Thinkific email marketing, and why it is upside down
On every other course platform the automation is the expensive bit and the plain broadcast comes as standard. Thinkific is the other way round. The automated sequence is on the cheapest plan, and emailing all your students at once is what you upgrade for.
Read off Thinkific's own support articles and pricing page, in a browser, on 12 September 2026. The email prices used in the sums below are our own published figures, read off each vendor's pricing page on 6 September 2026. We have not run Thinkific ourselves.
The inversion, in Thinkific's own plan lists
Both of these are printed at the top of the relevant support article, under the heading Plan Availability, and they disagree with each other in a way that decides your bill.
- Email Automation lists Basic, Start, Grow, Expand and Plus. The cheapest plan is included.Source
- Mass User Email lists Grow, Expand and Plus. The two cheaper plans are not on it.Source
Mass User Email is the ordinary thing: "bulk email a message to a large number of users at once, directly from the Users page." That is the feature most people assume every course platform has as standard, and on Thinkific it starts at Grow.
Billed annually, read off the pricing page on the same day: Basic $40 a month, Start $82, Grow $164.SourceSo the gap between having an automated sequence and being able to email your students directly is $124 a month.
What the automation actually is, before you count on it
Being on Basic and having Email Automation sounds generous until you read what the feature contains. Thinkific: "At the moment, Thinkific's Email Automation feature offers one email sequence: Sales Flow."Source
A Sales Flow targets leads or users who are subscribed and have not bought the product you selected, and it stops when they buy or unsubscribe. It is a sales sequence, not a welcome sequence, and Thinkific says so plainly in its own FAQ: "using Thinkific's Mass User Email functionality is the only way to send a broadcast email to a single or several students at once. Similarly, other automated notifications, such as welcome emails, cannot be sent using Email Automation functionality."
Two more limits worth knowing before you build anything on it. "At the moment, triggers and exit conditions cannot be modified", and "HTML editing is not supported in the email editor." So the sequence runs on Thinkific's conditions rather than yours.
The abandoned cart email is a separate thing again, and it has its own gate: it "is available on paid plans to creators using TCommerce", meaning you have to be running Thinkific Payments to get it.
The part Thinkific does better than you would expect
Two genuine strengths, both of which matter if you are weighing whether to add anything at all.
It will email leads, not just students. Leads are a first-class list with their own consent state, and the automation triggers accept them: "The Triggers define which contacts (leads or users) will be entered into the email sequence." Anyone who arrives through a lead magnet or the lead capture section can enter a sequence. That is a real gap between Thinkific and Teachable, where leads cannot be emailed at all.
Its export can carry the course. The Users table filters by "Enrolled In", "Has Purchased", "Progress", "Enrollment Status", "Amount Spent" and more, and the CSV export "will include all of the displayed fields". Filter first and the export knows which course somebody bought, which is exactly what makes a later move to a dedicated tool survivable.Source
One caveat on the leads export: it carries the email, the name, the consent flag, the capture page and the date, and no purchase data. Students and leads come out as separate files.
The sum: upgrade to Grow, or stay on Basic and add a tool
If what you want is to email your list properly, Thinkific's route is Grow at $164 a month. The other route is to stay on Basic and run a dedicated email tool beside it. Using our own published prices at 1,000 subscribers, read 6 September 2026:
| Thinkific Basic, plus | That tool | Total a month | Against Grow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systeme.io | $0 free at this size | $40 | $124 less |
| MailerLite | $17.10 billed annually | $57.10 | $106.90 less |
| AWeber | $25 billed monthly | $65 | $99 less |
| beehiiv | $43 billed annually | $83 | $81 less |
The gaps here are the widest in this whole cluster, because Grow is not really an email upgrade. It is a business-tier upgrade that happens to carry the email feature you wanted.
Which is exactly the thing that would make the table above misleading if it were left alone. Grow also removes Thinkific branding, raises communities, adds API access and webhooks, group and B2B orders, invoicing, phone support and more video bandwidth. If you want any of those, you are buying them too, and the comparison stops being about email.
The honest reading is narrower and more useful: if the only reason you are looking at Grow is that you cannot email your students, a dedicated tool solves that for much less, and solves it better, because it will also let you retime and retrigger a sequence, which Thinkific's own automation will not.
What we could not find out
No page we read states how many contacts or leads a Thinkific account may hold, or how many emails it may send in a month. The comparison table lists 10,000 current students on Basic, Start and Grow alike, but students are not contacts, and a lead who never bought is not a student.
We are recording that as unknown rather than as unlimited. If your plan depends on it, ask Thinkific before you build on it.
You do not need a second tool if
- You only ever want a sales sequence to people who have not bought yet, and you are happy with Thinkific's fixed timing for it.
- You are already on Grow or above, so the broadcast is included and the main gap is closed.
- You do not need a welcome sequence for new students, which Thinkific's automation does not do on any plan.
That third one is the one that catches people, so it is worth saying twice: on Thinkific, a welcome sequence for buyers is not a plan upgrade away. It is not there.
If you want the tool beside it
The decision is your list size and whether it has to automate without paying. Both come off each vendor's own pricing page, with the date we read it.
Thinkific email, answered
- Does Thinkific have email marketing?
- Yes, and it is arranged the opposite way round from most course platforms. Email Automation, which sends an automated sequence, is listed on every plan including the cheapest. Mass User Email, which is the plain one-off email to your students, is listed on Grow and above. So the automation is cheap and the broadcast is the upgrade.
- Can Thinkific send a welcome sequence to new students?
- Not as such. Thinkific offers one sequence, a Sales Flow aimed at leads who have not bought the product you select. Its own FAQ is explicit that automated notifications such as welcome emails cannot be sent through Email Automation, and that Mass User Email is the only way to send a broadcast to students.
- Which Thinkific plan do I need to email all my students at once?
- Grow, by Thinkific's own plan availability list on the Mass User Email article, read on 12 September 2026. Billed annually that was $164 a month, against $40 for Basic. Email Automation, by contrast, is listed on Basic.
- How many contacts does Thinkific allow?
- We do not know, and we are not going to invent a number. No Thinkific page we read states a contact limit or a monthly send limit. Its comparison table lists 10,000 current students on Basic, Start and Grow alike, but that counts students, not email contacts or leads.
On a different course platform? The same question forTeachable,Kajabi andPodia is answered the same way, from each vendor's own pages. All four sit side by side oncourse platform email limits compared, and the short version for all of them isdo you need a separate email tool.