Circle pricing explained: plans, transaction fees, and add-ons

We make Drry, a competitor to Circle, so read this with that disclosure in mind. Circle costs $89 a month for Professional on annual billing ($99 month-to-month), $199 a month for Business ($219 month-to-month), $419 a month for Scale, or custom pricing for Circle Plus, and every plan also charges a transaction fee of 0.5% to 2% on member payments. That one sentence is the whole answer; the rest of this page is what it means for your budget.

Our promise for this page is the same one we make in our comparison content: the math is shown, the fees are itemized, and the vendor bias is disclosed in the first line instead of hidden in the last.

What do Circle's plans include?

Every Circle plan includes unlimited members, and what separates them is the transaction fee, the admin seat count and which features are unlocked rather than bought as add-ons. None of them is free after the 14-day trial, which matters if you are still validating whether your community idea has legs.

• Professional, $89/month annual ($99 month-to-month): the entry plan. You get the polished core Circle is known for: spaces, courses, events, live rooms, and paid memberships. The catch is what it withholds. Professional locks out automation, workflows, API access, and white-label branding. If you want a member to be auto-tagged when they join, a welcome sequence to fire on its own, an integration through the API, or Circle's branding removed from your community, none of that is available at this tier.
• Business, $199/month annual ($219 month-to-month): the plan most serious operators end up on, precisely because it unlocks the four things above. It also halves the transaction fee from 2% to 1%, which we will do the math on below.
• Scale, $419/month: the tier above Business, at the same 1% transaction fee. Circle charges the same $419 whether you pay monthly or yearly, which is the one place on its pricing page where paying up front saves nothing. What it adds over Business is worth asking them rather than us.
• Circle Plus, custom pricing: the enterprise conversation, quoted on a call. You get the lowest transaction fee (0.5%), plus the sales-call treatment: custom terms, migration help, and priority support. Circle publishes no figure for it, so there is no number to plan against, and any you have read elsewhere did not come from them. Get the quote in writing.

The honest framing: Professional is the price on the billboard, and Business is the price of the product many buyers actually want. Automation and API access are not luxury features in 2026; they are how a community of any size runs onboarding without a human doing data entry. Budget against the tier whose feature list matches your real workflow, not the cheapest number on the pricing page.

What is Circle's transaction fee?

Circle takes 2% of member payments on Professional, 1% on Business and 0.5% on Plus, on top of Stripe's processing. This platform fee is separate from, and stacked on top of, Stripe's standard payment processing of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So on Professional, roughly 5% of each member payment is gone before it reaches your bank account, and the platform's share of that grows in exact proportion to your revenue. The subscription is the visible cost; the fee is the one that compounds.

The structural point is worth sitting with: a percentage fee means the platform earns more every time you do, forever, without doing anything additional for you. Your 500th member costs Circle nothing extra to serve, but you pay the platform 2% of their subscription every month regardless. Whether that trade feels fair depends on how much you value what the subscription already pays for.

What does Circle cost with add-ons?

A realistic Circle bill runs well past the plan price, because email, branded apps and extra admin seats are billed separately: the $89 Professional plan commonly lands above $200 a month in practice. The base plans look complete on the pricing page, and for a small community they are. The creep happens as you grow, through add-ons that are individually reasonable and collectively significant:

• Email Hub: $99/month. If you want to run real email marketing to your members from inside Circle, that is a second subscription larger than the Professional plan itself.
• Extra admin seats: $10/month each. A co-coach, a community manager, and a VA is $30 a month on top.
• Branded emails: $40/month. Sending member email from your own domain instead of Circle's is a paid add-on.
• Extra spaces: $20/month per 10 spaces. Communities that organize heavily (a space per cohort, per course, per topic) can outgrow the included allotment.

Run the realistic version: a coach on Professional at $89 who adds Email Hub ($99) and two extra admin seats ($20) is at $208 a month before the transaction fee, which is more than the Business base price. That is not a trick, it is just modular pricing, but it means the number you should budget is not the number on the plan card. Add up your actual configuration: base plan, the add-ons your workflow needs, plus 1% to 2% of your projected member revenue. That total is the real Circle price.

Who is Circle worth it for?

Circle is worth its price for an established brand with a budget, whose members judge a community by how polished it feels, and for whom a percentage fee is a rounding error rather than a growing bill. Here is the part a competitor is supposed to skip: for that segment Circle is worth every dollar above. It is arguably the most polished community product on the market, the spaces and events experience feels premium out of the box, and established brands care about that feel because their members judge the room by its walls.

Circle pricing suits you if: you are an established, design-forward brand where the premium feel is part of the product; your revenue is solid enough that $200 to $420 a month plus 1% to 2% of gross is a rounding error rather than a decision; you want a large ecosystem, a mature feature set, and a company with years of enterprise customers behind it; and you would rather pay for refinement than configure your way to it. A well-funded creator business or a company community fits this profile cleanly, and for them the fee is a tax they can afford on a product they like.

It suits you less if you are earlier: pre-revenue, validating an idea, or running a community where $2,000 to $3,000 a year of platform cost is real money that could be content, ads, or savings. There is no free plan to grow into Circle from, so the entry price is the entry price.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Circle?

This is our pitch, disclosed as such, with only claims you can verify in five minutes: yes, and the saving is mostly in the fee and the add-ons rather than in the subscription. Drry charges a flat subscription and takes 0% of member payments on every plan: your members pay you through your own Stripe account, so only Stripe's standard processing applies and the customer relationship belongs to you. There is a genuinely free plan (100 members, 5 GB of storage, unlimited courses, no card required), then flat plans at $29 and $99 a month.

Run the same worked example from above on a flat price: the 100 member, $4,900-a-month coach pays $348 or $1,188 a year depending on plan, and $0 of platform fees on the $58,800 of member revenue, versus roughly $2,244 to $3,216 a year on Circle. The gap widens as you grow, because one of those models scales with your revenue and the other does not. That is our business model being different, not us being charitable: we make money on the subscription, so we have no reason to touch yours.

If you want the feature-by-feature version of this comparison, see Drry vs Circle. And if you are surveying the whole field rather than just the two of us, our Circle alternatives guide covers six options with the same disclosed-vendor rules as this page.