Muay Thai Coaching School — Thinkific to WordPress Membership Site Migration
Industries
🎯 The Challenge
Kru Pol was running a single Muay Thai coaching course on Thinkific and had two real problems: rising monthly platform costs on a startup budget, and a hard content limitation. He needed a category-tabbed video layout, where clicking a tab like Footwork or Offense would swap videos below without reloading the page, and Thinkific could not support that structure at all.
There was also a protection concern from the start. He specifically did not want members subscribing, downloading his coaching content, and cancelling immediately after. Any solution needed to include staged content release, not just a paywall.
💡 Our Solution
The recommendation was a WordPress site built on a free lightweight theme to avoid unnecessary licensing costs, with ARMember as the membership plugin instead of the initially proposed Paid Memberships Pro, since ARMember included drip content, subscriptions, and one-time purchases for roughly $69 a year versus PMPro's $400-a-year drip add-on. A custom tabbed video library was built to match the client's reference design, videos were hosted on Vimeo and domain-locked to the site, and drip scheduling was configured to release content gradually. Stripe was integrated for payments after resolving webhook and API key configuration issues. When the client requested a more complex multi-tier access system mid-project (partial subscriptions, full access, and per-course one-time purchases), that was scoped and quoted separately as a future phase rather than folded into the existing budget, keeping the original $550 build intact and on schedule.
🏆 The Result
The site launched at muaythaischool.org with a working subscription and one-time purchase membership, the custom tabbed video library, Vimeo-locked video delivery, drip content, and Stripe payments. Checkout was later streamlined to a single click through to card entry, and three Loom tutorial videos were delivered so the client could add coaches, new video categories, and new lessons independently. The client said: "Hello, I love the look" and later, "Yes, this look great." The order was completed July 14, 2026, with a clearly scoped multi-tier expansion left ready for a future phase.