Payment plan
Also called: installments, installment plan, EMI
Letting a student pay for a course in several scheduled charges instead of one. The headline price does not change; the timing does.
Installments 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 from a saved card or a bank mandate, nobody chases; collected by reminder, someone does, and the drop-off between installment one and installment three is the cost of that choice.
For example
A $600 course is offered as 3 × $200 on the 5th of each month. The student pays $600 in total either way. What changes is that the first payment is $200, which is the number that decides whether they enroll at all — and that the academy now carries the risk of installments two and three failing.
On Prolaud
A course can be published on a plan of 2 to 12 installments at a chosen interval, collected automatically or on reminders.
Related terms
- UPI Autopay — A feature of UPI, the instant bank-to-bank payment system used in India, that lets a payer approve a recurring debit once, so later installments are collected automatically up to an agreed limit without 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, wallets and local bank methods — Stripe, Razorpay, PayPal and PayU are examples.