In September 2026, Thinkific cut 96 roles - close to a third of its staff - and said it would focus its investment on Thinkific Plus, its offering for mid-market and enterprise organisations. It said the cuts centred on the parts of the business serving very small businesses, and that it will keep supporting all its customers (BetaKit).

That's normal for SaaS. Vendors invest where the growth is, and customers find out after the decision is made.

If your training business runs on a SaaS LMS, that's the risk. Your platform stays online, but the vendor decides who it's built for.

Why SaaS LMS vendors change direction

A SaaS LMS is planned and priced around the vendor's whole customer base, not around you. Its roadmap, pricing and support follow whatever keeps the company growing fastest, and its investors expect that growth.

When one group of customers grows more slowly than another, investment moves to the faster one. That's a reasonable decision for the vendor, and investors tend to reward it.

The risks of a SaaS LMS when your vendor moves on

When a vendor shifts focus, the effects on existing customers tend to arrive in a few familiar ways.

• Prices change at renewal. Subscription prices rise, entry plans get retired and new fees appear. A change announced this year usually reaches you at your next renewal. When Kajabi raised prices across all plans in 2025, existing customers who stayed on legacy plans moved to the new prices from 13 January 2026 (Kajabi).

• Features move up a tier. Something your training relies on can be repackaged into a higher plan, so keeping it means paying more. Teachable's 2025 plans added caps on published products and students at each tier (Kourses).

• The roadmap follows bigger accounts. The features you've asked for wait behind requests from the customers the vendor now values most. Thinkific's reorganisation, for example, points its R&D at enterprise-first products (press release).

• Support gets stretched. When teams shrink, response times and account management are usually where customers notice first. After one course platform's 2023 layoffs, a six-year customer wrote that support had become non-existent (Class Central).

• Per-seat pricing grows with you. On per-user plans, typically $2 to $5 per user per month for smaller businesses, every new learner adds to the bill (eLearning Industry). Your costs rise in step with your success.

• Ownership can change. If the vendor is acquired, the new owner can reset pricing, terms and priorities. LMS platforms change hands often. SAP sold Litmos to a private equity firm in 2022 because it overlapped with SAP's own learning product (CX Today), and Instructure sold its corporate LMS, Bridge, in 2021 to focus on schools and universities (EdSurge).

None of these needs bad intent. Each is a normal decision for a subscription business. You're the one who pays for each of them.

Upgrading your plan doesn't remove the risk

The natural response is to move up - onto the enterprise plan, into the group the vendor is investing in. That helps for now. It doesn't change who makes the decisions.

The priority segment is whichever one is growing fastest today. In a few years it may be a new market or a new product line. When that happens, the same logic reaches the plan you moved onto.

The tier you pay for decides your place in the queue. The roadmap is still theirs.

Vendor lock-in lives in your learner data

Most teams assume they could leave if they had to. Videos and PDFs can be downloaded, and a learner list usually exports as a CSV. That part is true.

The hard part is everything that makes the platform run your business:

• Learner progress and completion history

• Assessment results and grading rules

• Certificates already issued, and the CE or compliance records behind them

• Recurring payments held in the platform's own payment system

• Automations, drip schedules and integrations with your CRM

Platforms often export little of this in a form another system can use. For a training business, these records are what customers and regulators ask for. The fear of losing them mid-migration is what keeps teams on a platform they've outgrown.

When a SaaS LMS is still the right call

Often, it is. If you're early, have a few hundred learners and need to launch next month, a subscription gets you live quickly with little upfront cost. The trade-offs start to matter once the platform becomes central to how you earn.

Signs you've reached that point:

• Your LMS bill rises every time your learner numbers do

• You've built workarounds for features the vendor won't add

• Customers or regulators ask for records and integrations the platform can't provide

• A single pricing or plan change would hit your margins

• You plan to raise or sell, and an investor or buyer will ask what the business actually owns

How to reduce SaaS LMS risk, whether you stay or move

You don't need to leave your platform to protect yourself. These steps help either way.

1. Run a test export now. Export everything the platform allows and note what's missing, while there's no deadline.

2. Read your renewal terms. Check how much notice the vendor must give before a price change, and ask for a cap in writing at your next renewal.

3. Own your payment relationship. Where you can, take payments through your own payment account, so subscribers stay with you if you move.

4. Keep your own records. Back up completion, assessment and certificate data outside the platform on a regular schedule.

5. Price your platform at twice your learners. If that number worries you, plan for it before you reach it.

6. Watch for early signals. Restructures, plan reshuffles and price changes tell you where your segment sits in the vendor's priorities.

What changes when you own your LMS

With a custom LMS you own, the decisions in this article sit with you. You hold the source code and your data. There's no per-seat bill, so more learners don't mean a bigger invoice. Nobody can retire your plan or move a feature up a tier, and the roadmap follows your business.

It has real costs. You pay to build it up front, and someone has to host and maintain it - your own team or a partner. Whether that beats a subscription depends on your learner numbers and how long you'll run it. Run your own numbers with our total cost of ownership calculator.

You own it, we run it, and you're never locked in. If you want to take it in-house later, the code goes with you.

Want to talk it through? Book a call with our founder to talk through what owning your LMS would look like for your business.

FAQ

What is a SaaS LMS?

A learning management system you rent by subscription. The vendor hosts, maintains and updates it, and sets pricing and priorities across all its customers.

What are the main risks of a SaaS LMS?

Price rises at renewal, features moving to higher tiers, per-seat costs that grow with your learners, a roadmap shaped by other customers, and data that's hard to move if you leave.

What is vendor lock-in in an LMS?

It's when leaving costs more than staying, usually because learner records, certificates, payments and integrations can't be moved cleanly.

Can I take my learner data with me if I leave a SaaS LMS?

Usually some of it. Content and learner lists tend to export. Progress, assessment history, certificates and active subscriptions often don't. A test export will tell you.

When is a custom LMS worth it over SaaS?

When the platform is central to your revenue, your costs rise with every learner, or you need features and records your vendor won't provide.