Why creators are leaving ThriveCart — and what it actually costs now

What ThriveCart costs in 2026

Let me save you the twenty minutes I just spent.

I went to thrivecart.com/pricing to check a number for this article.

It bounced me to a login screen.

Not a paywall. Not a "request a quote" form. A 302 redirect straight to /signin/. I ran it again on 1 September 2026 in case I'd fat-fingered something. Same thing.

Their homepage names three plans — Standard, Pro+, Enterprise — and puts a dollar figure next to exactly none of them.

I have opinions about this. If I have to start a trial to find out what you charge, you've already told me something about the number.

But here's the thing about checkout pages: they have to name a price. You can't legally take someone's card without telling them the amount.

And ThriveCart's homepage buttons point straight at their own checkout subdomain.

So I read the prices off there instead.

Read on 1 September 2026. ThriveCart's marketing site publishes none of these — the one-time and monthly figures came off its own checkout pages, the Pro+ and ThriveAcademy figures off its own support docs. Prices move. Go check them yourself before you buy anything, including mine.

Now. None of those numbers is criminal on its own.

$495 for a cart is fine. I'd pay it.

What's not fine is which of them you find out about, and when.

Problem 1: the lifetime deal got hollowed out

First let me kill a rumour, because I keep seeing it and it's wrong.

"ThriveCart killed the lifetime deal." No, they didn't. The $495 one-time licence is sitting on their checkout right now. Go buy it.

What actually happened is quieter and, I think, worse.

They kept the licence and moved the good stuff out of it.

Pro+ is "$295 per year," described on their own helpdesk as "an optional upgrade available to users on top of our already powerful lifetime access Standard account."

Fine. Optional. Except read the next line on that same page:

There it is.

Not "we killed lifetime." Just: the good stuff moved upstairs, and the stairs are $295 a year now.

A guy who'd been on ThriveCart five years described the feeling better than I can — the upgrade prompts are a "constant reminder of the fact that ThriveCart is getting some of its newest features in spite of the fact that you bought their lifetime deal."

You paid once so you'd stop having this conversation. Now you have it every time you open the dashboard.

How I solved it

I had to pick a side on this when I built SoloStore, so I'll tell you which side and why.

There are no tiers.

Not "fair tiers." None. One licence, one price, and everything in the product is in it.

The only recurring charge is $99 a year for updates and support, and it's genuinely optional — skip it and your store keeps running exactly as it is, forever.

Now, why should you believe that'll hold?

Not because I'm a nicer human than whoever runs ThriveCart. I'd be an idiot to ask you to bet on my character.

Believe it because there's no upstairs to move anything into. I'd have to build the tier first. And then I'd have to publish this page with that paragraph still on it.

Problem 2: Learn is being switched off at the end of 2026

This is the one that made me write the article.

It's not a rumour, it's not a competitor's blog post. It's sitting in ThriveCart's own support docs, where roughly nobody will read it:

Products get replaced. That's software, not scandal.

The only question that matters is what your lifetime licence is worth on the new thing.

Same FAQ answers it. Your lifetime Learn or Learn+ licence "is valid on the new Academy platform for the Courses module" — and "everything else requires an active Academy subscription."

Everything else.

Read that phrase again, because it's carrying an enormous amount of weight.

ThriveAcademy runs $47 to $127 a month. The tiers cap you at 2,000 members, then 10,000, then unlimited. Video storage caps at 100GB, then 500GB.

Custom domain and white-labelling? Higher tiers.

So if you paid $195 once for Learn+ specifically so you'd never see a monthly bill for hosting your own courses — that bill is arriving. It has a date on it.

How I solved it

Here's the stand, and it's the entire reason SoloStore is self-hosted instead of another SaaS with my logo on it.

I can't do this to you.

Not "I wouldn't." I can't.

When you buy SoloStore you deploy it to your own Railway account. It runs on your server, against your database. I ship new versions; you decide whether to take them.

There's no lever on my end that reaches into your install and switches a module off. There's no server of mine your students log in against.

If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, your store would keep taking money.

That's not a customer-service promise. It's just where the code lives — and I put it there on purpose, after a decade of watching platforms I'd already paid for quietly change the deal.

Problem 3: they ration the one feature they're famous for

ThriveCart built its whole reputation on order bumps.

The little checkbox at checkout that adds a second product to the cart. It's the thing people say when you ask them why they use it.

Here's what the Standard licence gives you, in ThriveCart's own words on their own homepage:

"1 Bump Offer."

One.

Multiple order bumps are Pro+. Which is $295 a year.

And this is the bit I find genuinely cheeky: their own plan table sells those multiple bumps with "↑ 30% AOV increase" printed right next to them.

