What is Thinkific and how does it work?
·Founder, Stakk
·
4 November 2026
·
7 min read
Thinkific is an online platform for selling what you teach: courses first, plus coaching, webinars and digital downloads. You build a product, set a price, and Thinkific runs the checkout, takes the card payment and gives the buyer access inside your Thinkific site. It also hosts your lessons, your students and your sales pages. There is no free plan. Paid plans start at $109 a month, and all of them carry order bumps and after-purchase upsells. Checked 3 November 2026.
Everything below comes from Thinkific's own site, read on the day this was written. If you are here because you want to build and sell a course, Thinkific is made for that, and Stakk does not host courses. If you mostly sell files, like templates or ebooks, the sections on products and payments are the ones to read closely.
What is Thinkific used for?
Thinkific is used to build and run a business that sells knowledge, from one account. It started as a course platform, and courses are still the center of it. Around that it adds coaching, webinars, digital downloads, sales pages and a site for your students to log in to.
In practice, creators, coaches and small training teams use Thinkific to:
- host a course and track who has finished which lesson
- run a coaching program or a live webinar
- sell digital downloads like templates, guides or workbooks
- build landing pages and a checkout for each product
- give every buyer a login where their purchases sit
Thinkific's pricing page says you can "Publish unlimited courses, digital downloads, and coaching or webinar products on every plan." So the number of things you sell is not what the plans limit. There is no free plan, though, and the paid tiers start at $109 a month, so there is a real monthly cost before you make a sale. Our breakdown of what each Thinkific plan costs covers the four tiers and what changes as you move up.
If your buyers find you through a social profile rather than a website, a lighter tool may fit the way they arrive. Our look at link in bio tools with a real checkout covers that route.
How does Thinkific work?
You build a product, set its price, and share the page. The product is the thing the buyer gets, a course, a coaching package, a webinar seat or a download. The page is where they pay. Here is how a sale moves through Thinkific.
- The product. In your admin, you pick a product type, add a title, a description and the content, whether that is lessons or a file.
- The price. You set a price and Thinkific builds a checkout and a sales page for it.
- The checkout. The buyer pays by card. Order bumps, which Thinkific calls add-ons, sit here on the checkout.
- The upsell. If you have built an After-Purchase Flow, a second offer shows after the first payment.
- Access. The buyer logs in to your Thinkific site, where their course or download is waiting.
A sale on Thinkific, as its own site describes it. Add-ons sit on the checkout, and an After-Purchase Flow runs after the first payment.
So the buyer ends up logged in to your Thinkific site to get what they bought, rather than just downloading a file from an email.
What can you sell on Thinkific?
Thinkific's pricing page lists what you can publish: "unlimited courses, digital downloads, and coaching or webinar products on every plan." In plain terms that is four kinds of thing.
- Courses: lessons in modules, with progress tracked for each student.
- Digital downloads: files like templates, guides, presets or workbooks.
- Coaching: a program you deliver one to one or in a group.
- Webinars: a live or scheduled session people buy a seat for.
The thing to notice is that all four live inside a course platform. Even a single download is sold through, and accessed inside, the same student site that a full course uses. That is a strength if you plan to add courses later, and more than you need if a file and a receipt is the whole job.
This is close to how Kajabi works, another all-in-one built around courses, which can help if you are weighing the two.
How do you get paid on Thinkific?
Through card processing connected to your Thinkific account. Thinkific's pricing page describes its card rate as "in line with Stripe and PayPal at 2.9%." Beyond that card rate, it says a third-party gateway fee "varies per plan type," and it does not publish the exact amounts, so neither will we.
The pattern to understand is that the money and the platform are tied together through Thinkific's checkout rather than paid straight into a Stripe account you alone control. Whether a platform routes the charge through your own processor or holds it first is worth checking before you pick one, and our guide to which platforms let you use your own Stripe account lays that out.
Because the exact gateway fee is not published per plan, the honest read is this: budget for the 2.9% card rate that Thinkific names, and confirm any extra processing fee for your plan inside your own account before you rely on a number.
Does Thinkific have order bumps and upsells?
Yes, both, and on every plan. Thinkific's pricing page lists the ability to "offer add-ons during checkout," which is an order bump, and it lists After-Purchase Flows, which are product upsells. Both are shown as available on all four plans, from Start up to Plus.
The add-on is an extra offer the buyer can take on the checkout page, charged together with the main product. The After-Purchase Flow is a second offer that appears after the first payment goes through, so the buyer can take it in a step of its own. Together they are the two classic ways to raise the size of an order: one before the buyer pays, one just after.
What Thinkific does not do is make either one free. They are features of a paid plan, so the monthly fee is the price of having them at all. On a checkout tool with no monthly fee, the same two moves cost you a per-sale fee instead, which is the trade to weigh.
When is Thinkific the wrong choice?
If you sell courses, coaching or webinars and you want progress tracking and a student site, Thinkific is the better pick and Stakk is the wrong choice. Stakk has no course hosting, no communities, no call booking, no email marketing and no subscriptions or recurring billing. It sells in US dollars only and caps prices at $999. It also does not store your files: you paste a link to where your file lives, and Stakk emails that link to the buyer once they pay. Thinkific does the courses and the student logins that Stakk never will.
And if the cost of each sale is what decides it, use Systeme.io or Whop instead. Systeme.io has a free plan with 0% transaction fees, and Whop charges 2.7% + $0.30 on a transaction with no monthly fee. Both take less per sale than our 10% + $0.50. If you sell downloads rather than courses, though, you may not need a course platform or a monthly fee at all. A plain checkout that takes a payment and sends the file can be the whole tool.
Want a checkout built just for downloads?
Stakk is the checkout for people who sell digital files. You connect your own Stripe account, paste the link to your file, and add an order bump and a one-click upsell to any product. It is 10% + $0.50 a sale with card processing included, there is no monthly fee, and a month with no sales costs nothing. The upsell is a second charge, so our fee applies to it again.