, $54 for Basic, $109 for Start, $219 for Grow and $499 for Expand, plus sales tax where it applies. On annual billing the same plans work out to $40, $82 and $164 a month, because the yearly price carries a standard 25 percent discount. Legacy plans are priced separately: Pro is now $109 a month or $1,044 a year, and Fixed Growth is $169 a month or $1,620 a year.

Existing customers move to the new price at their first monthly billing, or their next annual renewal, on or after August 13, 2026. Non-profit accounts and accounts with an active discount are exempt, and the Expand plan did not change.

Is the Thinkific Basic plan worth it?

For a creator selling a first course, usually yes, and mostly for one reason: Basic is the lowest plan with the AI tools. It unlocks the AI Quiz Generator, which drafts multiple choice questions from the text, PDF and captioned video lessons in a chapter. At $475 a year, it is the cheapest way to run a course on Thinkific without hand writing every quiz.

Basic stops being worth it at a predictable point. If you sell through Stripe or PayPal, the 5 percent gateway fee grows with your revenue while Start charges 2 percent, so above roughly $1,800 a month in third party sales the fee difference alone covers the $55 gap between the two monthly prices. Moving checkout to Thinkific Payments removes that fee on every plan, and is the first thing to try before upgrading.

What do you pay for quizzes on each Thinkific plan?

Less than you might expect, because the quiz features are spread thinly across the tiers. Here is what each part of a quiz costs you, read from Thinkific's help center.

Quiz feature	Where it is available	What to know before relying on it
Quiz builder, one correct or multiple correct answers	Course builder, both Classic and New	Those are the only two question types. True or false is a one correct answer question with two choices
Import Questions from the .xlsx template	No plan requirement named in the import docs	50 rows per file in the New Course Builder, 500 in the Classic, 1MB per file
AI Quiz Generator	Basic and above	Reads only lessons in the quiz chapter, needs captions on video, stops at the first 8,000 to 10,000 words
Randomized question bank and passing grade	Quiz settings	Each learner draws a different subset, so the bank needs several times more questions than the quiz shows
Export of quiz questions	Not available	Thinkific says there is no direct way to export quiz questions, answers and explanations

The cost that does not show up on the pricing page is authoring time. The generator is free on Basic, but it only sees captioned video uploaded into the chapter, ignores YouTube videos embedded in a text lesson, and reads roughly the first hour of speech. A course built on long lectures or on YouTube lessons ends up writing most questions by hand, then typing them into a template with ten answer columns.

That is where we fit. Paste a lesson's YouTube link, or its transcript, into VidQuiz and it drafts the questions, the correct answers, an explanation for each and a timestamp back to the video. Our Thinkific quiz template page walks through moving that CSV into the QUESTIONS sheet, including the one formula that adds the asterisk Thinkific uses to mark the right answer. Plans start at $49 a month for 40 quizzes, after a free demo of 3 quizzes.

Does Thinkific have a free plan?

Yes. Thinkific still lists a Free plan, and its fee table shows it requires Thinkific Payments (TCommerce) for sales. The free plan does not include the AI Quiz Generator, which Thinkific lists as available on Basic and above. The help article on importing quiz questions names no plan requirement for the .xlsx import. For testing a course idea with a short quiz you write yourself, the free plan is a reasonable place to start, and Basic is the step up once you want AI drafted questions.

How much does Thinkific Plus cost?

Thinkific does not publish a Plus price. It is sold on a quote to larger organizations, and Thinkific's fee table shows it pays no third party gateway fee at this time. If you are comparing Plus with a corporate LMS, get the quote in writing with the renewal terms, since the published plans just went up 10 percent.

Thinkific cost for a real course, worked through

Take a solo creator selling one $199 video course to 15 buyers a month, $2,985 in sales, with ten lessons and a quiz after each.

• Basic, annual, Thinkific Payments: $475 a year for the subscription, plus card processing of about $90 a month. No gateway fee.
• Basic, annual, Stripe: the same $475, plus Stripe's processing, plus the 5 percent Thinkific fee of about $149 a month, or roughly $1,790 a year.
• Start, annual, Stripe: $978 a year, plus a 2 percent fee of about $60 a month, or about $716 a year. Cheaper than Basic on Stripe at this revenue.

The quizzes are where the hours go. If each of the ten lessons is a 40 minute recording, the AI Quiz Generator can draft questions for the captioned ones, and the rest are ten quizzes to write by hand. Revenue from a course like this usually lands alongside YouTube and other platforms, and it is easier to see what a plan change really saves when you track every creator payout in one place.

How to choose a Thinkific plan for a course with quizzes

1. Decide on payments first. Thinkific Payments removes the gateway fee on every plan. If you must stay on Stripe or PayPal, compare the fee percentage before the subscription price.
2. Pick annual billing if you are committing. The 25 percent discount turns Basic from $648 a year on monthly billing into $475.
3. Check how your videos are hosted. Captioned uploads work with the built-in quiz generator. YouTube embeds and long lectures do not, so budget for another way to write questions.
4. Keep your questions outside the platform. Thinkific cannot export quizzes, so the spreadsheet you import from is your only backup.

If your lessons are recorded, start with the questions. Paste one lesson into VidQuiz, check the draft against the video, and move it into your Thinkific quiz import template. The same set also exports to LearnDash, Canvas, Moodle or Google Forms if the course moves.