ThriveCart for Courses in 2026: Learn Is Closed to New Accounts

Using ThriveCart for courses now means ThriveCart Academy, the course and community tool that comes with every ThriveCart subscription. Standard costs $47 a month or $444 a year and includes Academy Starter, with course hosting, quizzes, certificates, 100 GB of video and up to 2,000 community members.

Pro+ costs $87 a month or $804 a year for 10,000 members and a custom domain. The older tool, ThriveCart Learn, is closed to accounts opened after May 19, 2026, and Learn+ is no longer sold. Existing Learn courses keep working, turning read-only in 2028. ThriveCart’s homepage says Academy is not included with lifetime plans.

I read ThriveCart’s pricing section, its help center and its fee page side by side, and they do not agree on what the lifetime license includes or how many students the cheapest plan allows.

The 2 reviews on page 1 written by people outside ThriveCart skip that gap. Both favor paying ThriveCart once, and the newer review promises you will never see a monthly bill again.

2 kinds of seller get caught by that gap: the one who bought the lifetime deal years ago and built courses in Learn, and the one about to buy it now.

By the end you will know which ThriveCart plan your course needs, what it costs a year, and what to ask ThriveCart support before you pay.

Key Takeaways

• Academy replaced Learn for new sellers. Accounts opened after May 19, 2026 get ThriveCart Academy only, and Learn+ is no longer for sale.
• Standard is the cheapest way in for a new account. $444 a year or $47 a month, with 100 GB of video and up to 2,000 members.
• Pro+ is for bigger or branded schools. $804 a year or $87 a month raises the cap to 10,000 members and adds a custom domain.
• Check lifetime before you pay. The $495 checkout lists unlimited courses, but ThriveCart’s homepage says Academy is not included with lifetime plans.
• Existing Learn courses have time. ThriveCart’s October timeline: build in Learn through 2026, edit only in 2027, read-only from 2028.
• Course already hosted elsewhere? ThriveCart Standard costs $444 a year. CartMango is free right now, then from $10 a year from November.

ThriveCart for courses: what each plan includes

ThriveCart for courses runs on ThriveCart Academy, and each ThriveCart subscription comes with 1 Academy plan: Starter with Standard, Growth with Pro+ and Scale with Enterprise. The FAQ on ThriveCart’s homepage says each subscription includes its Academy plan at no extra charge, so there is no second bill for the course side.

If this is your first course, the selling side tends to trip people up before the course player does. The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge is a free 5-day challenge on 5 common mistakes solo creators make when they start selling.

Every Academy plan hosts the course itself. You get modules and lessons, drip release by date, day, prerequisite or subscription, progress tracking, quizzes with pass marks that can lock the next module, and certificates. Lessons can hold video, audio, text, PDFs and SCORM files, and the video plays from ThriveCart’s own storage instead of a YouTube embed.

ThriveCart Standard costs $444 a year for 2,000 members and 100 GB of video, Pro+ costs $804 a year for 10,000 members and a custom domain, and the $495 lifetime plan comes without Academy, per ThriveCart’s homepage FAQ.

ThriveCart’s own pages disagree on 2 details. The Academy FAQ in ThriveCart’s help center prices Scale at $127 a month or $1,164 a year, while the pricing section, the Academy sales page and the getting-started guide all list Scale as a custom quote.

On student limits, the Standard plan card says “Unlimited Courses/Students” right next to “Up to 2,000 Community Members”. The Academy FAQ is plainer. It says that for new users, “the limits apply to both Courses and Communities”, and that enrolled course students are left out of the count only for Learn and Learn+ users, adding “(they are for new users)”. So on a new account, course students count toward the 2,000. If you expect more than that in your first year, get ThriveCart support to confirm it in writing before you choose Standard.

If you opened your ThriveCart account after May 19, 2026

A ThriveCart account opened after May 19, 2026 can only build courses in ThriveCart Academy, because ThriveCart Learn is closed to it. That covers anyone signing up today, on the 30-day free trial or a paid plan.

ThriveCart’s own Learn help page. Its first sentence says accounts created after May 19, 2026 cannot use Learn. The end-of-2026 retirement date in the second paragraph was later replaced by a slower, 3-phase timeline.

The pick for most new sellers is Standard at $444 a year, with Academy Starter included. Pro+ at $804 a year only earns its place if you want the course on your own domain, expect more than 2,000 members, or need ThriveCart’s affiliate center. Standard already carries the checkout features a course launch leans on: 1 order bump, 1-click upsells and downsells, abandoned cart recovery and payment plans. ThriveCart’s fulfillment settings can now hand out Academy access from the main product, a bump, an upsell or a downsell, so a student who buys the add-on gets the extra module without you touching anything.

