Skool vs Patreon
Classroom community vs patron membership.
Skool and Patreon both sell access to you, and they charge for it in completely different shapes. Skool is a paid subscription plus a fee, running a classroom-style feed with courses and a calendar. Patreon asks for no subscription at all and takes a percentage of what your members pay instead, on a brand your audience already recognises. Disclosure: we make Drry, a third option, and we get to it honestly at the end. The choice is mostly about which cost you would rather carry.
The honest recommendation.
Pick Skool
Pick Skool if you want a contained space where members work through your material together, with courses, a feed and a calendar in one simple place. It suits a creator whose audience shows up to learn something specific rather than to support a person.
Pick Patreon
Pick Patreon if you want to start with no monthly bill and your audience already understands patron tiers. It is the lower-friction start by some distance, and it suits creators whose members are paying for ongoing output rather than a structured programme.
Where Drry fits.
Patreon costs nothing to open and takes its percentage of membership income instead, while Skool charges a subscription on both of its tiers and adds a per-payment rate that is heaviest on the cheaper one. Either way your bill grows with your revenue rather than staying still. Drry takes the other trade: a flat price, 0% of member payments on every tier including the free one.
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
- Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
- Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.
Skool vs Patreon, common questions
Is Skool or Patreon cheaper?
It depends almost entirely on your revenue, because the two charge in different shapes. Patreon has no subscription and takes a percentage of membership income, so it is cheapest when you are small and gets steadily more expensive as you grow. Skool charges a monthly subscription on both tiers plus a per-payment rate, which is heaviest on its cheaper plan. The fact boxes above carry each platform's current numbers.
Does Patreon take a cut of every membership payment?
Yes, Patreon's model is a percentage of what your members pay, and that is how it earns instead of a subscription. Its rate depends on when your page was created, and payment processing applies on top. Skool charges differently again, with a subscription plus a per-payment rate whose meaning changes sharply between its two plans, so read the Skool fact box above rather than comparing headline percentages.
Can I run courses on Patreon the way I would on Skool?
Not really, and this is the clearest split between them. Skool is built around a classroom: courses, a feed and a calendar in one place. Patreon is built around posts and tiers, so a course there is a series of posts your patrons scroll rather than a structured programme they work through.
Which is better for a community rather than an audience?
Skool, if you want members talking to each other. Its feed is the product and the whole design assumes a group working through something together. Patreon is built for a creator publishing to supporters, so the conversation runs mostly between you and them rather than among them, which is a real difference once a membership grows.
More comparisons
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Courses and community together in your own branded space, and you keep 100% of what your members pay you.