Thinkific Layoffs, Flat Creator Sales and a Move Upmarket

On 23 September 2026, Thinkific announced it had eliminated positions affecting 96 employees. The Canadian course platform said it was realigning its workforce and operating model to speed up growth in Thinkific Plus, its offer for mid-market and enterprise customers, and to improve profitability and free cash flow, with about US$19 million in expected annualised savings (Thinkific, September 2026). Six weeks later, its third-quarter results showed what it is moving away from: revenue from its self-serve plans fell 3% on the year, while Plus grew 18% (Thinkific, November 2026).

Thinkific is one of the few course platforms that publishes audited accounts, so its filings are the clearest public window on how the course-creator market has done since the pandemic. We pulled six years of them into the charts below.

What creators sell has stopped growing

The best measure of how course creators are doing on a platform is how much they sell through it. Thinkific reports this as gross merchandise volume (GMV). Teachable, its closest rival, is private and owned by Hotmart (Teachable, 2024), and doesn’t publish a yearly equivalent. The only yearly figure we could find from Teachable itself is for 2020, when it said its creators “earned close to $400 million” (Teachable, 2021). It’s self-reported and not audited, so we show it as a single marked point rather than a line.

A flat total doesn’t mean every creator is standing still: some will be growing while others leave. But it does suggest that, on this platform at least, the pandemic jump in course buying became a new, level baseline rather than the start of a steady climb.

Revenue still grows, more slowly each year

Thinkific’s own revenue, what it earns from subscriptions and from processing creators’ payments, kept growing after creators’ sales levelled off. But the rate has fallen almost every year.

Part of the growth since 2023 has come from payments rather than new customers. Commerce revenue, from processing creators’ sales, grew 32% in 2025 to US$13.4 million, against 5% for subscriptions (Thinkific, March 2026). That’s the platform earning more from each dollar creators take, not creators taking more dollars.

The growth is now in Plus

Thinkific splits its revenue between Plus, for larger organisations, and self-serve, the plans customers sign up for on their own. Since 2023, Plus has grown far faster.

Read alongside the September reorganisation, the direction is clear. Thinkific’s chief executive, Greg Smith, said the company was “encouraged by what we are seeing in our strategic move upmarket” (Thinkific, September 2026). The company is profitable on an adjusted basis, reporting adjusted EBITDA of US$1.8 million, or 10% of revenue, in the third quarter, before restructuring costs of US$4.7 million pushed it to a net loss.

Why it matters if you build courses

For most independent creators, a platform’s strategy matters more than its share price. A move upmarket doesn’t mean self-serve plans disappear, and nothing in the releases says they will. But companies put their people and product work where the growth is, and Thinkific has said where that is. Over time, that can show up in which features get built first, how plans are priced, and what support looks like for smaller accounts.

It also cuts the other way. If your course business is growing into an organisation, with staff training, client cohorts or a team of instructors, a platform investing in larger customers may suit you better than before.

The wider point is that the course market’s pandemic boom is over, on the evidence of the one platform that shows its numbers. Growth now comes from selling more to existing customers and moving upmarket, not from a flood of new creators. That’s consistent with what we’ve seen in AI course creation on course platforms: platforms competing on features to win and keep customers in a market that has stopped expanding quickly.

What we’d do

• If you’re on Thinkific: nothing drastic. Keep an eye on announcements about self-serve plans and pricing over the next two quarters, and judge the platform on what it does for your learners.
• Whatever platform you use: keep your own copy of your course content and your student list, so a change in strategy is a decision you get to make, not one made for you.
• If you’re choosing a platform: treat business health as a tiebreaker, not the main test. What matters most is whether it supports the way people learn, which is what our upcoming Teachable vs Thinkific comparison will look at. Until then, our online course design checklist covers what to look for in any course, and how to create an online course that sells covers the business side.

Data in the charts comes from Thinkific’s annual and quarterly results releases, linked in each chart’s sources. Plus shares are our calculation from the reported figures.