# Course plans & billing

> Every course has a learner pricing tier: Starter (free), Core, or Pro.

Source: https://www.curacourse.com/help/course-billing

## At a glance

Every course has a learner pricing tier: Starter (free), Core, or Pro.

By default learners pay for their own seat.

Organizations can instead be invoiced directly, which removes the paywall for students entirely.

Pricing is per learner, per term. A term is typically a semester for higher education, a school year for K-12, and a month to month for everyone else.

## Prerequisites

You must be the course instructor. Course billing settings are not available to TAs.

Course → Settings → Billing.

## Steps

Open your course and go to Settings → Billing.

Choose a tier under Learner pricing:

- Starter is free and covers lessons, activities, manual grading, and autograding, including AI grading with a small AI credit allowance. It doesn't include the AI tutor. A Starter course never shows a paywall to students.
- Core is $20 per learner per term and adds the AI tutor, analytics, group work, and 10x the AI and VM credits. Add-ons are optional.
- Pro is $45 per learner per term and includes everything in Core plus cloud-based labs and every add-on.

![CuraCourse screenshot: Course Billing](https://www.curacourse.com/help/featurebase/f78661c6ddbf0bb5b6da.png)

Each learner adds AI and VM credits to shared course pools, allotted for the whole term rather than per month. VM credits cover running code in Code Editor blocks, code autograding, and cloud-based labs.

Click Save pricing.

Make sure your organization has an enrollment period set up, and share the join code for that period. Join codes bind learners to a period, and the period's last drop date is when payment starts being required.

## How students pay

Students on a Core or Pro course pay for their own seat unless your organization is set up for institution-paid billing.

Before the last drop date of the enrollment period, students can open course materials without paying. This is the add/drop window.

After that date, a student who has not paid sees a screen explaining that payment is required, and cannot access course material until they pay.

## Switching to institution-paid

Contact support or email sales@curacourse.com to have your organization pay instead of your students.

Once your organization is switched to institutional billing, CuraCourse manages course features for that organization and invoices you for seats. A seat is a unique learner per term, counted against the enrollment period.

If you only need to cover specific students, such as with a scholarship or a waiver, contact CuraCourse support.

## Enrollment periods

Enrollment periods are set at the organization level, not per course, under the org's Enrollment periods settings. Each one has a name, a start, an end, and a last drop date.

![CuraCourse screenshot: Course Billing](https://www.curacourse.com/help/featurebase/53a8166094cbb8d20b58.png)

How long a period can run depends on your organization's approval status:

- Organizations that have not been approved can only create monthly periods.
- Approved organizations can create periods up to 3 months for corporate training, 6 months for higher education, and 12 months for K-12.
- For institution-paid organizations, the last drop date is the billing census. Seats are counted as of that date.

## Add-ons

Add-ons apply to Core courses. Pro already includes all of them.

Cloud-based labs, +$15 per learner per term. VS Code in the browser on a cloud machine, for multi-file and professional projects.

Exams, +$5 per learner per term. [In beta](https://www.curacourse.com/help/exams-beta).

Discussions, +$5 per learner per term. In R&D.

## Common gotchas

You cannot change tiers once learners have enrolled. Pick your tier before sharing the join code. If you need a change after that, contact CuraCourse support.

Starter (Free) courses never paywall students, so a fully manual-grading course costs nothing.

A student enrolled in more than one paid course pays per course enrollment.

Institution-paid organizations do not choose tiers per course from this page. CuraCourse manages features for those courses.