Do you have a high dollar value course, bundle, or community, and want 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 products!
Using our payment plan feature, the pricing for your products can be split into automatically collected, monthly payments. This is an easy way to provide your product at a more affordable per-month rate, and increase your sales while offering your students greater predictability and flexibility with their payments.
For example, instead of asking your students to pay $450 all at once, you can create a payment plan giving them the option to make 3 monthly payments of $150 each - providing your students with a smaller initial commitment and a more convenient way to pay for a larger purchase over time!
In this article:
Monthly Payment Schedule Considerations
Enrollment Duration Considerations
Visibility of “Buy Button” Text
You will need to have T-Commerce or Stripe connected to your Thinkific site to set up a payment plan.
Create a Payment Plan
Often, payment plans are offered as an optional price for your product, along with a one-time payment option. If you would like to set up a one-time payment as your primary price, and add a payment plan as an additional option, check out our Set Additional Prices for Your Products article.
In the example below, you'll see a scenario where a payment plan has been set up for a course that costs $120 in total. The pricing has been set for $10 per month for 12 months, and the enrollment duration has been set for 365 days (or one year). This means that the student will pay $10 per month for every month they have access to the course.
To learn more about setting up payment plans, click the dropdowns below.
How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Course
- Go to Manage Learning Products
- 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
How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Bundle
- Go to Manage Learning Products
- Select Bundles & Memberships
- 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
How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Community
- Go to Manage Learning Products
- Select Communities
- Locate your community, click the ellipses (3 dot icon) and select 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
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, bundle, or community, 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 product card, buy button, and various Site Pages sections on your product 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. Thinkific Payments is our built-in payments processor, and we also support direct integrations with PayPal and Stripe to accept payment for your courses.