Skool free and paid communities, side by side

TL;DR

On Skool, you (the owner) pay $99/month flat per community after a 14-day free trial — same price whether the community is free for members or paid. Free communities are usually run as a top-of-funnel marketing channel: you get list growth, audience engagement, and warm leads, but you eat the $99/mo cost personally. Paid communities flip that: members pay you any price you set ($9–$999/mo is the typical range), Stripe processes the payment, and Skool takes its $99 from your gross. Most six-figure creators on Skool run both — a free community for top-of-funnel discovery, a paid one for the actual offer. The free → paid funnel converts in the 2–8% band when the welcome DM, content, and offer are tight; tools like tools4skool exist mostly to push that conversion number higher.

See the pricing inside Skool itself.

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

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What Skool actually charges the owner

Skool's owner-side pricing is unusually simple for SaaS. Flat $99/month per community after a 14-day free trial. No per-member fees, no transaction fees from Skool itself (Stripe still takes its 2.9% + 30¢), no feature paywalls. A community with 10 members costs the same as a community with 10,000.

What's included at $99: unlimited members, unlimited courses/lessons, gamification (leaderboard, levels), DMs, video uploads, Stripe integration for paid memberships, member export CSV, and the moderation queue.

What's not included: native auto-DM, advanced segmentation, comment mining, scheduled posts, churn-recovery DMs. Those are the gap third-party tools fill. Tools4skool covers them with a free plan that handles 20 DMs/day on one Skool account, then $29 / $59 / $149 paid tiers.

For multiple communities, each costs $99 separately. Agency owners running 5 client communities pay $495/mo plus whatever automation they layer in.

Running a free community: economics and tradeoffs

The math. You pay $99/mo. Members pay $0. The community is a cost center until you connect it to a paid offer.

Why it works as a funnel. Free Skool communities tend to grow faster than paid ones because there's no friction at the door — anyone can apply. A well-positioned free community can hit 1,000–5,000 members in the first 6 months purely on word-of-mouth and the creator's existing audience.

What you do with the audience. Sell into your DMs (paid community, course, coaching, service). The native Stripe integration makes upgrade flow easy, but Skool doesn't have an automated 'free → paid' upgrade trigger. You have to build the prompt yourself — a welcome DM, a weekly post, or a tools4skool sequence that fires on join.

The risk. Free communities can drift into ghost-town territory if there's no clear hook. The community needs a daily reason for members to open it: a thread, a challenge, a live call. Without that, members forget you exist. The 'set and forget' free community is a $99/mo waste of money.

Running a paid community: pricing and conversion

Owner pays $99/mo. Members pay you whatever you charge. Skool processes payments via Stripe. Stripe takes 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Skool itself doesn't take a transaction cut beyond the platform fee.

Pricing bands we see. $9–$29/mo: low-ticket, big-volume, often loss-leader. $29–$97/mo: the sweet spot for most coaching/community businesses. $97–$297/mo: mastermind tier, requires high-touch live calls. $297+: founder masterminds, peer groups for established operators.

Conversion benchmarks. Cold visitor → paid Skool member: 2–6% on a strong landing page. Free Skool member → paid Skool member (same creator): 4–12% over 90 days. Email subscriber → paid: 1–4% one-shot, higher with sequence.

Retention. Paid Skool community month-1 churn: 8–18% typical. Month-12 retention for tight niches: 50–75%. Loose 'general business' communities churn faster. Churn Saver flows (a 60-second recovery DM after cancel) recover 18–34% of cancellations in our customer data, which directly compounds month-12 retention.

The free → paid two-step funnel

The pattern most six-figure Skool creators run: a free community as the front door, a paid community as the deeper offer.

Free community job: capture audience, build trust, demonstrate value. Daily content, weekly live call, no hard pitching.

Paid community job: the actual product. Higher signal-to-noise, cohorts, deliverables, accountability.

The bridge: when a free member shows engagement signals (commented 3+ times, attended a live, completed a free course), they get a tailored DM about the paid offer. Skool itself can't fire that automatically. tools4skool's multi-condition triggers do — 'IF in free community AND completed lesson 3 AND member age >14 days, send DM B with paid-community link.'

Typical economics for the two-step. A free community with 3,000 members converting at 5% to a $59/mo paid community = 150 paid members × $59 = $8,850/mo recurring against $198/mo in Skool platform fees. The math gets more aggressive once you tune the welcome DM and add a Churn Saver flow. Kate Capelli's public case (paid tools4skool $59/mo, generated an extra $4,000/mo in 2 weeks) is a real example of the upside.