So they've run the numbers on what the cap is costing you.

And then put those numbers in the marketing copy. For the tier above the one you bought.

How I solved it

Order bumps, one-click upsells, downsells and multi-step funnels are in the licence. All of them.

A bump can carry its own price, separate from what that product sells for normally.

Every funnel has an analytics tab showing which of your bumps and upsells people actually say yes to, and what the whole thing made.

There's no tier above yours, so there's nothing left to ration.

Problem 4: the affiliate centre is a second annual bill

Want other people out there selling your course for you?

The Affiliate Center and Joint Venture Contracts are both listed under Pro+. Not under the licence you bought.

That's not a complaint I dug out of a review site. It's on the plan table on their homepage.

How I solved it

It's in the licence. You invite people, set their commission, and pay every affiliate at once with one-click PayPal payouts.

One thing to be straight about.

Mine is much newer than theirs and it's still marked beta. It shipped in August 2026.

ThriveCart's has years of real production use behind it — tiers, JV contracts, the lot.

If you run a serious affiliate operation with JV partners and tiered commissions, theirs is the more proven tool today.

Problem 5: when ThriveCart has a bad day, so does your checkout

I found this one by accident.

I was rebuilding the SoloStore landing page and wanted to look at a competitor's page I liked. Clicked the link.

Got a big fat 504 Gateway Error.

Refreshed. Nothing.

Refreshed again. Still nothing.

Then I looked at the URL properly. It had "thrivecart" in it.

Sales pages down. Students locked out of their content. Checkouts dead. Not just for him — for everybody on the platform.

On Friday 3 July 2026 that went on for something like ten hours, during business hours, reportedly after an unplanned database update. A seller posted this while it was happening:

There was another on 5 August 2026 — a DDoS attack, sorted in under two hours.

And it isn't only the big, obvious blackouts.

I sit in a private mastermind with a group of people who sell digital products for a living. Which means I get to watch this stuff land on real businesses in real time, months before it reaches a review site.

In March, someone opened a thread there titled simply “ThriveCart alternatives?”

Read that middle sentence again. Not a single transaction since March 5.

That thread ran to 28 replies.

Last month, a different member started another one. The title was “Getting to the breaking point with Thrivecart.”

His summary: the awkward checkout UI is one thing, “it's another thing when the server is down with increasing frequency.” He attached a screenshot of ThriveCart's own Server error page.

That last line is the one that matters. Not down. Down with increasing frequency.

And notice what the first guy said about why he hadn't left yet: he uses ThriveCart for course delivery too, so leaving means moving every course as well.

That's not loyalty. That's a hostage situation with good manners.

Here's the part I find quietly damning.

You can watch all of this in the search data. “thrivecart down” normally gets 10–20 US searches a month.

It hit 90 in March 2026 and 70 in July.

March. The same month a man in my mastermind couldn't take a payment for eleven days.

Here's the mental model I wish somebody had handed me in 2014.

On ThriveCart you don't have a shop. You have a stall inside a very large shopping mall.

Same building as tens of thousands of other sellers. Same front doors. Same electricity.

Completely fine on a normal day.

But when the mall's doors jam shut, every shop inside is shut. Including yours.

And you don't own the doors. So you stand there and wait for the landlord, refreshing a status page, watching people who wanted to buy from you fail to.

How I solved it

Let me be honest here in a way that costs me something.

Self-hosting does not give you better uptime. I'm not going to tell you it does.

It moves uptime onto you and your host, and your host can absolutely have a bad Tuesday too.

What it removes is shared fate.

One vendor's database migration can't take your checkout down alongside thirty thousand other people's, because your checkout isn't in that building.

It's on your server, on your domain, running your Stripe keys.

So when the big mall goes dark and everyone's frantically refreshing, you're just not part of that story. That's the claim. It's smaller than "more reliable" — and unlike that one, it's true.

Problem 6: the bugs land in front of your customers

An outage is at least honest. Everything's down, everyone can see it, and it comes back.

The bugs are worse. They're quiet, and they happen in front of the person holding a credit card.

A seller who moved over from Kajabi put it plainly in August 2026: “the system has so many bugs and I, as a result, lost so much credibility with my clients.”

Another: “Every week, we discover a new bug.”

Another: “Every time they fix one issue, they seem to break five more.”

What got my attention is that the same failures repeat across unrelated reviewers, in different countries, over three years.

Duplicate charges. Sales that never appear in the dashboard. Subscriptions cancelling paying customers on their own.

One reviewer reported a duplicate-transaction bug still open a year and a half after they filed it.

