Northpass Pricing and the Switch to Skilljar by Gainsight
Northpass never published a rate. Its last pricing page sold one fixed annual price for unlimited learners, and northpass.com now redirects to Skilljar by Gainsight, which bills a yearly plan plus active users. Here is what that means for a renewal and what it can cost.
By the CompanyLMS team
October 2026 · 7 min read
Northpass never published a price, and you can no longer buy it under that name. Its last pricing page, archived in April 2025, sold one fixed annual price for unlimited learners, admins and content, set on a sales call. Gainsight bought Northpass in 2023, bought Skilljar in 2025, and northpass.com now redirects to Skilljar by Gainsight, which charges a yearly plan fee plus an active user fee instead.
This is for the customer education, customer success or training lead at a US software company who either has a Northpass contract coming up for renewal or found Northpass on an old shortlist and wants to know what it costs now. The facts come from Northpass's own pricing pages as archived in 2020 and 2025, its homepage as archived in April 2026, Gainsight's announcements, Skilljar's current pricing page and Vendr's buyer data. Where a number is our own arithmetic, we say so.
How much does Northpass cost?
There is no list price to quote, and there never was. Northpass priced every deal on a call, but the way it framed that price changed twice in five years, and the change is what matters at renewal.
| Period | What the pricing page said | What decided the bill |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Essentials, Premium and Enterprise plans, each with a "Chat With Sales" button and a slider to "Select your monthly active users" from under 1,000 to 50,000+ | Monthly active users and plan tier. Monthly, quarterly or annual payment, with discounts for paying a year upfront and for multi-year terms |
| 2024 to April 2025 | "All Northpass plans have a fixed price for unlimited users, admins, and content." No figures, a "Schedule a Call" button | A negotiated flat annual fee. Northpass criticized active-learner pricing as "unpredictable and surprise invoices" |
| 2026 | northpass.com/pricing redirects to gainsight.com/pricing, and the homepage to Skilljar by Gainsight | For new buyers, Skilljar's model: a yearly plan plus an active user fee on an annual allowance |
So the honest answer to "how much does Northpass cost" has two parts. If you hold a Northpass contract, you pay whatever flat fee you negotiated, until renewal. If you are buying today, you are buying Skilljar, and the price is built a different way.
Third-party figures do not help much here. Vendr's Northpass page currently reports a median of $225,680 a year across 32 purchases, with a range of $19,550 to $1,106,538, and lists learner-count tiers that contradict Northpass's own "unlimited learners" pitch. A spread that wide almost certainly mixes Northpass with larger Gainsight contracts. We would not plan a budget on it.
What happened to Northpass
Northpass was a New Jersey company that sold customer education academies, mostly to mid-market and enterprise B2B software firms. Its 2025 pricing FAQ named Grammarly, Freshworks, Glassdoor and Pipedrive as typical customers, and said it was not a fit for K-12, nonprofits, higher education, consultants, coaches and influencers.
- July 11, 2023. Gainsight announced a definitive agreement to acquire Northpass, then used by almost 350 companies. The product was renamed Gainsight Customer Education.
- April 2, 2025. Gainsight acquired Skilljar, the larger customer education platform, and began marketing it as Skilljar by Gainsight.
- April 2026. The archived Northpass homepage carries a banner: "Northpass is now Gainsight Customer Education. For all of the latest on our customer onboarding and training solutions, check out Skilljar by Gainsight."
- By June 2026. northpass.com returns a redirect to gainsight.com/skilljar, and the old pricing URL lands on Gainsight's pricing page.
Gainsight has not, in anything we read, announced an end date for existing Northpass contracts. But a vendor that points its old product's domain at a sister product is telling you where renewals are headed.
Northpass pricing vs Skilljar pricing
The two products price on opposite principles, which is the real risk for a Northpass customer. Northpass charged a flat fee whatever your learner count. Skilljar charges for every person who takes a lesson, counted month by month.
| Pricing term | Northpass (last published) | Skilljar by Gainsight (today) |
|---|---|---|
| Published plan rate | None | None. Every plan card says "Let's talk pricing" |
| What you pay for | One fixed price | A yearly plan (Essentials, Professional or Enterprise) plus an active user fee |
| Learners | Unlimited | An annual allowance, counted once per learner per month with a lesson |
| Admins and content | Unlimited | Unlimited seats and courses on every plan; admin SSO starts on Professional |
| Published add-ons | None | Content Syndication $10,000, Data Connector from $25,000, Language Packs from $10,000 |
| Buyer data | Unreliable, see above | Vendr median $38,972 a year across 233 purchases, $23,000 to $99,976 |
Our Skilljar pricing breakdown covers the plan matrix and the add-ons in detail. The point for a Northpass customer is narrower: a model that never cared how many customers you trained is being replaced by one that bills for exactly that.
What a Northpass renewal into Skilljar can cost
Skilljar's own counting example makes the math straightforward. A learner who takes one lesson in March and never returns uses one unit. A learner who takes lessons in January, April and October uses three. A learner active every month uses twelve. Logging in without opening a lesson uses none.
Take a software company with 2,000 customer users in its Northpass academy. Our arithmetic, not a quote:
| How those 2,000 users train | Skilljar units a year | Under the Northpass flat fee |
|---|---|---|
| Each takes onboarding once, in one month | 2,000 | No change to the fee |
| Each returns in three months a year for release training | 6,000 | No change to the fee |
| A quarter of them use the academy every month | 7,500 (500 x 12, plus 1,500 x 1) | No change to the fee |
The same academy can need an allowance anywhere from 2,000 to 7,500 units depending on how often customers come back, which is exactly the behavior a good customer education program tries to increase. Pull your monthly unique learners from Northpass reporting for the last twelve months before you take the renewal call, and add them up. That total is the allowance you need, not your customer count.
Questions to ask Gainsight before you renew a Northpass contract
- Is our Northpass contract being renewed as Northpass, or migrated to Skilljar? Get the answer and the date in writing.
- If migrated, what allowance and plan will we be quoted, and on what usage data? Ask them to show the monthly learner counts they used.
- Does our current flat price carry over for any term? A one-year bridge at the old fee is a reasonable ask.
- Who migrates courses, completions and certificates, and at what cost? Certificate history matters if customers or partners are certified.
- Which of our integrations and custom domains move across? Skilljar caps premium integrations at 3, 5 and 7 by plan.
When a priced LMS is the simpler path
Many Northpass academies were not huge. A team training a few hundred customers, partners or new employees a month does not need an enterprise customer education contract, and it does not need to sit through one either.
CompanyLMS publishes its rate: $7 per active learner a month on Business, or $6 billed annually, with idle accounts not billed. At 150 active learners a month that is $10,800 a year, well under the lowest Skilljar deal Vendr reports. The same workspace runs customer onboarding training, employee onboarding, compliance assignments and certificates with expiry reminders. Be clear about where the math turns, though. We also bill per active learner per month, so an academy with thousands of customers learning every month can be cheaper on a negotiated enterprise deal, and Skilljar has course selling, content syndication and multiple branded academies that we do not.
If the slow part of customer onboarding is the handoff work around the training, the intake forms, document collection and account setup, that is a separate problem from the academy, and a customer onboarding operations tool is the better fit for it than any LMS.
For the full field of vendors, our customer onboarding LMS comparison sets nine platforms side by side, and the Docebo pricing page covers the other big name customer education teams quote against Skilljar.
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