You cannot sign up for a Thinkific free plan. It left the pricing page in May 2024 and a 30-day free trial replaced it, after which the cheapest plan is $40 a month billed annually. A Free Plan account state does still exist, but the only door into it is cancelling a paid plan.
If you searched for this, you probably read somewhere that Thinkific lets you build and sell a course for nothing. Plenty of pages still say exactly that.
I read every result on the first page of Google for this term. 3 of the 4 that Thinkific does not own still tell you a free plan is sitting there waiting for you.
One calls it one of a kind. Another lists it as a live option at $0 and hands you a signup link for it.
That is worse than a wrong number in a blog post. Plan a course launch around a free plan and you are budgeting for money you never meant to spend, with the bill landing mid-launch.
So this post gives you the dates, the live prices, the fee that is not on the price card, and the one place a free Thinkific account still exists.
Key Takeaways
- No free signup since May 2024. The free tier was still on Thinkific’s pricing page on 14 May 2024 and gone by 26 May 2024.
- You get 30 days instead. Thinkific’s own FAQ says you can build courses and host communities before you pay a cent.
- A Free Plan still exists, but only by cancelling. Thinkific staff say a cancelled account keeps 1 course, with paid areas locked.
- Basic is the floor at $475 a year. That is $40 a month billed annually, or $54 a month paid monthly.
- Stripe costs an extra 5% on Basic. Thinkific names the fee on its pricing page but keeps the actual rates in a help article.
Is there still a Thinkific free plan?
Not one you can sign up for. Thinkific answers this itself, in the FAQ at the bottom of its own pricing page: “No, instead, you can explore the whole platform with a 30-day free trial. Build courses, host communities and test all the AI tools for a full month before you pay a cent.”
The plans on sale today are Basic, Start, Grow and Plus. No $0 tier, nothing under Basic, and no way to keep a course live past day 30 without paying.
Not sure a course is even the right first product? The free 5-day Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through the 5 mistakes solo creators make before they ever pick a platform.
The reason the internet cannot agree on this is that the answer has 2 halves, and almost everybody writes down only one of them.
There is no free plan to join. There is still a Free Plan to fall into. The next 2 sections cover each half.
What happened to the Thinkific free plan
Thinkific took it off the public pricing page in the second half of May 2024. I checked that against archived copies of the page rather than trusting the dates going around, which range from 2025 to March 2026.
The free tier was still on Thinkific’s public pricing page on 14 May 2024. By 26 May 2024 it was gone, and the page opened at Basic.
The old free plan gave you 1 course and unlimited students for $0, with email support that expired after 30 days. Basic gives you unlimited courses and caps students at 10,000, for $40 a month billed annually.
| Feature | Free plan 2024 | Basic today |
|---|---|---|
| Courses | 1 | Unlimited |
| Communities | 1, with 2 spaces | 1 |
| Digital downloads | 1 | 5 |
| Students | Unlimited | 10,000 |
| Platform transaction fee | 0% | 0% |
| Support | Email for 30 days, then chatbot | Email and chat |
| Price | $0 | $40 a month billed annually |
There is a second half to the removal that most write-ups skip. The plan did not disappear overnight for the people already on it.
From 3 July 2024 in the US, Canada and the UK, and from 6 November 2024 in the EU, Thinkific made its own processor the required option for anyone on a free plan. Sellers on free plans who were running Stripe or PayPal had that access, in Thinkific’s own wording, revoked. So free accounts carried on for a while after new signups stopped, on tighter terms.
The trial changed too. It ran 14 days when the free plan first disappeared. It is 30 days now.
The free plan went in stages rather than all at once. The July date is the US, Canada and UK one, and the EU followed in November.
The Thinkific free plan that still exists
A Free Plan account does still exist inside Thinkific, and the only door into it is cancelling a paid plan.
This is the part no page ranking for this search mentions, and it comes straight from Thinkific.
In an April 2026 thread on r/thinkific, a user asked the exact question this post is about. Their words: “There seems to be conflicting information about whether you can use Thinkific free after the trial period. Some say you can downgrade to free after the free trial of a paid level. Others say the Free level has been discontinued.”
A moderator posting under a Team Thinkific flair replied, correcting his own earlier answer in the same thread: “We’ve made some changes recently and our latest policy here is that if you are cancelling you are downgraded to our Free Plan which includes 1 course. Any add-on features (e.g. branded mobile) will be immediately unavailable upon cancelation. You will no longer be able to access, edit, or interact with paid areas of Thinkific, including a custom domain, bundles, memberships, etc. You can upgrade if you need to regain access to any of the features.”
What that leaves you with is 1 course on a thinkific.com subdomain. You can keep your work visible there. You cannot really run a business from it, and you have to have paid at least once to get in.
It also explains a loose end in Thinkific’s own documentation. Its payment-fee help article still runs a plan table with a Free column, which looks like a leftover next to a pricing page selling no free plan. That column is the cancellation state.
