Are you looking to start a membership site, take recurring payments or subscriptions for your course? With Thinkific, you have the option to set up subscription pricing for your courses!
The subscription payment option allows you to take recurring payments for your course via Stripe. Subscriptions are based on monthly or yearly billing periods and the student’s billing date will be based on the day of the month that they sign up on. For example, if they sign up for a monthly subscription on January 15th, their next billing date will be February 15th.
In this article:
Create a Subscription for Your Course
Create a Subscription for Your Bundle
You will need to have Stripe connected to your Thinkific site to set up a subscription price.
Create a Subscription Price 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 Subscription / Membership
- Enter an Amount per payment (the amount for each subscription payment)
- In the Paid every field, input a number value and select Month(s) or Year (to define the payment frequency)
- Optionally add a Free trial period
- Optionally add a Custom first payment
- Click Save
Example of a monthly subscription at $50 per month:
Create a Subscription Price 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 Subscription / Membership
- Enter an Amount per payment (the amount for each subscription payment)
- In the Paid every field, input a number value and select Month(s) or Year (to define the payment frequency)
- Optionally add a Free trial period
- Optionally add a Custom first payment
- Click Save
Example of a monthly subscription at $50 per month:
Payment Frequency
In the Paid every field, you can define the frequency you would like your customers to be charged. Subscriptions are based on monthly or yearly billing periods and you can specify a value for the monthly or yearly frequency.
Example of a $50 per month subscription:
- If a student signed up on Jan 1st, they would be charged Jan 1st, Feb 1st, Mar 1st, etc.
Example of a $50 subscription every 3 months:
- If a student signed up on Jan 1st, they would be charged Jan 1st, Apr 1st, Jul 1st, etc.
Example of a $99 per year subscription:
- If a student signed up on Jan 1st 2019, they would be charged Jan 1st 2019, Jan 1st 2020, Jan 1st 2021, etc.
Free Trial Period
You can also select to offer a Free Trial period of days or months prior to the subscription beginning. During this free trial for the course, all lessons will be available. As a best practice, you may want to utilize a Drip Schedule to prevent some lessons from being available.
Custom First Payment
If you would like a custom initial payment for the subscription, you can fill out this field. Please note that if you choose to add a custom first payment, this payment will apply to the first billing period of your subscription.
For example, if you have a $50 per month subscription, with a custom first payment of $25, a student who enrolls will pay $25 for the first month, and then $50 on their next billing date a month later. In another example, say you have a $50 per year subscription with a custom first payment of $25. A student who enrolls in the subscription will pay $25 for the first year, and then $50 on their next billing date a year later.
You cannot apply both a Free trial period and Custom first payment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Check out frequently asked questions here.