Create a Payment Plan for Your Course or Bundle

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!

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 these articles: Stripe: What happens if my student's subscription or payment plan fails? and Thinkific Payments: Managing Student Payments

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.

You will need to choose and set up a payment processor before you can set up a payment plan. We support direct integrations with PayPal and Stripe to accept payment for your courses.

More About Pricing

Set Your Course Pricing

Upgrade to use this feature

In this article: