Skool memberships, end to end

TL;DR

When people search skool membership, they usually mean one of two things. (1) The fee an owner pays Skool to host a community — currently a flat $99/month with a 14-day free trial. (2) The fee a member pays an owner to access a paid community — set by the owner, ranges from $0 (free communities) to $500+/month (high-ticket masterminds). The owner fee covers unlimited members, courses, and core features. The community fee is whatever the creator decided. Cancellation is one click in both cases but the billing implications differ. Refunds are at the owner's discretion for community access; Skool itself almost never refunds platform fees.

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The two kinds of memberships

Skool sits in an unusual spot in the SaaS world: it sells one thing to creators and a totally separate thing to their members. The creator pays a flat platform fee. Their members may or may not pay them. Most confusion in support tickets, Reddit threads, and Twitter rants comes from people not knowing which side they are on.

If you are a creator paying skool.com directly via your billing settings — that is the owner membership (sometimes called the Group or Community Owner subscription). The card on file belongs to you, the bill comes from Skool Inc, and the line item says something like Skool $99.

If you joined a specific community run by a creator — Hormozi's group, an AI bootcamp, a copywriting mastermind — that is a community membership. The card on file is at Skool, but the money flows (after Skool's processing cut) to the creator. Your line item says the community name, not Skool. Cancelling that membership ends your access to that community only. Other Skool communities you joined keep working.

This distinction matters most for refunds and disputes. Skool will rarely intervene on a community membership refund — that is the creator's call. But if your card was charged for a platform fee and you never built anything, Skool support handles it directly.

Owner membership: $99/month for everything

Skool's pricing for community owners has stayed almost shockingly stable: a flat $99 per month, no per-seat fees, no per-MAU fees, no feature tiers. You get unlimited members, the classroom for courses, the calendar for events, DMs, the leaderboard, and 14% transaction fees on community payments handled through Skool. There is a 14-day free trial that does not require a card up front. After the trial, if you do not subscribe, your community goes read-only.

The fee is independent of your community size. A solo creator running a 30-person beta pays $99. Hormozi's school, with tens of thousands of members across multiple groups, also pays $99 per group. This is the bet Skool made on simplicity, and it is one reason creators migrate from per-MAU platforms once their communities scale.

What is not included: video hosting beyond a basic embed (most owners use YouTube unlisted or Wistia), email broadcasts to all members (Skool does not have a built-in newsletter — see ConvertKit, Beehiiv, or Loops), and any deep automation. The platform deliberately ships fewer features than Circle or Mighty Networks. That gap is where third-party tools live. tools4skool plugs in via Chrome extension to handle DM sequences, churn-saver flows, comment mining, and CSV exports — with a free plan covering 1 sequence and 20 DMs/day.

Community membership: whatever the creator decided

When you join a Skool community as a member, the price was set by the owner. Free communities exist (often used as lead magnets feeding paid offers). Mid-tier communities run $19–$99/month. High-ticket masterminds can be $297–$497/month or more. Some run on quarterly or annual billing.

Payment goes through Skool's billing rails. Your card is charged on the same day each month. Skool takes a transaction cut (typically around 2.9% + $0.30 like Stripe, plus a small platform fee in some cases) and the rest flows to the creator. Refunds, pauses, and downgrades are at the creator's discretion — Skool does not enforce any standard policy across communities.

One nuance: free communities may convert to paid later, but you have to actively re-join when they do. Existing members are not auto-charged. Conversely, paid communities can comp specific members (founding members, refunds-as-store-credit, etc.) which shows up as $0 on your end while the community remains paid for new joiners.

If you are evaluating whether a paid community is worth it, two reasonable signals: (1) is the leaderboard active in the last 7 days — if only the owner is posting, it is not a community, and (2) does the classroom have content beyond the intro module — some creators sell access and never finish the curriculum.

Cancelling either membership

To cancel a community membership (you are a paying member of someone else's community): go to the community → Settings → Subscription → Cancel. Access continues until the end of your current billing period. You can rejoin later, but if the price changed you pay the new price.

To cancel your owner membership (you run a community on Skool): go to your profile → Account Settings → Billing → Cancel Subscription. Your community goes read-only at the end of the period — members keep seeing the content but cannot post, and you cannot bill them. You can resubscribe later to reactivate.

Refund expectations are very different from SaaS norms. Skool does not auto-refund mid-period cancellations on either side. For community memberships, message the creator directly — many will refund a recent charge if you barely used the community. For owner fees, Skool support handles disputes case-by-case but rarely refunds full months.

Running a paid community without losing members in week one

If you run a paid Skool community, churn in the first 14 days is usually 30–50% on cohorts you didn't onboard well. Members join with high intent, never see the right module, never post, and cancel before their second bill. The fix is mechanical, not motivational.

The baseline that works: an Auto DM Sequence that fires on join and walks the member through post here, watch this 6-minute video, ask one question this week. A Churn Saver that fires within 60 seconds of cancel-click with a single offer ("want a 1:1 with me before you go?"). A weekly export of inactive members so you know who to nudge personally. tools4skool runs all of these on top of skool.com. Kate Capelli reported going from a $59/mo plan to $4,000/mo more in 2 weeks, mostly by saving members who would have churned silently.

None of this replaces a good community. It just stops the leakage long enough for the community to do its job.