What does Skool actually cost in 2026?

The headline price: $99 a month, one community

Skool charges $99 per month per community. That is the entire core price. There is no Hobby tier, no Pro tier, no member-count ladder, no per-seat pricing for admins. You pay $99 and you can have as many members as you want under that one community.

That flat number is unusual in the creator-platform world. Mighty Networks, Circle, Kajabi, and Thinkific all charge based on tier — basic vs growth vs pro — and most also charge per admin seat. Skool decided early to keep one price, one product, no upsell screen. It is a real philosophical choice and it makes the platform easy to budget for.

A few specifics worth pinning down:

• The $99 is per community, not per account. If you want to run two separate communities (say, a free intro one and a paid mastermind), you pay $99 for each.
• Owners can add unlimited admins and moderators on the same plan at no extra cost.
• There is no member cap. A community with 50 members and a community with 50,000 members both pay $99/month.
• All core features ship in the price: classroom, community feed, calendar, chat, gamification, mobile apps for members.

If you are pricing a community business in your head, $99 is the floor. The next variable is what skool takes when you take money.

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 →

Transaction fees: where the real cost shows up

Skool itself does not take a platform cut from your member revenue. That is the friendly headline. The unfriendly part is that payments run through Stripe, and Stripe charges its standard fee on every transaction.

That fee is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge in the United States. International cards add roughly 1.5%. Currency conversion adds another 1% if you accept payments in a non-USD currency.

A couple of practical examples:

• A $49/month community charge → Stripe takes about $1.72, you net $47.28.
• A $99/month community charge → Stripe takes about $3.17, you net $95.83.
• A $499 one-time course → Stripe takes about $14.77, you net $484.23.

Multiply that by your member count and the fees become real. A community with 200 paid members at $49/month is paying Stripe roughly $345 a month — more than three times the $99 skool fee. That is not skool's fault, but it is part of the total cost of running a community on the platform.

A few notes on how skool handles payouts: payouts are direct from Stripe to your bank, on Stripe's normal 2-day rolling schedule for established US accounts. Refunds, chargebacks, and disputes also come straight out of your Stripe balance — skool is not your merchant of record.

Free trial: 14 days, no card required

The skool free trial is genuinely free. You sign up, build the community, invite members, even charge for it — no credit card on file until day 14.

What you can actually do during the trial:

• Build the entire community feed, classroom, and calendar.
• Invite unlimited members.
• Connect Stripe and start accepting paid signups.
• Use the mobile app exactly the same way paid users do.

What happens at day 14: skool emails you to add a card. If you do not, the community goes into a frozen state — existing members keep their access for a short grace period, but you cannot post and new signups are blocked. Add the card and everything resumes instantly.

Most people who fail the trial do so because they spent the 14 days building and never spent any of it inviting. The platform is not the problem; an empty community is. If you are in trial mode and the calendar is empty, that is your priority.

Monthly vs annual: do the yearly math

Skool offers an annual plan at a discount. The exact number drifts a little, but the standard offer is around $948/year, which works out to roughly two free months versus $99 × 12 = $1,188.

Who should take annual:

• Communities already past 10 paid members. If your monthly recurring revenue clears $500/month, the annual upfront is trivial and the savings are real.
• Anyone running a 12-month curriculum (cohort programs, year-long memberships).

Who should stay monthly:

• Brand-new communities still finding their angle. Pay $99 for two or three months, see if it sticks, then commit to annual once the model is proven.
• Anyone testing a niche they are unsure about. Annual is a real cash commitment if you might pivot in 60 days.

There is no penalty for switching from monthly to annual mid-life. You can do it from billing settings whenever the cash flow makes sense.

Costs people forget to budget

The $99 + Stripe fees is the visible part. The honest cost of running a paid community on skool also includes:

• Email tooling. Skool's built-in email is fine for community broadcasts but limited for sales sequences. Most owners end up paying for ConvertKit, Beehiiv, or similar — $0–$50/month at small scale.
• Video hosting for courses. Skool plays YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, and Wistia embeds. If you want unlisted high-quality video, Vimeo Plus is around $12/month, Wistia starts around $19.
• Domain. A custom domain costs $10–$20/year at any registrar. Skool supports custom domains with a free SSL.
• Automation tools. Skool's native automation is light — there are no native auto-DM sequences, no churn-recovery flows, no tag-based triggers. Owners who want any of that pay for an external tool. tools4skool is the dedicated layer for this — multi-condition DM triggers, churn saver, comment miner, member CSV export — and it has a free plan that covers small communities.
• Your time. The biggest cost. Manual welcome DMs, manual cancellation saves, manual lead extraction from comments — all of that is hours every week that you eat for free unless you automate.

Real cost examples by community size

Three honest scenarios:

1. The 30-member side project (free community)

• Skool: $99/month
• Stripe fees: $0 (free community)
• Total: $99/month

For a free community used as a top-of-funnel for another offer, this is just $99 in pure cost. The economics work if even a couple of members convert to a paid offer downstream.

2. The 100-member paid community at $49/month

• Gross: $4,900/month
• Skool platform fee: $99/month
• Stripe fees: roughly $172/month (2.9% + $0.30 × 100)
• Net: about $4,629/month
• Effective platform cost: 5.5% of gross

At this size, skool is essentially free — the platform fee is rounding error.

3. The 1,000-member paid community at $99/month

• Gross: $99,000/month
• Skool platform fee: $99/month
• Stripe fees: roughly $3,170/month
• Net: about $95,731/month
• Effective platform cost: 3.3% of gross

This is the math that drove a lot of creators off Mighty Networks and Circle. On most other platforms, the larger you get the more you pay. On skool, the fee stays $99.

How to actually lower the bill

Three real moves:

1. Switch to annual once revenue is steady. Two months free is two months free. 2. Cut the tool stack. A lot of skool owners pay for ConvertKit, Zapier, ChatGPT API, and a CRM — and use 10% of each. Audit what is actually firing every week. 3. Automate the manual work. Manual DMs and cancellation saves are not just annoying; they are leaking money. A churn-saver DM that fires within 60 seconds of cancellation can recover real revenue, and an auto-welcome sequence converts free trials at higher rates than letting them sit cold.

This is the gap tools4skool is built for. The free plan covers 1 sequence and 20 DMs/day, which is plenty for most communities under 100 members. Paid tiers start at $29/month — well under the cost of an extra VA, and they pay for themselves on the first saved cancellation.