If I were starting a course on ThriveCart today, I would run the 30-day trial on Standard and build the whole course before paying for a year. Moving a course in from another platform means rebuilding the lessons by hand, as far as ThriveCart’s pages say: its Learn help page states course content cannot be imported, and the CSV upload in its October update adds students only.

ThriveCart takes 0% of a basic sale. Its fee page does list a few add-on fees on the Standard subscription: 0.10% on subscription bumps, 5% of the first payment a retention offer saves, and 0.5% when ThriveCart calculates and collects sales tax for you. Pro+ drops the first 2 to 0% and the tax fee to 0.35%. For the full fee breakdown against a revenue-priced cart, see ThriveCart vs PayKickstart.

What you give up is maturity. Academy launched in May 2026, and in its October update ThriveCart wrote that “mistakes were made in how we launched ThriveCart Academy”. There is no native phone app yet, only a mobile-friendly web version, and live events are still on the roadmap. On Starter the course sits on a ThriveCart web address, because custom domains start at Growth.

If your ThriveCart lifetime license still runs your courses in Learn

If your courses already sit in ThriveCart Learn or Learn+ on a lifetime license, they keep working, and nothing changes for your students before the end of 2026. ThriveCart’s October update set out a slower timeline in 3 phases:

• 2026: build new courses in Learn and Learn+ as usual.
• 2027: keep editing existing Learn courses and adding students, but new courses can only be created in Academy.
• 2028: Learn and Learn+ turn read-only. Students keep access to what they bought.

ThriveCart’s Learn help page, last updated in June, still says Learn will be “fully retired for existing users at the end of 2026”. The October blog post and the Academy FAQ updated after it replace that with the 3 phases above, so go by the newer pages.

Existing Learn and Learn+ license holders also get a courses-only seat in Academy at no extra cost. ThriveCart’s October update calls this grandfathered access: your courses, students and content can move across, and quizzes and certificates come free on top. ThriveCart’s own hosting for video, audio and files needs a paid subscription, and so does anything community: discussion spaces, leaderboards, events. For lifetime holders ThriveCart is offering a Pro+ annual plan for $295, which adds hosting and communities.

If you stay on the free courses-only seat, video keeps coming from wherever it lives now, usually an unlisted YouTube video or a privacy-locked Vimeo upload. Our list of course video hosting platforms covers the other options if you outgrow those.

The move itself is the weak spot. ThriveCart paused migrations from Learn to Academy on August 13 while it fixed missing content, and its October update admitted it “underestimated what was required to migrate more than 13 million accounts”. That same update promised a self-serve migration tool, so check your dashboard for it before you plan a move. Logos and thumbnails from the Learn media gallery need uploading again, and Learn+ users keep their custom domain while plain Learn users need Growth for one.

The pick: stay on Learn for now, build 1 test course in Academy before 2027, and pay for a subscription only if you want ThriveCart to host your video or run a community. If you are rethinking the whole stack anyway, ThriveCart vs Kajabi prices the all-in-one route against ThriveCart’s own.

If the $495 lifetime price is why ThriveCart made your shortlist

If the $495 lifetime license is the reason you are looking at ThriveCart for courses, get the course side confirmed in writing before you pay, because ThriveCart’s own pages give 2 different answers. The lifetime checkout page lists “Unlimited courses & students”. The FAQ on ThriveCart’s homepage says “ThriveCart Academy is not included with ThriveCart lifetime plans.” And the help center says accounts opened after May 19, 2026 cannot use Learn.

My reading of those 3 pages: a brand-new lifetime buyer gets the checkout and no ThriveCart course tool, because the grandfathered courses-only seat is described only for existing Learn and Learn+ users. The checkout copy may simply be older than the FAQ. I would not pay $495 for course hosting until ThriveCart support confirmed it in writing.

This is the exact trap a beginner described in a thread on r/onlinecourses: priced out of Kajabi, drawn to the lifetime deal, and asking where the videos would live. 1 reply pointed to a podcast that scored 20 course platforms and said “Thrivecart did not score well for hosting online courses.” Another said the videos had to sit on Vimeo and that native hosting was on ThriveCart’s roadmap. Native hosting did arrive, inside Academy, on the subscription plans.

Lifetime accounts also carry higher add-on fees on ThriveCart’s fee page: 0.25% on subscription bumps and 8% of a payment a retention offer saves, against 0.10% and 5% on Standard. If you want ThriveCart to host the course, Standard at $444 a year is the version that includes it. If you only need the checkout and will host the course somewhere else, the lifetime license costs $51 more than a year of Standard and comes out ahead from year 2.

Still deciding what the course should be? Start with what an online course is and course creation costs before you pay for any platform.

If your course is already hosted on another platform

If your course already lives on Teachable, Kajabi or another course platform, you only need a checkout in front of it, and both ThriveCart and CartMango sell one. I built and run CartMango, so weigh this section with that in mind.

