Payment plan
Also called: instalments, EMI
Letting a student pay a course fee in several scheduled charges instead of one. The headline price does not change; the timing does.
Instalments answer "too expensive right now" rather than "too expensive", which is why they convert on higher-priced courses where a discount would only devalue the course.
The operational question is who chases the later payments. Collected automatically under a mandate, nobody chases; collected by reminder, someone does, and the drop-off between instalment one and instalment three is the cost of that choice.
For example
A ₹24,000 course is offered as 3 × ₹8,000 on the 5th of each month. The student pays ₹24,000 in total either way. What changes is that the first payment is ₹8,000, which is the number that decides whether they enrol at all — and that the academy now carries the risk of instalments two and three failing.
On Prolaud
A course can be published on a plan of 2 to 12 instalments at a chosen interval, collected automatically or on reminders.
Related terms
- UPI Autopay — An NPCI feature that lets a payer approve a recurring UPI debit once, so later instalments are collected automatically up to an agreed limit, without them approving each one.
- Payment gateway — The service that collects a payment from a buyer and settles it to a business's bank account, handling cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets — Razorpay, Stripe, PayU and Cashfree are examples.