Thinkific’s fee table marks that Free column “TCommerce required”, so even in the cancelled state you take payments through Thinkific’s own processor or you take none at all. Running the trial and dropping to free parks a course. Selling from that state still means using Thinkific’s own processor.
What Thinkific costs when the trial runs out
Basic is $475 for the year, Start is $978 and Grow is $1,968, and each is about 25% cheaper than paying the same plan month to month.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Annual total | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $54 | $40 | $475 | Unlimited courses, 1 community, 5 downloads, custom domain |
| Start | $109 | $82 | $978 | Memberships, bundles, upsells, certificates, live cohorts |
| Grow | $219 | $164 | $1,968 | Removes Thinkific branding, 3 communities, B2B sales, API |
| Plus | Talk to sales | Talk to sales | Talk to sales | SSO, SCORM, dedicated support |
The annual total column is the one to budget from. Thinkific shows the yearly price as a monthly figure, so Basic reads as $40 when the charge is a single $475. Its own page prints the arithmetic for you: $54 a month is $648 a year, and the page offers to “Save $173 by billing annually”, which is where the $475 comes from.
A Basic limit catches people out. Paid memberships and product bundles are both switched off at that tier. If your plan was a $19 a month membership rather than a one-off course, Basic cannot sell it and your real entry price is Start at $978.
There is also a branded mobile app add-on at $199 a month, which is nearly 4 times the $54 Basic plan it sits on top of.
The fee that is not on the price card
Thinkific charges a third-party gateway fee on top of Stripe’s own cut, and the pricing page confirms it exists without ever telling you the number.
The pricing FAQ says only this: “When using third-party processors like Stripe or Paypal on Thinkific, an additional third-party payment gateway fee applies and it varies per plan type.” The actual percentages live in a separate help centre article, which carries no update date and still lists 2 plans, Free and Expand, that nobody can buy.
On $5,000 of course sales taken through Stripe, the Basic plan’s 5% gateway fee costs $250, which is more than half the $475 subscription again.
| Plan | Stripe fee | On $5,000 of sales |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 5.0% | $250 |
| Start | 2.0% | $100 |
| Grow | 1.0% | $50 |
| Plus | No fee at this time | $0 |
2 things soften it. The fee is waived after your first $1M of sales in a calendar year, which will not touch most people reading this. And it goes to zero if you use Thinkific Payments, Thinkific’s own processor, which charges around 2.9%, in line with Stripe and PayPal.
So the honest reading is that the 5% is what Thinkific charges for using your own payment processor instead of theirs. Whether that bothers you depends on whether you already run Stripe for other products and want everything in a single account.
One of the pages ranking for this search states that “the old surcharge for using your own Stripe was removed in 2026” and that you pay 0% on any paid plan.
Thinkific’s own pricing page still says the fee applies and varies by plan. When a review and the vendor’s current page disagree, the vendor’s page is the one to act on.
Why so many pages still say the free plan exists
Of the 4 page-1 results Thinkific does not own, only 1 tells you there is no free signup. Page 1 moves, so the mix will not be identical the day you read this, which is why each one below is described in enough detail to check.
One opens its pros list by calling Thinkific’s free plan one of a kind, saying nowhere else can you build a course, host it and take payments completely free, and answers its own FAQ with a flat yes. Another lists the plans as “Free plan, $0” and says yes, there is a free plan that lets you create 1 course. A third does say in a single line that the free plan ended, then keeps a whole section headed Thinkific Free Plan underneath it, calls it free forever, and publishes a 2024 signup link as though it still works.
The prices on those pages are as old as the free-plan claims. I found Basic quoted at $36, $49 and 36 euros, and Start at $73, $74 and $99.
The live numbers are $40 and $82 on annual billing, $54 and $109 monthly. Thinkific put prices up about 10% this year and dropped its Expand tier at the same time.
None of this is harmless trivia, because people go looking. In a February 2025 thread on r/elearning, 9 months after the plan left the pricing page, somebody wrote “I need a very basic platform, but MUST be free for a basic course.”
6 separate people then asked the same commenter for a link to Thinkific’s free plan, until that commenter answered: “I’ve given out quite a few links to the free plan for thinkific and want to be mindful so I’m going to close this for now.” A side channel had grown up around a plan you could no longer find through the front door.
Google’s AI Overview for this search gets the first half right and the second half wrong.
Google’s AI Overview for this search. Read the last clause of the first sentence, where it puts the entry price at $74 a month.
No Thinkific plan costs $74 a month today, and the entry rate is $40.
$74 was the Start plan’s annual rate from mid-2024 until the rise. Budget off that summary and you plan for a bill 85% bigger than the real one.
Where it came from is worth a look. The citation card on that answer shows 2 sources, and one is the single page-1 review that gets the free plan right.
That review calls $74 the entry price, omits the Basic tier entirely, and still lists Start at $74 and Grow at $149. Both the number and the wrong framing around it match.
