Skool pricing: the $9 and $99 plans explained

Use this Skool pricing page to understand cost structure, usage limits, and where pricing conversations need more detail.

The flat rate is the whole argument for Skool's pricing model. Hobby at $9/mo and Pro at $99/mo cover the community rather than the headcount, so a group of 50 and a group of 5,000 pay the same subscription.

Most community platforms price by member or by seat, which is why Skool reads cheap at scale and expensive for a group of ten.

The variable cost is the transaction fee. Our 1 October 2026 snapshot records 2.9% on paid membership revenue.

At $49 a month in revenue per member, that comes to about $1.42, so a hundred paying members at that rate generate roughly $142 a month in fees on top of the subscription.

The fee tracks what you charge, not how many people are in the room.

Our snapshot records a single 2.9% rate and does not attach different rates to Hobby and Pro. That matters, because a per-plan fee difference would change where the break-even between the two plans sits.

Read the current rate for your plan off Skool's own pricing page before you build a revenue model on it.

That leaves the $90/mo difference between Hobby and Pro as a feature purchase rather than a capacity one. The split is not in our verified snapshot, so we do not list it here.

The question to answer on Skool's pricing page is narrow: which of the Pro features would you use in the next quarter, and what would going without them cost in workarounds.

For a paid community, the comparison that matters is flat fee plus revenue share against per-member pricing. Skool Pro at $99/mo costs $1,188 across a year at list price, with no annual discount recorded in our check.

A platform charging per member crosses that figure at a headcount that depends entirely on its own rate, which is why the arithmetic has to be run at your own membership size.

Against the two closest paid alternatives, Skool is cheaper at the entry point and comparable at the top. Circle starts at $89/mo on Professional and runs to $419/mo on Scale, and Mighty Networks starts at $79/mo on Launch, both checked 6 October 2026.

Skool Hobby at $9/mo has no equivalent in either range, and Skool Pro at $99/mo sits between Circle Professional and Circle Business.

The free option is Discord, which costs nothing to run and carries no transaction fee because it does not handle your membership payments. The trade is structure: Skool bundles the community feed, courses and payment collection in one place.

The Discord and Skool comparison sets out what the $9/mo buys over a free server.

If you are deciding between the paid platforms, Circle against Skool covers the per-member versus flat-fee question directly, and Skool against Mighty Networks covers the course-plus-community overlap. The Circle profile and the Mighty Networks profile carry their full rate cards.

Course platforms are worth pricing in the same exercise if the community exists to support a paid course. Teachable starts at $39/mo on Starter and Kajabi at $179/mo on Basic, both checked 1 October 2026, and both bundle course delivery that Skool also offers.

The wider field sits in the community platforms category.

Before committing, model the flat fee and the 2.9% together at your expected membership price and headcount using our pricing calculators, and read our guide to community platforms for creators for how the models differ in practice.

Start the 14-day trial before choosing a plan at all.

It is full access on our 1 October 2026 check, which makes it the only honest way to find out which Pro features you would use, since the feature split is not published in our snapshot.

Take Hobby at $9/mo if you are launching a first community, testing a paid cohort, or running something small enough that the Pro features would sit unused. At $108 across a year it is the cheapest paid community platform we track by a wide margin.

Take Pro at $99/mo once a specific Pro capability is blocking you, not on a schedule. The $90/mo difference costs $1,080 a year, so name the feature and the workaround it replaces before upgrading.

Member growth alone is not a reason, because neither plan charges per member.

Look elsewhere if your community is free and informal, where a Discord server costs nothing, or if you need the deeper course and marketing tooling that sits on a dedicated course platform. Skool covers both jobs adequately rather than either one exhaustively.