Stop overpaying for Samcart - The best online checkout tools for courses in 2025

I can't believe samcart just did this to their customers. They've quietly switched from a fixed, fairly fair monthly fee to basically a percentage model. And some people's bills have gone from their standard $150 a month, which, to be fair, was probably on the higher side of what people were wanting to pay for their checkout, to $900 a month or more. If you're a SamCart user and you haven't checked recently, you might want to go check your bill and fingers crossed, you you don't get a nasty shock. But if you have recently or you are just worried about that they're going to do the old switcheroo on you and you're looking for a new checkout solution, then you need to hear this, because I'm about to share the alternatives that are actually way better and way cheaper. So, hi, if we haven't met before, I'm Kate from hellofunnels. I've made over $6 million in online courses, mostly on autopilot, and I've helped thousands of amazing course creators to do the same. And today I'm going to take you behind the scenes inside our deep dive into the best possible checkouts out there. Right now, if you got a nasty shock on your SAM cart bill like we did, or if maybe you're just looking for a new checkout or an alternative, we've done the research and we've come up with three that are absolutely brilliant. So let's dive right on it.

All right, let's just take a minute first up to have a quick chat about what Samcart did. And thing is, it's not just Samcart. I have a personal conspiracy theory that about 12 to 18 months ago there was some kind of tech conference and someone got up and said, hey, you're all undercharging 10x your prices, because pretty much since then, that's what happened for so many of the tools that we use, activecampaign, lead pages and so many others. And now samcart have jumped on the hey, let's just become really inexpensive and unaffordable bandwagon. I don't know who thinks this is good business advice given the current climate, because hey, guys, maybe read the room. But this is what's happened. And for us in particular, if you go and have a look on their pricing page right now, you'll see it's no longer just do you want the basic or the advance as two prices? It's now this horrific sliding scale. And then once you get up to anything above 10 to $20,000 a month, which, you know, most people are aiming to do, I believe, then it starts to get up into the hundreds of dol. Ours went from $150 to nearly $900. That's a month, and that's in US dollars as well. And we're in Australia, so right now that hurts. So like I said, we were very quick to go, okay, what are we going to do? Where are we going to move to? Because I'm not paying $10,000 a year plus for a checkout software. And we're growing. Is that. So that's going to grow to like. No. And it's really just the, like, even the morality of it, I just don't agree with it. So when someone does that, I leave. So we went and we did a deep dive. We went and looked at all of the standard players, went and revisited them and had a look, see what they were doing now, what features they had. Because the fact is, after being online for as long as I have, I've got a bit of a list of what my checkout needs to do and I'll let you know the criteria. So, number one, I want to fix pricing. None of this percentage model bollocks which they all seem to be jumping on. I wanted it to have a good track record for being stable. So I wasn't looking for any, you know, shiny new thing that was popping up and was like $20 or something. Like, no, I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount, but I want you to actually be a quality product. So I wanted to know that big businesses out there were using it and had been using it for a while. Next, it had to look good and I had to load fast, especially on mobile. Next thing, and this one was really important because we have a lot of different offers and they're not always completely straightforward how they're delivered. So I wanted something that had a direct integration with the rest of my tech stack. I didn't want to be doing zaps back and forth because that just becomes a logistical nightmare. Then the zaps fail and then there's angry people sending you emails and I just didn't want the hassle. Another really important one, again we're based in Australia, is we have to be able to calculate tax like GST or which is the same as like VAT in other countries. We have to be able to calculate tax on top of our sales for people who live in Australia. And again, I don't want to have to find another plugin to do this and band Aid it all together, I wanted it just to be part of the software. We tick a box, we set it up and it just works. Next, I want to be able to use Stripe and PayPal and if there was any extra type of, you know, payment processes, that was a bonus. But I want those two as a minimum. Then, of course, it needed to have order bumps that looked good, that I could edit and it needed to have one click upsells again, looked good, needed to be able to be edited and look really lovely so they convert well. And finally, clear reporting, reporting that shows me how offers are doing, how our upsells are doing, what our average order value is, you know, basic stuff, which for some reason so many checkout softwares just don't have. All right, in case you can't tell just from that list, I'm a bit of a nerd and I've been out there testing things for a long time. And if you would like my tech recommendations, not just for checkouts, but for your entire online course tech stack, there's a link below. You can grab my tech guide. It's going to walk you through everything you need. The ones that I love, the ones that are great budget options as well. So just jump in, grab that below. All right, let's get back to it. So now you know what my criteria is. I narrowed it down to two and they didn't all tick all the boxes, but they both ticked most. So the first one that I looked at really seriously considered was ThriveCart. We actually have a license to ThriveCart. We've bought it previously. And that's one of the things I both like and don't like about ThriveCart is that they have a lifetime license pricing. So you buy it once, you own it forever. Which sounds good at the time, but it did kind of mean that they ended up getting in a bit of trouble where they just didn't have enough revenue to be able to sort of keep up with the demands of their product. Well, this is my reading between the lines Anyway, because about 18 months to two years ago, they had some real issues with reliability. They'd done some updates, there's loads of bugs. And that's when we actually left thrivecart the first time, because, you know, I want my checkout to be stable. Right. So the reason I was looking at them again was since that time they've had new owners. It seems like they've been really, you know, quite dedicated to going in, updating it, bringing it up to date and Making sure that everything is working smoothly. I know several people who've used them throughout that time and had zero issues, so I wasn't so worried about that. It also ticks every other box on the list apart from one, and that was the direct integrations. Sadly, they do not currently have a direct integration with Circle, which I use to provide my online courses and programs. And so that was a bit of a deal breaker for me. So we had to go look for another option. And to be honest, at this point I was like, there is no other option. We just can't sell things or we're going to have to ask people to send us cash in the mail. I don't know. Luckily I'm in a wonderful mastermind group. I put my little rant in there and one of my friends said that they are in the process of moving to a new tool. Well, sorry, not new, just a tool I hadn't heard of before. One that's probably not shared quite as commonly called Spiffy and Spiffy Co. I'll pop the link below because there's actually two checkouts out there called Spiffy. One's more for E commerce, but this one is for course creators and this is the one that I'm really that we are using and that I recommend. Now Spiffy actually ticks every single box on my list apart from the reporting. The reporting is okay, but hopefully they're going to make some updates to that soon and then that'll get a big green tick. Not just a sort of a like a little question mark on my checklist. But other than that, so far so good. It looks great. It's really simple to use. Like I said, it's got the one click, upsells order bumps, the automatic tax, the Stripe, the PayPal, all great. It integrates with my entire tech stack directly, which is wonderful. And the icing on the cakes. Remember I said I wasn't going to go use any new unproven tool was that Amy Porterfield uses Spiffy. Okay. So if anyone is going to be my canary in the mine to go ahead of me and test it and make sure they run millions of dollars of traffic through it and make sure it really works and then give their, you know, their thumbs up approval, I'm pretty happy for that to be Amy. So Amy's used it, she's tested it, she's happy with it. So therefore I'm taking that as, you know, that big green tick and that's what we've gone for and so far super, super happy. It's integrated really, really well and you know, we're got a couple more products to bring across but we really, really love it now pricing wise because again, that was a consideration. The pricing plan we've gone for is $99 a month. And I know some of you listening might be, oh, $99 a month, that's still a lot. Or even Thrive car, which I believe is between 4 to $500 one time only. Again, it can be a bit out of reach. So I wanted to throw at the end here a budget option. Now this budget option, it doesn't tick all of my boxes, but it ticks enough to be a.

