How much does Skool cost?

Skool has two plans, and the sticker price is the smaller part of the bill. What you really pay is the monthly plan plus a transaction fee on every payment your members make.

Both plans unlock the same product: unlimited members, unlimited courses, live calls, a custom URL and the built-in affiliate program. You are not paying more for features on Pro. You are paying $90 more per month to drop your transaction fee from 10% to 2.9%. Skool bills monthly by default and gives two months free if you pay yearly. There is a 14-day free trial on both plans with no card required.

So the honest answer to "how much does Skool cost" is: between $9 and $99 per month in plan fees, plus 2.9% to 10% of whatever your community collects. Which plan is cheaper depends entirely on your revenue, and the crossover point is exact.

The two plans cost the same at exactly one revenue level. Set them equal and solve:

$9 + 10% of revenue = $99 + 2.9% of revenue

The $90 plan gap divided by the 7.1-point fee gap gives $1,268 per month in community revenue. That is the line:

• Below $1,268/month collected: Hobby is cheaper. The 10% fee costs you less than paying $90 extra for the Pro plan.
• Above $1,268/month collected: Pro is cheaper. The lower 2.9% fee saves more than the $90 it costs.

Most people get this backwards. They see $99 and assume Pro is the "serious" plan they should start on. If your community collects $600/month, Pro costs you $116/month all-in while Hobby costs $69. You would be paying $47/month for nothing. Start on Hobby, watch your revenue, and switch the month you cross $1,268.

For a deeper look, see What is Skool and how does it work.

Here is the all-in monthly cost (plan plus transaction fee) at each revenue level, and which plan wins:

The pattern is the opposite of most SaaS pricing. On Skool, the cheap plan punishes success: at $5,000/month, staying on Hobby to save $90 in plan fees costs you $265/month in transaction fees. And once you are on Pro, the fee barely grows. Going from $5,000 to $10,000 in revenue only adds $145 to your Skool bill, because 2.9% is a rounding error on real money.

We break this down further in How much money can you make on Skool.

Three details change the real number and most reviews skip them:

The 30¢ per transaction. Pro is 2.9% plus 30¢ on each payment. On a $10/month membership, that 30¢ is another 3% on top, so your effective fee is closer to 5.9%, not 2.9%. Low-priced memberships with many members pay proportionally more. High-priced ones barely notice it.

The 3.9% tier above $900. On any single transaction over $900, Pro's fee jumps from 2.9% + 30¢ to 3.9% + 30¢. This does not hit monthly memberships, but it does hit high-ticket cohorts and annual plans billed in one payment. A $2,000 annual community payment costs you $78 in fees, not $58.

Payment processing is included, not extra. Unlike Gumroad or Payhip, Skool's transaction fee already covers Stripe processing. So the 2.9% + 30¢ on Pro is the whole fee, not a platform cut on top of a separate processing charge. That makes Pro genuinely cheap at scale, which the raw percentage hides.

Skool's model is a flat plan plus a low fee, built for recurring community revenue. That makes it cheap at scale and expensive when you sell little. Here is where it sits against the platforms creators actually compare it to, on a $100 payment:

The split is clean. Whop has no monthly plan and a slightly lower card rate, so on domestic cards it costs less than Skool at any revenue. Skool Pro only pulls ahead of Whop for a mostly international audience, where Whop adds 1.5% on international cards and 1% for currency conversion. Among plans with a monthly fee, once your community clears roughly $1,300/month, Skool Pro's 2.9% makes it one of the cheapest ways to run a paid community. For one-off digital downloads rather than a recurring community, neither fits as well as a lower-fee Gumroad alternative.

The plan fee is only worth it once your fee savings beat it, which is the $1,268/month line. But the honest version has two more parts.

Worth it if you run a recurring paid community above ~$1,300/month, want members, courses and live calls in one place, and value the engagement mechanics (the gamified leaderboard drives real retention). At $5,000/month, Skool Pro costs $244 all-in, or under 5% of revenue, for the whole stack.

Not worth it if you are pre-revenue or testing an idea. Paying $99/month before you have paying members is how people lose money on tools. Start on the $9 Hobby plan, or on a zero-fixed-cost platform like Whop, and upgrade when the math flips. It is also not worth it if you mainly sell one-off products rather than memberships, since the flat plan assumes recurring revenue to earn its keep.

Picking a plan is easy once you know two numbers: what your community will realistically collect, and what communities like yours charge their members. InsightRaider tracks pricing and revenue signals across 500,000+ products and communities, including Skool, so you can benchmark a realistic price per member before you commit to a plan.

$49/month.