What to do if you actually wanted free
If your reason for searching was that you have no budget yet, the useful question is what you need running before anyone should be charging you anything. Platform cost is usually the smallest number in a first launch. The real cost of building an online course sits mostly in recording gear, editing time, and whatever you spend getting the first 100 people to hear about it.
4 routes are worth weighing, and they suit different situations.
On $240 of sales in a year, a CartMango checkout costs $0 today and Payhip’s free plan takes $12, against $475 for a year of Thinkific Basic, which also hosts the lessons for you.
| Route | Year 1 cost | Hosts the course | Cut per sale | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thinkific 30-day trial, then Basic | $475 | Yes | 0% on Thinkific Payments, 5% on Stripe | You want lessons, quizzes and a community in one place |
| Teachable, Podia and other all-in-ones | Varies by plan | Yes | Varies by plan | You want that same bundle and are shopping on price |
| Payhip free plan | $0 plus 5% per sale | Yes | 5% | You want somewhere to test with no card at all |
| CartMango checkout, lessons by email | $0 until October 2026, then from $10 a year | Not yet, planned for October 2026 | 0% | You want the money and the list first, the player later |
I should be upfront that CartMango is my platform, so read that last row knowing who wrote it. CartMango is a checkout with hosted sales pages, and it does not host course lessons yet.
CartMango’s learning management system and community are planned for October 2026, and affiliate management for September 2026. Until those ship, using it for a course means delivering the lessons some other way and running the sales page, the checkout and the order bump on CartMango.
That trade only makes sense if money is your bottleneck. If you want a proper course player, quizzes and a student community on day 1, Thinkific does that today and CartMango does not.
Still comparing platforms? The Thinkific alternatives roundup prices 6 of them live, the head-to-heads against Teachable and Kajabi work out the crossover point where each stops being cheaper, and the LMS for online courses breakdown does the same across 7 platforms at once.
FAQ
Is there a free plan on Thinkific?
Not one you can join. Thinkific’s pricing FAQ says there is no free plan and offers a 30-day free trial of the full platform instead. A Free Plan account state still exists, holding 1 course, but you only land on it by cancelling a paid plan.
The cheapest plan you can buy is Basic at $40 a month billed annually, charged as $475 once a year.
What happened to the Thinkific free plan?
Thinkific removed it from its public pricing page in the second half of May 2024. Archived copies show the free tier still listed on 14 May 2024 and gone by 26 May 2024. Existing free accounts carried on for a while, but from 3 July 2024 they lost the ability to use Stripe or PayPal and had to move to Thinkific Payments.
How long is the Thinkific free trial?
30 days, on Basic, Start and Grow. Plus is a sales conversation rather than a self-serve trial.
Thinkific’s own wording is that you can build courses, host communities and test the AI tools “for a full month before you pay a cent”. Signup starts with an email address.
Can I downgrade to the free plan after the trial?
No. The downgrade Thinkific describes happens when you cancel a paid plan, not when a trial lapses.
Its team put the policy this way: a cancelling account drops to a Free Plan with 1 course, and add-ons, custom domains, bundles and memberships all switch off. If you never subscribe, there is nothing to cancel.
What is the best alternative to Thinkific if I wanted the free plan?
It depends what the free plan was doing for you. If it was course hosting, Payhip’s free plan hosts basic products at no monthly cost and takes 5% per sale. If it was somewhere to sell while you test the idea, CartMango gives you a hosted sales page and a checkout at no cost until October 2026, and you deliver the lessons by hand until the money is real.
Will the price go up again?
It already has once. Basic was $36 a month on annual billing in May 2024 and is $40 today, Start went from $74 to $82, Grow from $149 to $164, so roughly 10% across the board. Nothing announces the next one, and an annual plan holds your rate only until it renews.
What to have ready before the clock starts
30 days is enough time to build a course. Thinkific’s builder handles video lessons, quizzes and a community without you touching any code.
Finding an audience takes longer than 30 days. The old Thinkific free plan let you take months over that part at no cost. The trial does not, so the clock starts the day you sign up.
Years ago I built an online training course, put hundreds of hours into it, launched it, and fewer than 5 people bought. I nearly quit the whole thing over it.
What I do differently now is check that somebody wants the thing before I build it. On a 30-day clock that ordering matters twice over, because the clock runs on the building, not on the selling.
So before you start the trial, have the part that takes longer than 30 days. A handful of people who told you in writing that they want this, ideally with money attached. There is a whole 30-day sequence for that in the course launch guide, and it runs fine before you have picked any platform at all.
If the first sale is your bottleneck rather than the lesson player, you can put a sales page and a checkout live this week and deliver version 1 by email while you find out whether the idea holds.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
Related Reading
- What an online course actually is: the definition, plus how to pre-sell one before you build it
- How to sell online courses: the sequence behind $2.8M in 3 years
- Video hosting platforms for online courses: 21 options for when the platform does not host the video
- Teachable pricing: all 4 plans priced live, including the tier that is not on the pricing page