Skool community pricing: every dollar that moves

Owner-side pricing — $99/month flat

Owning a Skool community costs $99/month regardless of how many members you have. This is the only price tier — there's no Hobby vs Pro vs Enterprise ladder.

Included in the $99:

• Unlimited members (free or paid)
• Unlimited courses, modules, and lessons
• Custom URL: skool.com/yourname
• Calendar with Zoom/Google Meet integration
• Mobile apps (iOS + Android)
• Stripe Connect for paid memberships
• Standard analytics dashboard
• Member tags (limited — no automation off them natively)

Not included: email broadcasts, landing pages, deep automation, advanced analytics, native CRM, affiliate program management. These are the gaps owners typically patch with external tools.

14-day free trial, no card required to start. After that the $99 is monthly, billed automatically. Cancel anytime — your community goes dark and members lose access at next renewal.

See the pricing inside Skool itself.

14-day free trial — no card required. Most community owners decide whether Skool fits within the first week.

Start Skool free trial →

Member-side pricing — owner sets it

When you join a Skool community as a member, the price is whatever the community owner has set. There's no Skool-imposed floor or ceiling. Common pricing patterns we see:

• Free communities: $0/month forever. Often loss-leaders for a paid course or product.
• Low-tier paid: $9–$29/month. Hobbyist or interest-based groups.
• Mid-tier paid: $39–$99/month. The sweet spot for most coaching, mastermind, and skill-building communities.
• High-tier paid: $147–$299/month. Premium masterminds, accelerator-style programs.
• One-time fees: some owners charge a one-time $497–$2,997 for lifetime access. Less common but supported.
• Annual upfront: 'pay $497 for the year' (~$41/month equivalent) is increasingly common because it cuts churn.

Members pay through Stripe directly; the money lands in the owner's connected Stripe account minus fees. Cancellation is self-serve from the member's billing settings, no need to ask the owner.

Transaction fees on member payments

Every member payment runs through Stripe. The fee breakdown for a US card on a $49/month subscription:

• Stripe percentage: 2.9% × $49 = $1.42
• Stripe per-transaction: $0.30
• Total Stripe fees: ~$1.72
• Skool's marketing claim: 'no additional platform fee on top of Stripe' for the standard $99 plan
• Net to owner: ~$47.28 per member per month

International cards bump Stripe to 3.9% + $0.30. If your audience is heavily non-US, factor in roughly 1% extra in fees.

Refund cost: Stripe returns its percentage but keeps the $0.30 per refund. Heavy refund volume (which often signals product fit issues) means non-recoverable fee leakage.

Affiliate program: Skool's program pays affiliates 40% recurring of net revenue forever. You can't disable it. For most owners this is a net positive (free growth) but factor it into unit economics: a $49/month member referred by an affiliate nets you ~$28/month, not $47.

The realistic monthly stack

We've watched dozens of paid Skool communities scale from zero to $30K+/month. The typical stack at $5K–$30K MRR:

• Skool: $99/month
• Email tool (ConvertKit or Beehiiv): $25–$79/month
• Automation/DM (tools4skool): $0 free / $29 Starter / $59 Pro
• Zapier or Make (optional): $20–$50/month
• Video hosting (optional, if not using Skool's): $20/month for Vimeo Pro

All-in: ~$130–$200/month. That's substantially less than Kajabi Growth at $199 alone, or Mighty Networks Business at $179 plus 2% transaction fees.

The single highest-ROI line item is automation. Skool's native member follow-up and churn handling are essentially manual. tools4skool replaces 30–60 minutes per day of DM and onboarding work with multi-condition trigger DMs, churn saver fired within 60 seconds of cancellation, churn risk scores that flag members before they leave, and a Kanban pipeline auto-synced from Skool member tags. Most operators we've talked to break even on the tool cost in week one.

How pricing scales — the math at growth

The flat $99 fee makes Skool's unit economics get better as you grow, unlike percentage-fee platforms.

At 50 paid members × $49/month:

• Revenue: $2,450
• Skool fee: $99
• Stripe fees: ~$86
• Net before tools: ~$2,265
• Skool % of revenue: 4%

At 500 paid members × $49/month:

• Revenue: $24,500
• Skool fee: $99
• Stripe fees: ~$860
• Net before tools: ~$23,541
• Skool % of revenue: 0.4%

Compare to Mighty Networks at 2% transaction fee on top: you'd pay an extra $490/month at the 500-member scale. Or Whop's percentage model: $735+/month. Skool's flat fee starts to feel like a rounding error past ~$10K MRR.

Free Skool communities — who pays?

Owners can run their community completely free for members. Everyone joins, no payment required, no Stripe needed. The owner still pays Skool $99/month.

Why run a free community on Skool?

• Audience funnel for a paid product (course, coaching, SaaS) — Hormozi's free Skool group is the canonical example
• Brand-building / authority play in a niche
• Pre-launch list for a future paid version
• Customer support / community for an existing product

Watch the unit economics: $99/month means a free community needs to drive at least $1,200/year in indirect revenue to break even on platform cost alone. Most successful free communities funnel hard into a $497–$2,000 paid offer, where 5–10 conversions per year cover Skool plus the rest of the marketing stack.