ThriveCart Standard at $444 a year (about $37 a month, billed yearly) gives you its full checkout. It connects to Teachable directly, enrolling the buyer when the order completes, as long as you are on Teachable Pro or higher. ThriveCart’s own guide says it cannot remove that access later, so refunds and cancellations need a manual step or Zapier.

ThriveCart also lists Kajabi among its membership-platform connections, for delivering content and assigning offers. Academy is still bundled into the price, so part of what you pay covers a course tool you will leave switched off.

CartMango is free right now. Once CartMango’s paid plans start in November, its Silver plan at $10 a year covers the checkout with order bumps, and Gold at $20 a year (about $1.67 a month, billed yearly) adds upsells, downsells and abandoned cart emails. CartMango takes 0% of each sale on every plan. CartMango’s native connections are Stripe, PayPal, Kit, ActiveCampaign, Beehiiv and BirdSend, so enrolling a buyer on Teachable or Kajabi runs through CartMango’s Make.com connection, which reaches 3,000+ apps.

CartMango does not host courses yet. CartMango’s course hosting and community features are planned for October 2026 on its $30-a-year Platinum plan, so if you need lessons and student progress in the same login today, ThriveCart Academy or your current course platform does that today.

My tiebreaker: if your course lives on Teachable and you want enrollment to just work, ThriveCart’s direct connection is the easier setup. If you mostly want to stop paying $444 a year for a checkout, CartMango is the cheaper one.

Which ThriveCart route fits which situation

Standard at $444 a year fits a new account, Pro+ at $804 fits a bigger or branded school, existing Learn users pay nothing extra, and a course hosted elsewhere needs only a checkout.

That last row is my own product, so it only appears for the 1 case it fits. If it is your case, CartMango is free right now and takes 0% of every sale on every plan.

FAQ

How much does ThriveCart cost?

ThriveCart Standard costs $47 a month or $444 a year, and Pro+ costs $87 a month or $804 a year, both with a 30-day free trial. Enterprise is a custom quote. A $495 lifetime license is still sold through a single line under the plan cards, but ThriveCart’s homepage says it does not include Academy, the course tool.

How much does ThriveCart Academy cost?

Academy has no separate price when you buy ThriveCart. Starter comes with Standard ($444 a year), Growth with Pro+ ($804 a year) and Scale with Enterprise. The Academy FAQ in the help center lists the same Starter and Growth prices, and a lifetime holder can add a Pro+ annual plan, which brings Growth, for $295.

What is ThriveCart used for?

ThriveCart is a checkout first: sales pages, checkout pages, order bumps, 1-click upsells, subscriptions, payment plans and, on Pro+, an affiliate center. Since May 2026 its course and community tool is ThriveCart Academy, bundled with each subscription.

What is the best platform to sell courses on?

Pick by where the money comes from. If the lessons are the product, a dedicated course platform such as Teachable, Thinkific or Kajabi is built around them. If your income comes from upsells, bumps and payment plans around the course, ThriveCart puts the checkout first and now bundles a course tool with it. Our guide on how to sell online courses covers the selling side either way.

Is ThriveCart Learn being shut down?

In stages. Accounts opened after May 19, 2026 cannot use it. Existing users can build new Learn courses through 2026 and only edit them in 2027, and from 2028 Learn turns read-only while students keep access to what they bought.

Does ThriveCart host course videos?

Academy does, on the subscription plans: 100 GB on Starter with 2 GB per file, 500 GB on Growth with 4 GB per file, and unlimited on Scale. Learn never did, so Learn courses embed video from YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia, and lifetime licenses do not include ThriveCart’s hosting.

A plain page and buyers who already trust you

In 2022 I sold a short email-writing training to my waitlist without a designed sales page. The page was a plain Google Doc: 2,104 words, a few screenshots, 3 memes. Over 3 days, Thursday to Saturday, 42% of the people who had replied “waitlist” to my emails bought it. My takeaway at the time was that trust beat design, because those readers already knew me.

I would apply the same logic to a first course. Pick the setup that takes the payment and delivers the lessons, and spend the rest of the effort on the people who already trust you.

If ThriveCart for courses feels like more tool than you need right now, CartMango covers the selling half: order bumps on every plan, upsells from the $20 Gold plan, buyers synced into your email tool, and 0% of each sale. CartMango is free right now, with paid plans from $10 a year once they start in November, and CartMango’s course hosting is not live yet.

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

• ThriveCart vs Kajabi: if ThriveCart for courses feels too thin, the all-in-one route priced at $1,716 a year against $444
• ThriveCart vs PayKickstart: a flat plan price against a bill that grows with sales
• ThriveCart vs Leadpages: checkout, page builder, or both
• How to launch a course: 30 days to a calmer launch
• Video hosting platforms for online courses: where to put lesson videos when your course tool does not host them