Thinkific

What it is

Thinkific is a hosted platform for building and selling online courses, coaching programs, memberships and branded communities, with a drag-and-drop builder, live cohorts, completion certificates, and AI-assisted content tools. Brothers Greg and Matt Smith founded it in Vancouver in 2012, after Greg turned an in-person LSAT prep class into an online course and decided the software behind it was the real business. Thinkific took its first outside funding around 2016, raised a $22 million Series A in 2019, and has traded publicly on the Toronto Stock Exchange as THNC since April 2021.

Who should use it

A course creator or coach who has moved past the testing phase and is selling at a volume where avoiding a per-sale platform fee matters more than a lower sticker price. It fits less well someone who wants to validate an idea for free first, since there’s no free tier to fall back to, and it fits less well a creator whose real product is an engaged community rather than a course, since Thinkific’s community tools are secondary to the course builder rather than the center of the product the way Skool’s are.

What stands out

The fee math is the whole pitch. Thinkific Payments charges 2.9% processing and stops there, on Basic as much as on Grow. That’s a meaningfully different deal than Teachable, whose Starter tier stacks a 7.5% platform fee on top of card processing until you upgrade to Builder or Growth, or Skool, where Hobby takes 10% until you move to Pro. Thinkific’s version of that same upgrade pressure shows up elsewhere: B2B selling tools, group orders, bulk invoicing, API access and webhooks, and phone support all sit behind Grow at $164/mo annual, not Basic or Start.

There’s no free plan to soften the decision. Every signup gets a 30-day trial of the full platform, and the account converts to a paid tier (or lapses) at the end of it, a steeper commitment than platforms that keep a limited free tier running indefinitely. A branded mobile app, if that matters to a cohort-based or membership business, is a further $199/mo on top of the plan price until Thinkific Plus folds it in.

The review picture is split enough to flag rather than average away. G2 and Capterra both put Thinkific around 4.4 to 4.5 out of 5, and reviewers on both sites consistently point to the course builder and support quality as the reasons. Trustpilot tells a different story, with ratings landing somewhere between 2 and 2.5 out of 5 across different aggregators’ counts of the same review set, and the complaints clustering around annual plans renewing automatically and refunds being hard to get once that happens. The gap between those scores is wide enough that it looks less like noise and more like two different experiences: the product mostly works, but the billing relationship around cancellation is where it breaks down for a visible minority of customers.

The verdict

Thinkific is worth it once the fee math actually matters: a creator doing enough volume that 2.9% flat beats a 7.5% to 10% platform cut on a cheaper competing plan, and who can live without a free tier for the testing phase. The course-building and support experience holds up well across the review sites that focus on the product itself.

What it doesn’t earn is a pass on billing friction. The Trustpilot pattern, annual renewals and refund disputes, is specific enough and corroborated across enough independent reviews that it’s worth calendaring your renewal date before you forget about it. Skip Thinkific if you want to validate an idea with zero monthly cost first, or if the real thing you’re building is a community with its own gamified reasons to show up, since that’s a secondary feature here rather than the core product.