Do you have a high-value course and are looking to give your students the option to split their payment across a few months? With Thinkific, you have the option to set up payment plans for your courses!
Using our payment plan feature, the pricing for your product can be split into automatically collected, monthly payments. This is a time-tested way to provide your course at a more affordable rate per month and increase your sales. Instead of asking your student to pay $450 upfront, for example, you can simply ask them for 3 monthly payments of $150 each - a much smaller initial commitment, and at a price that they're far more likely to have the available funds for!
In this article:
Create a Payment Plan for Your Course
Create a Payment Plan for Your Bundle
Monthly Payment Schedule Considerations
Enrollment Duration Considerations
Visibility of “Buy Button” Text
You will need to have Stripe connected to your Thinkific site to set up a payment plan.
Create a Payment Plan for Your Course
- Go to Manage Learning Content
- Select Courses
- Click on the image of the course you want to edit
- Select the Pricing tab
- Select Monthly payment plan
- Enter a Price per Payment (the amount for each monthly payment)
- Enter the Total months that this amount should be charged
- Optionally add an Enrollment duration
- Add custom text for your “Buy Button” text label
- Click Save
Example of a 3 month payment plan at $150 per month:
Often payment plans are offered as an optional price for your course. If you prefer a one-time payment as your primary price, you can consider adding a payment plan with our additional price feature.
Create a Payment Plan for Your Bundle
- Go to Manage Learning Content
- Select Courses
- Select Memberships & Bundles
- Click on the image of the bundle you want to edit
- Select the Pricing tab
- Select Monthly payment plan
- Enter a Price per Payment (the amount for each monthly payment)
- Enter the Total months that this amount should be charged
- Optionally add an Enrollment duration
- Add custom text for your “Buy Button” text label
- Click Save
Example of a 3-month payment plan at $150 per month:
Monthly Payment Schedule Considerations
- The payment plan feature allows you to set a recurring payment schedule, where a payment is automatically collected each month
- These payments are automatically charged to a student's credit card on their monthly billing date
- A student's monthly billing date is set by the date they enrolled in your course and started the payment plan
- A student will no longer be billed on their monthly billing date once the Total months period, which you chose while setting up the payment plan, has been completed
Looking for more information about student billing? Check out our article: What happens if my student's subscription or payment plan fails?
Enrollment Duration Considerations
- The Enrollment duration must be greater than the number of days that the payment plan lasts for. For example, if Total months is set to 3 (which equals 3 months of payments; approximately 90 days), the Enrollment duration must be greater than 90 days.
- If the Enrollment duration field is left blank, the student will have access to the content indefinitely, unless you manually cancel their enrollment, or one of their payments fails.
Learn more here: How to Set an Enrollment Duration
Visibility of “Buy Button” Text
It's best to keep the “Buy Button” text fairly short as it will appear on the course card, buy button, and various Site Builder sections on your course landing page.
“Buy Button” Examples:
- Example on course card (applies to All products [smart section] and Additional products section)
- Example in course banner (Dropdown menu appears with additional prices)
- Example in All pricing options [smart section]
- Example in Upsells section
Important Considerations
As with subscription pricing, if you change or update your payment plan pricing this will not affect existing students and will only apply for new enrollments moving forward.