And it's not always dramatic. Sometimes it's just the software refusing to do the one thing you asked.

There's a thread on r/AskMarketing titled “Anyone else having trouble saving checkouts on ThriveCart?”

The top reply is another user saying: “i have the same problem, do you find a solution for this?”

Two hours of work. Gone. And the only answer in the thread is someone else with the same problem.

And then there's the part that turns a bug into a grudge.

Getting someone to fix it.

Support is email only. No live chat, no phone.

“24 hour response? More like 3 weeks,” wrote one seller after three years on the platform. Another, in 2026: “ThriveCart still does not have any customer service.”

Tickets closed without resolution. Threads that just stop being answered.

Daniel Throssell — a copywriter with a large list, who has sold a lot of things through that cart — wrote this to his subscribers on 16 May 2026, in the middle of a week where payment, subscriber export and course delivery were all failing him at once:

“A hollow veneer.” That is a professional writer choosing his words carefully about a tool he pays for.

In that same email he was apologising to his own customers for a duplicate charge issue and offering to make it right personally.

That's the real cost, and it's the thing I keep coming back to. The bug was ThriveCart's. The apology was his.

One last thing, and it's the part that bothers me most.

In July, someone posted on r/DigitalMarketing that ThriveCart was deleting complaints in its own Facebook group:

I want to be fair here: I can verify the ban happened to that person, because they said so. I can't independently verify a policy of deletion, and I'm not going to state one as fact.

But I'll tell you what it looks like from outside.

It looks like a company that would rather manage the complaining than the bug.

That's the combination that actually pushes people out. Not the bug — the bug plus the silence.

How I solved it

I'm not going to stand here and tell you my software has no bugs.

It has bugs. It's software. I found several this month.

What I did instead was make the fixing impossible to hide.

Every single thing I ship goes on a public changelog at /updates — features, improvements and bug fixes, each one tagged, in plain English, with the date it shipped.

Including the embarrassing ones. There's a line on there about checkout buttons that ignored clicks. Another about prices displaying in the wrong currency.

Go and count it. In August 2026 alone there are 127 entries on that page — 61 new features, 41 improvements and 29 bug fixes.

Hold that up against “their devs are doing NOTHING to fix it.” That's the comparison I'd like to be judged on.

I'd rather you read that page and judge the pace yourself than take my word for it.

And I don't have a Facebook group to ban you from. You reply to my emails and I'm the one who reads them.

The second thing is structural, and it matters more than any changelog.

Every sale runs through your own Stripe account.

So the record of what you were actually paid is Stripe's — not my software's summary of it. If something goes strange in my dashboard, your money and your transaction history are never in question.

That's the failure mode I most wanted closed, because it's the one that costs you a customer instead of an afternoon.

On support: ThriveCart has a team and I'm one person — but I'm the person who wrote the code. More on that below.

What I can promise is that you're never locked out waiting on me. You have the server, the database and the Stripe account. Worst case, you go around me entirely.

Problem 7: your own domain is a paid add-on, three times over

By default everything on ThriveCart lives on ThriveCart. Your checkout is youraccount.thrivecart.com. So are your courses.

You can fix that. It just isn't free — and I went and read exactly how unfree it is.

Start with the checkout. ThriveCart's documentation settles it in one sentence:

So putting your checkout on your own domain means the $295-a-year tier, on top of the licence you already bought.

Courses are worse. Custom domains for Learn courses were a Learn+ feature. And Learn+ is closed:

So if you joined ThriveCart after May, that door is shut. There is no version of Learn you can buy today that puts your courses on your own address.

Which leaves ThriveAcademy — the subscription everyone gets moved to at the end of 2026.

Its own feature table is blunt about it. Custom Domain: No on Starter. Yes on Growth. Yes on Scale.

So the cheapest Academy plan that puts your courses on your domain is Growth: $87 a month, or $67 billed annually.

White-Label Branding is Scale only. $127 a month, or $97 annually.

Add it up. Your own domain on the checkout, $295 a year. Your own domain on your courses, $804 a year at best. Both, plus the ThriveCart branding removed, $1,164 a year.

For an address you already own and already pay for.

There's a design ceiling underneath all this too. ThriveCart's visual editor restyles the elements already on the page — it won't let you add or remove form fields, or change the structure.

How I solved it

It's your domain. It's included. There is no tier.

Store, sales pages, checkout, lessons, members area, community — one address, yours, from the first day. Not $295 a year, not $804, not $1,164. Nothing.

White-labelling isn't something I sell you either. It's a checkbox.

There's a “Powered by Solo Store” line at the bottom of your store and your sales pages. One toggle in Settings → Design removes it completely.