Quite often if you are just getting started. If you do have lower revenue levels, you don't need all the bells and whistles yet anyway. So the one I recommend for people who are a bit more budget conscious or are in that beginner stage is stand store. It's really inexpensive, it's really simple. It does what you need to do to get you started. And then if you find over time as you're growing, you're like, you know what, I'm kind of growing out of this. I think I need a few other things. Then come and check out the other two that I mentioned. Now before I jump off, there is one thing that I want to share which is really, really important for those of you who are using SAM Cart. Okay. This is like, I feel like it's like the warning on the packet of cigarettes, right? Don't go and cancel your SAM cart right now because it could actually cost you money. And so the reason that not a lot of people actually realize is when you sign up with SAM Cart and when you get SAM Cart and it's. And I'm not just throwing them under the bus here, they're not the only ones that do it. But basically the way that SAM Cart works, if you offer products that have payment plans, so I'm not talking about recurring like, not like membership style, but maybe you've got an online course and it's got, you know, a six part pay or a 12 part pay, whatever it is. So if you have those and you have ones that are outstanding, so you're kind of currently getting a few hundred or a few thousand tens of thousands even a month in these payment plans from previous sales. If you go and cancel your SAM card account right now, they will stop because they actually live inside samcart. So you're going to want to reach out to samcart about that. You're going to Want to see if there's any options. We're currently talking to Spiffy to see if there is an option for them to migrate them across. We are also because we won't be putting any new sales through Sam Cart is only going to be just their recurring payments. Is we're kind of having a look and just doing a bit of maths around. Okay, well does it make sense because we'll now be on a lower plan like is that okay to sort of do for a couple of months while those payments finish up? Are we able to migrate some people if we can't migrate them directly? So this is still something I'm like in the process of figuring out guys, but I really just wanted to let you know that that is what would happen because I don't want anyone going and canceling to save themselves money but actually costing them themselves 10 times more. So I just want to put that little PSA at the end because you know it is really important. We want to make sure we're doing things strategically, not just knee jerk reaction. How dare you. I'm canceling. So this has been useful guys. And like I said, if you want more tech recommendations just like this. Don't forget I've got my free tech stack guide. The link is below. It's got all my favorite tools specifically for course creators. It includes some great trials and discounts that can save you a ton of money. And I cover everything from email marketing, course platforms, analytics, all of it. So just click below, grab it now and if you have loved this episode guys, it would mean absolutely the world to me if you could leave a review, give us a thumbs up, give us a follow, give us a like, give us a share, whatever sort of takes your fancy, whatever platform you're on. It really, really helps us to get the word out and to be able to help even more people. So thank you so much for spending these last few minutes with me. As I said, I hope it's been helpful. I hope you're going to go away and be able to implement something for find yourself a great tech solution. Either way, I will see you same time, same place next week with more nerdy goodness. Alrighty guys, I'll see you then. Bye.