ThriveCart vs SamCart vs Payhip: Best Checkout 2026
Key Takeaways
- ThriveCart is the money tool: 0% platform fees, strong upsells, and the $495 lifetime license is still on the table (now with new $47–$87/month options alongside it).
- SamCart is the polished all-in-one, but the useful conversion features (upsells, order bumps, A/B tests, affiliate center) live on the $199/month Pro plan.
- Payhip is the simplest start: free forever, every feature included, and it takes a 5% cut of sales until you upgrade.
- On fee math alone, ThriveCart and SamCart win once you pass roughly $1,000/month in sales. Below that, Payhip’s free plan is the cheapest way to sell.
- ThriveCart’s affiliate program is the most generous of the three on paper, advertised at up to 55% recurring commission.
ThriveCart spent years being famous for one thing: you paid $495 once and never gave checkout a second thought. Then in July 2026 the pricing page flipped, and suddenly the site leads with monthly plans. If you read a review written before summer, parts of it are already out of date, including a few of ours.
So I re-ran the numbers on the three checkout platforms solo founders keep asking about: ThriveCart, SamCart, and Payhip. One charges once. One charges monthly. One charges per sale. Pick wrong and it costs you; pick right and it’s the least stressful part of launching. Here’s how they stack up.
For transparency: the links to each platform below go to the vendors directly. Some may carry tracking parameters and become affiliate links as our programs are approved. We disclose this everywhere on this site, and it doesn’t change what’s recommended here.
How I Evaluated These Three
An honest note first, because this is the kind of comparison where a made-up “I tested all three for a month” story would be convenient and dishonest. I don’t have a storefront on this site yet, so I haven’t pushed a live card through these checkouts. What I did instead: pulled current pricing straight from each platform (twice, since two of them changed mid-year), read the vendor help docs, and sat through a long pile of G2, Capterra, and community-thread opinions from people who do run revenue through these tools daily.
Where a claim comes from a vendor’s own marketing rather than independent reviews, I say so. Where the math is mine, it’s labeled as math. That’s the deal.
Context matters too. As a solo founder running this site, most of the automation I actually operate goes through Make and n8n, which is why webhook quality and integration quirks get extra weight in all my tool reviews. Checkout is the “boring” layer that everything else plugs into. If it’s flaky, nothing else matters.
What These Tools Actually Are
All three solve the same core problem: taking money for digital products without you building a checkout from raw Stripe components. After that they diverge.
- ThriveCart is a checkout and funnel specialist. It builds the cart, the bump offers, the upsell pages, and the recovery emails. It doesn’t try to host your whole course library (though a bundled Academy plan handles courses now).
- SamCart is checkout plus a storefront. It bundles a page builder, a courses app, members areas, and AI helpers around its CheckoutOS core.
- Payhip is a full merchant platform: it hosts your product pages, files, memberships, and courses, and simply takes a cut instead of a subscription.
The Pricing Picture in October 2026
Here’s where it gets interesting, because the July pricing shakeups rewrote the value comparisons older reviews rely on.
ThriveCart still offers the lifetime license (a single line near the bottom of its pricing page), but now leads with Standard at $47/month and Pro+ at $87/month, each with a 30-day free trial, and every plan bundles a ThriveCart Academy subscription for courses and communities. At $47 a month, you’d pass the $495 lifetime price in about 11 months. The lifetime deal remains, for now, the cheapest long-run option if you can stomach paying it upfront.
SamCart restructured this summer too. Core runs $79/month, Pro $199/month, with 25% off annual billing ($59 and $149 monthly-equivalent respectively) and a 7-day free trial. The company’s help center notes that legacy, revenue-based tiers still exist for older accounts, but new plans are fixed per tier.
