How much does it cost to start a Skool group?

$99/month per group, billed to the owner regardless of whether it's free or paid, public or private. Skool offers a 14-day free trial on the first group. There's no per-member fee on free groups. On paid groups, Skool also takes a small platform cut on top of standard payment processing — typically 2.9% plus 30¢ for the card transaction and another small percentage for Skool itself, depending on plan. There are no setup fees, no annual contracts, and you can cancel any time and the group archives. If you delete the group, members lose access and any classroom data is gone.

What's the difference between a Skool group and a Skool community?

They're synonyms. Skool's own copy uses both words interchangeably. A Skool community is a Skool group is a Skool community. There's no product distinction. You'll occasionally see community used when the writer is talking about the cultural feel — the people, the vibe — and group used when they're talking about the technical container — the feed, the classroom, the billing. Both refer to the same thing. The directory used to be called the community directory and is now called Discovery, which adds a little confusion, but the underlying concept hasn't changed.

Can I make a Skool group private after launching it public?

Yes, in Settings. The change takes effect immediately. Existing members keep access; new strangers can no longer find or join. The trade-off is significant — flipping public to private removes you from Skool Discovery, the platform's main free traffic source. If you've spent weeks earning Discovery placement through reviews and activity, you give that up the moment you go private and you'll have to rebuild it if you ever flip back. Most operators only go private when they're certain they no longer want public top-of-funnel — usually because the offer has graduated from public membership to a closed mastermind.

Can members message each other in a Skool group?

Yes. Skool has built-in member-to-member DMs that work across the group. You can also DM members from outside the group if they're a fellow member of any other group you share. The DM system is functional but not feature-rich — no bulk send, no templates, no scheduling, no segmentation. Owners running active communities almost always end up wanting more. tools4skool extends the native DM system with templates, slash commands, sequences, condition-based triggers, scheduled DMs, and image DMs — all using the user's existing Skool session through a Chrome extension, so there's no password to share.

Are Skool groups good for paid courses?

Reasonably good, with caveats. The classroom supports modules, videos, text and gated content, and the community feed solves the loneliness problem most standalone course platforms have. Skool is weaker than dedicated platforms like Teachable or Kajabi on raw course features — quiz logic, drip scheduling, certificates, multi-instructor mode are limited. The trade is community for course depth. If your offer is mostly community with a course attached, Skool is excellent. If your offer is mostly course with a forum bolted on, dedicated course software is sharper. The middle ground — community-first with a serious course component — is exactly where most successful Skool paid groups sit.

Skool Groups: How Communities Work on Skool.com

On this page

TL;DR
What a Skool group is
Free vs paid groups
Public vs private groups
Roles inside a group
What running a group looks like
FAQ

TL;DR

A Skool group is a stand-alone community on skool.com with its own feed, classroom, calendar, leaderboard and member list. As an owner you pick two switches when you create one: free or paid (do members pay to join?), and public or private (can strangers see the group page?). Those four combinations cover most use cases — free public for top-of-funnel audiences, paid public for revenue-driving offers, paid private for closed mastermind tiers, free private for client-only or alumni spaces. Skool charges owners $99/month per group plus a small cut on paid memberships. As a member, you can belong to as many groups as you want under one account, free or paid. The group itself is where everything happens; the rest of Skool is just the chrome around it. tools4skool plugs into your group to handle the parts Skool's native UI is light on — multi-condition welcome DMs, churn-save flows, comment mining, scheduled posts and inbox slash commands.

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What a Skool group actually is

A group is a contained workspace at skool.com/your-slug with five core surfaces. The Community feed is a Facebook-style timeline of posts and comments. The Classroom is a course area where the owner uploads modules of videos, text, downloads and quizzes — gated by membership tier. The Calendar shows live calls and events with one-click join links. The Leaderboard ranks members by points earned for posts, comments and likes — Skool's gamification layer. The Members list is a searchable roster with profile cards, member-to-member DMs, and admin actions. Each group is its own world. You can be a member of fifty groups under the same email, but each group has separate feeds, separate classrooms, separate billing if it's paid. Owners can also enable a Chat tab (real-time chat) and an About page that doubles as a public landing page when the group is public.

Free vs paid groups — the real differences

Free groups are exactly what they sound like — anyone with a Skool account can join with one click, and you keep the whole experience free forever. They're great for top-of-funnel: a newsletter audience, a TikTok community, a free-tier mastermind, a creator's fan group. They cost the owner $99/month flat and Skool takes nothing on top. Paid groups gate access behind a one-time fee or a recurring subscription that you set ($1 to $10,000+/month). Skool processes the payment and remits to the owner minus a platform fee — currently 2.9% + 30¢ payment processing plus Skool's own cut, which they don't always advertise prominently but typically lands around 2.9% on top depending on plan. Paid groups also get richer revenue tooling: trial periods, annual billing, founders pricing, churn dashboards. The economic decision isn't free vs paid as a binary — it's usually a free group as a feeder and a paid group as the offer, ladder-style.

Public vs private — visibility, not access

Public means the group's About page is reachable from skool.com/discovery and from search engines. Anyone can see the cover image, About copy, and a sample of posts before joining. Public does not mean free — paid public groups are extremely common, with the join button replaced by a checkout. Private means the group is invisible to Discovery and search; only people with a direct invite link can see anything. Private is the right call for client-only spaces, alumni groups, beta testers, internal team comms. The trade-off is real — private groups give up Skool's free Discovery traffic, which can be a meaningful lead source. Most operators run public for any group they want to grow and private only for genuinely closed circles. You can switch between public and private later in Settings, but flipping public-to-private mid-stride loses Discovery momentum that takes weeks to rebuild.

Roles inside a Skool group

Four role tiers, each with a clear remit. Owner is the person who created the group — there's exactly one and they hold billing, settings, and the ability to delete. Admins have full operational control: they can edit the classroom, manage members, change settings, but cannot delete the group or change billing. Moderators can pin posts, remove rule-breaking content, and manage member behavior, but can't touch settings or paid tiers. Members are the default — they can post, comment, take classroom modules, send DMs, and earn leaderboard points. There's also a special Banned status that revokes access without refunding. For paid groups you can add membership levels — Standard, VIP, Inner Circle — and gate parts of the classroom by level. The role system is straightforward but the gating logic in larger paid groups can get fiddly. Most owners hire an admin or moderator once they cross 500 active paying members.

What actually running a group looks like

The day-to-day of running a Skool group is shaped by three loops. Acquisition: drive new members via Discovery, content, ads, partnerships. Activation: greet new members, get them to post or take their first lesson within 48 hours. Retention: keep them paying or coming back for at least three months. Skool's native UI handles the surface — feeds, classroom, billing — but it leaves the loops manual. You're DMing every new member yourself, watching for cancellations, manually following up on hot comments. That's where automation matters. tools4skool's Chrome extension and dashboard handles welcome DM sequences with multi-condition triggers, a 60-second churn-saver DM when a payment fails, comment mining to surface lurkers showing buy intent, scheduled posts for off-hour timezones, and a clean unreplied-DM filter. None of that replaces good content or a sharp offer — it just stops you from losing members to neglect while you focus on the work that only you can do.

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Frequently asked

Yes. One Skool account can own as many groups as you want. Each group is billed separately at $99/month, so two groups costs $198/month. You can also be a member of unlimited groups under the same account at no charge. A common pattern is one free group as top-of-funnel and one paid group as the revenue product, ladder-style. Some operators run a free group, a $29 group and a $497 group all under the same brand. The accounts don't talk to each other directly — there's no native cross-group messaging — but tools like tools4skool can run automations across multiple groups from a single dashboard.

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