Create a Payment Plan for Your Product

Do you have a high-dollar value product and want to give your users the option to split their payments across a few months? With Thinkific, you have the option to set up payment plans for your products!

About This Feature

Connect T-Commerce or Stripe to your Thinkific site to set up a payment plan.

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 products at a more affordable per-month rate, and increase your sales while offering your users greater predictability and flexibility with their payments.

For example: Instead of asking your users 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 users with a smaller initial commitment and a more convenient way to pay for a larger purchase over time!

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 user 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

From your Admin Dashboard, select 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
(Optional) Under Enrollment Duration, input the number of days a user should have access to the course. If this is left blank, users will have unlimited/forever access.
Add custom text for your “Buy Button” text label
Click Save

How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Community

From your Admin Dashboard, select 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
(Optional) Under Enrollment Duration, input the number of days a user should have access to the community. If this is left blank, users will have unlimited/forever access.
Add custom text for your “Buy Button” text label
Click Save

How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Digital Download

From your Admin Dashboard, select Products
Select Digital Downloads
Click on the image of the digital download 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
(Optional) Under Enrollment Duration, input the number of days a user should have access to the digital download link. If this is left blank, users will have unlimited/forever access.
Add custom text for your “Buy Button” text label
Click Save

How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Coaching & Webinars Product

From your Admin Dashboard, select Products
Select Coaching & Webinars
Click on the image of the event 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
Click Save

How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Membership

From your Admin Dashboard, select Products
Select 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
(Optional) Under Enrollment Duration, input the number of days a user should have access to the membership. If this is left blank, users will have unlimited/forever access.
Add custom text for your “Buy Button” text label
Click Save

How to Create a Payment Plan for Your Bundle

From your Admin Dashboard, select Sales
Select 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
(Optional) Under Enrollment Duration, input the number of days a user should have access to the bundle. If this is left blank, users will have unlimited/forever access.
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 user's credit card on their monthly billing date
A user's monthly billing date is set by the date they enrolled in your course, bundle, or community, and started the payment plan
A user 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 user billing? Check out these articles: What happens if my user'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 user 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 users, 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 payment processor, and we also support direct integrations with PayPal and Stripe to accept payment for your courses.
Products with recurring (subscription or payment plan) pricing cannot be offered as a gift or for a group order.
At this time, Order Bump products with recurring (subscription or payment plan) pricing cannot be added to a primary product with recurring (subscription or payment plan) pricing.