Free access plan vs free lesson: What’s the difference?

In LifterLMS, by default, only students enrolled in a course can access the lessons contained inside that course. To allow students to enroll in a course, an access plan is used.

An access plan allows students to enroll in a course or membership. Enrollment creates a WordPress account associated with the student. Access plans may either ask for payment or not. As a result, there are two steps that occur when an access plan is used enroll in a course or a membership:

1. Registration
2. Checkout

The registration step is required for anyone who is not already logged in (i.e., if you do not yet have a WordPress account on the website that hosts the LifterLMS course you want to access). If the access plan is a free access plan, as you can see below, then the checkout step will be skipped and the customer will be automatically enrolled to the course or membership associated with that access plan.

On the other hand, if the access plan is a paid access plan, the customer will first need to make the payment during checkout. Once the payment is made, the customer will then be automatically enrolled to the course or membership associated with that access plan.

Once the student is enrolled (whether by a free access plan or by a paid access plan), they can then access all the lessons of the course as long as they are logged in.

Some lessons inside a course can be made accessible even if the student is not logged in or even enrolled in the course at all. In LifterLMS, these are called free lessons.

As a result, these free lessons can freely be accessed by your students whether you add an access plan or not, whether these students use those access plans or not, whether those students enroll on the course or not, and whether they are logged in or not.