Skool fees, explained line by line

Skool's platform fee: $99/month flat

Skool charges $99 per month per community. That is the platform fee. It does not change based on member count, admin count, paid revenue, or feature usage. A 30-member community pays $99/month. A 30,000-member community pays $99/month.

Key details:

• Billed monthly by default.
• Annual option available at around $948/year — roughly two months free vs $99 × 12.
• One $99 per community. If you run two separate communities, that is $198/month.
• Unlimited admins and moderators are included free under that one fee.
• No member-count cap, no usage-based billing, no overage fees.

What the $99 buys: full classroom, community feed, calendar with RSVPs, gamification, native mobile apps, custom domain support, and Stripe payment integration. Every feature ships at the $99 price; there is no Pro tier locking anything behind a higher fee.

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

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Stripe's fee: 2.9% + $0.30 per US transaction

Skool routes member payments through Stripe. Stripe takes its standard processing fee on every successful charge:

• United States cards: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
• International cards: roughly 4.4% (the additional ~1.5% is Stripe's international card fee).
• Currency conversion: roughly +1% if you accept a non-USD currency.
• ACH or SEPA debit (where supported): much lower — typically 0.8% capped.

This fee comes out of each paid membership transaction. If a member pays you $49/month, Stripe takes about $1.72; you net about $47.28. If a member buys a $497 course, Stripe takes about $14.71; you net about $482.29.

The Stripe fee is the same fee any business using Stripe directly would pay. Skool does not mark it up. It is not a 'skool fee' in any meaningful sense — it is the cost of accepting card payments anywhere.

Why skool takes 0% from member payments

This is the most owner-friendly part of skool's economics. Some platforms (Mighty Networks, Patreon) take a percentage of every paid membership on top of the processor fee. Skool does not.

Skool's stance is that the $99/month flat fee is the entire deal. They make money on platform fees, not on a percentage of your revenue. The implications:

• A community generating $10k/month in member revenue pays skool the same $99 as a community generating $0.
• As you scale, your effective platform cost as a percentage of revenue gets smaller, not larger.
• There is no incentive misalignment where the platform tries to squeeze more revenue per member.

Compare to Patreon, which charges 8–12% of revenue. A creator earning $5,000/month on Patreon pays $400–$600/month in platform fees alone. The same revenue on skool costs $99 flat — that is a real cash difference, especially as you scale.

Real fee examples

Three honest scenarios:

1. Free community, 100 members

• Member payments: $0
• Stripe fees: $0
• Skool platform fee: $99/month
• Total cost: $99/month

2. Paid community at $49/month, 100 members

• Member payments: $4,900/month gross
• Stripe fees: about $172/month (100 × $1.72)
• Skool platform fee: $99/month
• Total fees: about $271/month
• Net to you: about $4,629/month
• Effective fee load: 5.5% of gross

3. Paid community at $99/month, 500 members

• Member payments: $49,500/month gross
• Stripe fees: about $1,585/month (500 × $3.17)
• Skool platform fee: $99/month
• Total fees: about $1,684/month
• Net to you: about $47,816/month
• Effective fee load: 3.4% of gross

The trend: as you scale, the fixed $99 becomes negligible and the only real cost is the Stripe pass-through, which you would pay anywhere.

International and currency fees

If your members live outside the US, two extra fees come in:

• International card surcharge — roughly +1.5% on top of the 2.9% base. So an international Visa charge runs about 4.4% + $0.30.
• Currency conversion — roughly +1% if you accept payment in a currency other than your Stripe account's settlement currency.

Most owners running globally still settle in USD and accept payments in USD; international members' banks handle the conversion on their side. That avoids the extra 1% conversion fee on your side.

Skool itself is currency-agnostic at the community level — you can charge members in EUR, GBP, AUD, etc. — but the fees apply via Stripe regardless.

How skool's fees compare

Quick honest comparison:

• Patreon: 8–12% of revenue + processor fees. Most expensive at scale.
• Mighty Networks: tier-based monthly fee + percentage take on paid memberships above certain plans.
• Circle: tier-based monthly fee, no percentage take, but higher monthly cost than skool at most tiers.
• Discord + Whop: free Discord, but Whop takes 5% on paid memberships.
• Kajabi: $149+/month flat, no percentage take.
• Skool: $99/month flat, no percentage take.

For any community generating real revenue, skool's flat structure is among the best. The fee load is genuinely low at scale, and the predictability is its own form of value.

Where extra cost shows up: the operational tools owners add on top. Manual DM work, churn handling, and lead extraction from comments are not included in the $99. Owners typically add an automation layer — tools4skool is the dedicated one — at $0 (free plan) to $149/month for agency-tier features. That is the real cost of running a community at scale, and unlike the platform fee, it pays for itself the first time it saves a cancellation.