If you're running a six-week ukulele cohort or a semester of theory drills that need to unlock one module at a time, the plan you pick determines whether that's five minutes of setup or a workaround involving manual emails every Monday. Here's what the current pricing pages for Podia and Thinkific actually say, and where they stay quiet.
Podia no longer has tiers to compare
Podia used to have a Free, Mover, Shaker structure where certain course features sat behind higher plans. That's gone. Podia now sells three plans (Mover at $42/mo, Shaker at $84/mo, Earthquaker at $150/mo billed annually), and the pricing page lists "Online courses" under a single "Everyone gets" section that applies across all three. There's no course-feature split between tiers on this page. The differences between Mover, Shaker, and Earthquaker are subscriber limits, transaction fees, product/video/space caps, and a handful of marketing tools (Affiliate Marketing, Upsells, PayPal, Zapier) that show up starting at Shaker.
Here's the limit of what I can tell you from this page: it doesn't mention drip content or student progress tracking by name anywhere, on any plan. "Online courses" is listed as a universal feature, but the pricing page doesn't break out whether that includes scheduled content release or a progress dashboard. If drip scheduling is the deciding feature for your cohort, don't take my word for it and don't take this page's word for it either, because it isn't in there. Check Podia's course-builder documentation or ask their support chat directly before you commit a semester's worth of content to a plan that might not do what you need.
What is confirmed for every Podia plan: unlimited customers, a real product cap that scales by tier (50 on Mover, 150 on Shaker, unlimited on Earthquaker), and email subscriber limits that scale the same way (100, 500, 1,000). If your practice-module list is small and your main need is "can I even build a course," Mover at $42/mo clears that bar. Whether it clears the drip-scheduling bar is not something this page answers.
Thinkific's cheapest tier gets you further, on paper
Thinkific's Basic plan runs $40/mo billed annually, just under Podia's Mover. Basic includes unlimited courses, video lessons, quizzes, student discussions, one community, digital product sales up to five items, and what the page calls "Sales and student dashboards" described as seeing "revenue, enrolments, and completion in one view." That's the clearest progress-tracking signal on either pricing page. It's not a full per-lesson completion breakdown, but "completion" as a dashboard metric is stated outright for Basic, Thinkific's entry tier.
Drip content specifically isn't named on Basic either. The closest match on the whole page is under the Start plan ($82/mo billed annually): "Assignments and quizzes" comes with the line "Grade student work and unlock lessons as they progress." That's a progression-gating mechanic, tied to grading, and it's listed as a Start-tier feature, not something confirmed on Basic. If what you need is content that unlocks on a calendar (week 1 opens Monday, week 2 opens the following Monday, regardless of whether the student finished anything) rather than content gated by completing an assignment, this page doesn't confirm that Basic has it, and the feature Thinkific does spell out sits one tier up.
Grow, at $164/mo, adds student engagement reports "to see where learners get stuck and which lessons drive completion," which is a deeper version of the same tracking idea, but that's well past what a solo music teacher running one or two cohorts needs to pay for.
What this actually means for your decision
Neither pricing page states "drip content" as a named, confirmed feature on any tier. That's a real gap in what I can tell you, and pretending otherwise would be guessing. Here's what is confirmed:
- Podia: no course-feature tiering at all, so if drip scheduling exists in the course builder, it should be available on Mover at $42/mo, but that's an inference from the page's structure, not a stated feature.
- Thinkific: progress-style "completion" tracking is stated on Basic at $40/mo. A lesson-unlock mechanic is stated, but only starting at Start, $82/mo, and it's tied to assignment grading rather than a calendar-based drip.
If weekly, calendar-based unlocking is the specific thing you're building around, the honest next step is a five-minute test account on each platform. Build one fake module with a scheduled release date and watch what actually happens. That's a better answer than anything either pricing page will give you, and it costs nothing during Podia's 30-day trial or Thinkific's free trial period. For a teacher running paid cohorts, that half hour of testing is cheaper than finding out in week three of a live course that the unlock didn't work the way the plan implied.