Payhip didn’t change its model because it never had one to change: Free Forever at $0/month with a 5% cut of each sale, Plus at $29/month with a 2% cut, and Pro at $99/month with zero transaction fee. Every feature ships on every tier, including the free one.
| ThriveCart | SamCart | Payhip | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $47/mo (or $495 lifetime) | $79/mo | $0/mo |
| Top-tier monthly price | $87/mo (Pro+) | $199/mo (Pro) | $99/mo (Pro) |
| Platform fee | 0% | 0% | 5% (Free), 2% (Plus), 0% (Pro) |
| Free trial | 30 days | 7 days | Always-free tier |
| Hosts your storefront & courses | Somewhat (Academy bundle) | Yes, full pages/courses | Yes, full storefront |
| Order bumps & 1-click upsells | Yes, Standard and up | Pro plan and up | Basic upsell options |
| A/B testing | Yes | Pro plan only | Not a core feature |
| Run your own affiliate program | Yes (Pro+) | Yes (Pro) | Built in |
| Sales tax handling | Automation on Pro+ | Paid add-on tier | Handled on EU sales |
That last row matters more than it looks. If you sell to customers in Europe, VAT is the problem that turns a simple checkout into a compliance headache. Payhip handles it as part of the sale at every tier, which alone justifies its 5% fee for plenty of small sellers.
ThriveCart: The Money-First Pick
ThriveCart’s pitch hasn’t changed under the new pricing: build a checkout that converts, then squeeze more out of every buyer. The Standard plan covers customized checkout pages, unlimited products and funnels, one order bump, one-click upsells and downsells, A/B testing, and abandoned-cart recovery. That’s most of the revenue toolkit in the entry tier, which is rare in this space.
Pro+ ($87/month, or more for the lifetime license) adds the parts that growing sellers want: multiple bumps, the affiliate center with automated payouts, subscription upgrades and downgrades with dunning, custom domains, and sales tax automation.
What’s the catch? ThriveCart is checkout software, not a platform. You still need somewhere for the customer to land and something to deliver the product, whether that’s a landing page you own, or the bundled Academy tier for courses. The template editor also draws a fair number of “fine, not beautiful” comments in community threads. It’s a selling machine, not a design showcase.
One more thing worth knowing: ThriveCart’s own affiliate program advertises commissions as high as 55%, recurring as long as the referred customer stays subscribed. If you end up loving it, referring it pays better than most of what’s in this space.
Check ThriveCart’s current pricing (30-day trial, and scroll down if you want the lifetime option).
SamCart: The Polished All-in-One
SamCart is the one that feels the most finished out of the box. CheckoutOS, the page builder, courses, a members area, cart abandonment flows, and a set of AI design and copy helpers all ship in every plan, including $79 Core. For a founder who wants one login instead of four, that’s real value.
Here’s the tradeoff that decides most comparisons: the features that actually lift average order value aren’t in Core. One-click upsells, order bumps, A/B testing, dunning, the affiliate center, and API access all sit on Pro at $199/month. Core is a competent checkout that sells one product at a time, at nearly double ThriveCart’s entry price.
SamCart’s processing rates are standard for the industry (around 2.9% plus 30 cents through its own SamPay, or your connected Stripe/PayPal account), and it charges nothing on top like a platform fee. A built-in sales tax collection add-on runs at a small percentage of processed volume depending on tier.
Reviews are mostly warm on the experience and split on the price. Longtime users of legacy tiers report good results with revenue-based billing, while new customers on fixed tiers pay more upfront for features ThriveCart includes earlier. If you’re pre-revenue, Core is a lot of money for what it includes. If you’re doing five figures a month, Pro’s toolkit pays for itself fast.
See SamCart’s plan comparison (7-day trial on every tier).
Payhip: The Simplest Way to Start Selling
Payhip is the anti-scheme of this comparison. There’s no trial to remember, no tier you have to grow into, and no sales conversation asking about your revenue goals. You sign up, upload a file, price it, and you have a checkout with a hosted product page. Five percent of your sales goes to Payhip. Done.
The plan ladder buys down the fee: $29/month Plus cuts it to 2%, and $99/month Pro eliminates it. Everything else (unlimited products, memberships, courses, coupon codes, EU VAT handling) is included from the free tier, which is a genuinely unusual amount of generosity in a category that loves feature gates.