Off means off. Nobody browsing your store can tell you're running anything but your own software.

Or leave it on and drop your partner code in beside it. Then it's your link — anyone who buys Solo Store after clicking it pays you 30% of the sale.

So the branding ThriveCart charges $1,164 a year to remove is, here, either gone in one click or a thing that earns you money.

And it never appears on checkout. Nothing of mine sits between your buyer and the payment.

Your students never leave your site, because there's nowhere else to go.

And you have the files, so the ceiling on customisation is however far you feel like going.

This isn't something ThriveCart is merely behind on. It's something they can't sell you at any tier, because there's no price at which a hosted platform hands you the server.

Problem 8: you can't hand the tax to anyone

Sales tax is the least glamorous problem on this page and the one that quietly eats the most weekends.

ThriveCart is not a merchant of record. It calculates tax. It does not remit it.

Their own docs say ThriveCart “is not a tax authority and the information contained on this page is for guidance only.” Actual remittance sits on a roadmap.

Tax collection on the Standard licence also carries a surcharge. It used to be Pro-only.

So the calculating is theirs and the filing is yours. A seller said it better than the documentation does:

ThriveCart can add the tax to the order, “but then I have to be responsible for dealing with two dozen different tax rates (each EU country is different) and then remitting the tax, and that's just too much for me to deal with.”

That's the whole thing in one sentence. The tax gets collected. You still have to become an expert in twenty-seven filing regimes.

How I solved it

I'll stop being even-handed for a moment, because on this one I'm simply better.

Stripe sells a service called Managed Payments.

Switch it on and Stripe becomes the merchant of record. They calculate the tax, collect it, file it and remit it, in every jurisdiction, on your behalf.

You never touch a VAT return again.

It costs an extra 3.5% per transaction on top of normal processing. That is the cheapest employee I have ever hired.

ThriveCart doesn't integrate with it. So on ThriveCart the option simply doesn't exist — you get the tax calculated, and then you go and deal with it yourself.

SoloStore plugs into Managed Payments natively. Per product, as a toggle.

I built that for completely selfish reasons: I did not want to spend one more evening of my life on quarterly returns.

It saves me somewhere between five and ten hours a month, and I'd have built it if not one other person ever bought the software.

Two things I'll be precise about, because this is exactly where people oversell.

SoloStore itself never becomes the merchant of record. Stripe does. I'm a piece of software, not a reseller of your work.

And if you leave the toggle off, the filing is yours. The difference isn't that I do your taxes — it's that you have the toggle, and on ThriveCart there isn't one.

Either way you're on Stripe, in your own account, and my cut of the sale is still nothing.

Where ThriveCart still wins

A page that only flatters itself is an advert. So, briefly, the other side.

Context I'd want if I were you: most ThriveCart customers are happy. Trustpilot has them at 4.4 out of 5 across 537 reviews. Everything above is structural and documented — not a mob.

What they genuinely do better:

• Quizzes, certificates and gamification. SoloStore has lessons, sections, drip and progress tracking. It doesn't have those three, and ThriveAcademy does. If your course needs a quiz, buy theirs.
• A more mature cart engine. Years of volume and A/B testing behind it. If squeezing the checkout is your only lever, that experience counts for something.
• A longer-running affiliate centre. SoloStore's is included rather than $295 a year, but theirs has the track record.
• More integrations. ThriveCart connects to nearly everything. SoloStore connects to Stripe, Kit and MailerLite.
• Nothing to host. They run it for you. SoloStore is a five-minute Railway setup and about $7 a month.

And support: ThriveCart has a team. SoloStore has me — which means the person answering your email is the one who wrote the code, and can ship the fix the same day.

So should you actually switch?

Not automatically. I can think of three honest answers and only one of them is mine.

Stay on ThriveCart if the checkout is your product. High-volume offers, deep upsell flows, an affiliate army you spent years training. The cart is good and $295 a year is a rounding error against that kind of revenue.

Go to ThriveAcademy if you need quizzes, certificates and gamification, and a monthly bill is a fair price for never thinking about any of this again. That's a legitimate trade.

Buy something you own if what you actually wanted — back when you bought a lifetime licence in the first place — was to stop having this conversation every eighteen months.

That third one is the entire reason SoloStore exists.

I didn't build it to start a software company. I built it because I'd been selling courses since 2014 and I was tired of renting the floor I was standing on.

Last honest thing: the migration is manual. You export your videos and files from ThriveCart and rebuild the products here. There's no importer, and I'm not going to pretend it's a fun afternoon.

Though you can point Claude at your store and have it do a good chunk of the clicking — which is a sentence I genuinely did not expect to write about course platforms.