The downside is honest too. Payhip isn’t a conversion laboratory. There’s no A/B testing, the upsell tooling is basic compared with ThriveCart’s bump-then-then-upsell flows, and customization sits between “clean” and “limited.” The 5% fee also compounds: at $10,000/month in sales, that’s $500 a month for a $99 plan that would cost you that out of pocket.
I like Payhip more than I expected to, though. It’s the tool I’d point a total beginner at without caveats, and the break-even math at the bottom section explains exactly when to graduate out of it. Plenty of sellers never do.
View Payhip’s pricing tiers (free forever, no time limit).
The Fee Math That Should Decide This
Platform fees sound abstract until you put real sales numbers under them. Here’s what each option costs per month at different revenue levels, ignoring card processing fees since you pay those roughly everywhere. The numbers are my own arithmetic from each platform’s listed prices.
| Monthly sales | Payhip Free | Payhip Plus | ThriveCart Std | SamCart Core |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $25 | $39 | $47 | $79 |
| $1,000 | $50 | $49 | $47 | $79 |
| $2,000 | $100 | $69 | $47 | $79 |
| $5,000 | $250 | $129 | $47 | $79 |
| $10,000 | $500 | $229 | $47 | $79 |
Three crossovers worth knowing. Below roughly $1,000 a month, Payhip’s free plan wins on price against everything here; Payhip Plus edges past ThriveCart’s $47 at about $900 in sales, since its 2% fee plus $29 works out to almost exactly $47 there. Once you cross $1,000 in sales, the pay-per-sale model turns on you: a seller doing $5,000 a month pays Payhip $250 a month for what ThriveCart charges $47 for, or SamCart $79.
And the lifetime deal keeps looking better the longer you run. Twenty months of ThriveCart Standard at $47 is $940. The $495 license beats it permanently after month 11. That’s what “buy once” actually means when the math is honest.
Who Should Pick Which
- Choose Payhip if you’re pre-launch, testing an idea, or selling under $1,000/month. Free, complete, and you can leave anytime.
- Choose ThriveCart if you’re selling $1,000+/month and want the revenue features (bumps, upsells, A/B tests) without monthly anxiety. The lifetime license is effectively a bet on your own business surviving, and it pays off quickly if it does.
- Choose SamCart if you want the storefront, courses, and checkout in one polished system and you’re already at a revenue level where Pro’s order-value tools earn their $199.
None of these are bad choices. SamCart is simply the most expensive starting line, and ThriveCart is the only one whose entry tier includes the money features.
What I’d Actually Do
My plan, for what it’s worth: if this were my first digital product, I’d start on Payhip Free and price it using the framework in our guide to pricing your first digital product. The 5% fee stings, but early-stage you have bigger problems than basis points. The moment I crossed $2,000 a month, I’d move to ThriveCart, because at that revenue the fee math flips hard and the upsell features would matter to my funnels.
And if all of this sounds like too many decisions at once, that’s fair. Our comparison of Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, and Payhip covers the merchant-of-record route that removes checkout design entirely and handles VAT for you. Sometimes the right checkout is the one you never think about.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the ThriveCart lifetime deal still available?
As of late 2026, yes. Reports following the July pricing change describe it as a single option near the bottom of the pricing page rather than the headline offer. Given how pricing shifts in this category, assume it won’t be there forever.
Does Payhip’s 5% fee disappear on paid plans?
It drops to 2% on the $29/month Plus plan and to zero on the $99/month Pro plan. Card processing fees stay on top regardless, same as with any platform.
Can you migrate between these tools later?
Product files and customer lists move reasonably well. What doesn’t move cleanly is your checkout links embedded in emails or ads. That’s the strongest argument for picking a tool meant to hold you for a while.
Is SamCart’s pricing based on revenue?
Not for new customers. SamCart’s current help center describes fixed per-tier pricing (Core $79, Pro $199). Legacy, revenue-based tiers exist for older accounts.
