We make Drry, and Drry does not charge a fee on member payments, so we are not a neutral party here. Read this as an argument from someone with a side, not a referee's ruling. The argument is simple: a percentage cut of your revenue is not a fee, it is a tax, and it is a tax structured so that you pay the most exactly when your community is working best.
A flat subscription and a percentage fee feel like the same kind of thing on a pricing page. They are both "what the platform costs." They are not the same kind of thing at all. One is a fixed cost you can plan around. The other is a variable that moves with your success, in the wrong direction for you and the right direction for the platform. That difference is the whole guide.
A fee is a number you multiply, not a number you feel
Here is the trick a percentage plays on your brain. A monthly price is concrete: $99 is $99, you feel it leave your account, you compare it to other $99 things. A percentage is abstract until you sit down and do arithmetic, and almost nobody does the arithmetic while they are choosing a platform. They see "10%" next to a low monthly price, decide it sounds small, and move on.
So do the arithmetic once, on a community that is not even large:
Notice what just happened to the "expensive" plan. The flat $99 subscription, the one that looked pricier on the pricing page, turned out to cost a tenth of what the fee did. This is not a fluke of the numbers I picked. It is the structure. The fee scales with your revenue and the subscription does not, so past a small crossover the fee always wins, and it wins by more the bigger you get.
The tax gets worse in exactly the moments you succeed
Think about the three things you do when a community is going well. You add members. You raise your price because your thing is worth more now. You launch a higher-ticket offer to your most engaged people. Every one of those is a win. Every one of those hands a percentage platform a raise it did nothing to earn.
- You add 50 members.Your work found them, your content converted them, your community keeps them. The fee platform's cut goes up by 50 members' worth of percentage, for building nothing.
- You raise your price from $49 to $79.You took the risk of the increase and absorbed whatever churn it caused. The fee platform's cut per member goes up by 60%, for taking no risk at all.
- You sell a $1,000 program to your best members. That is the payment you worked hardest for. On a percentage model it is also the single payment the platform taxes hardest.
That is what "a tax on growth" means literally. The pricing model is designed so that your best months are the platform's best months, funded by you. A flat subscription is indifferent to your success, which sounds cold until you realize indifference is exactly what you want from your software bill. You want it to sit still while you grow.
The crossover math, so you can run your own
You do not have to trust my example. The crossover point where a fee plan stops being cheaper than a flat plan has a clean formula:
Now put $900 a month in context. That is 19 members at $49, or 31 members at $29, or 10 members at $99. Those are numbers a working community passes in its first season. Which means for any community that succeeds at all, the fee plan is not the cheap option. It is the option that looked cheap on the day you signed up and quietly got expensive the day you started winning.
There is a second cost the percentage hides
Money is the obvious tax. The subtler one is ownership. On most percentage platforms, the reason they can take a cut of every payment is that the payment runs through their account, not yours. The platform is the merchant of record. Your members are, in a real billing sense, the platform's customers that you are allowed to serve.
The alternative is that payments run through your own Stripe account, the platform never touches the money, and there is therefore nothing to take a percentage of. That is not a coincidence of Drry's pricing, it is the same fact viewed twice. A platform that takes 0% is usually a platform that does not hold your payment relationship, and a platform that takes a percentage usually does. The fee and the lock-in are the same design decision. We wrote a whole separate argument about why that ownership matters in own your audience, don't rent it.
The honest case for a fee (yes, there is one)
I am not going to pretend percentage pricing is a scam. It is a real trade with a real upside, and if I skip that you should not trust the rest. A fee plan asks for almost nothing up front and only takes real money once you are making real money. For someone who is genuinely unsure whether their community will work, that alignment can feel safer than committing to a subscription: the platform only wins big if you do.
The catch is that "only takes money once you make money" and "takes the most exactly when you make the most" are the same sentence. The fee is friendly at zero revenue and hostile at scale, and the entire point of starting a community is to not stay at zero revenue. So the fee is optimized for the phase you are trying to leave. A genuinely free flat tier gives you the same "risk nothing to start" safety without the tax waiting on the other side of success. That is the combination worth looking for.
What to actually look for (our bias, stated plainly)
Here is the section where the vendor sells you something. Drry is built on the opposite bet from percentage pricing: a flat subscription, a genuinely free tier to start, and 0% of member payments on every plan, with the money flowing through your own Stripe account so there is nothing for us to take a cut of even if we wanted to.
- Start free, not cheap-with-a-fee. 100 members, unlimited courses, the community feed, no card. Validate at $0, and if it works, your platform bill still does not scale with your revenue.
- Then a flat $29 or $99 a month. Your two-hundredth member costs you the same as your tenth. Raise your price, launch a program, add a hundred people, and the bill sits still.
- Keep the payment relationship. Members pay you through your own Stripe. Your customers and subscriptions are yours, which is also why the fee can be zero.
If you want to pressure-test this against a specific platform, our Skool pricing breakdown walks the exact fee math on a real product, and the comparison hub lays every platform out dimension by dimension. Bring your own numbers and check the arithmetic. That is the whole point: a fee is a number you have to multiply, so multiply it before you sign up, not a year in.
Questions coaches ask
What is a platform transaction fee?
It is a percentage a community or course platform takes from every payment your members make to you, on top of the monthly subscription you already pay for the software and on top of the card-processing fee. A 10% platform fee on a member paying you $49 means the platform keeps about $4.90 of that payment before you ever see it, every month, for as long as that member stays.
Is a percentage fee ever cheaper than a flat subscription?
Yes, at very small scale. If your community earns almost nothing, a percentage of almost nothing is almost nothing, so a low-priced plan with a fee can beat a flat plan for a while. The problem is direction: the fee grows every time you add a member or raise your price, while a flat subscription does not. There is always a crossover point where the fee overtakes the flat price, and for a community that is actually working, you reach it in months, not years.
How do I calculate my own crossover point?
Take the monthly gap between the flat plan you would pay and the fee plan, then divide it by the fee percentage. If a flat plan costs $99 and the fee plan takes 10%, the crossover is roughly $99 divided by 0.10, or about $990 a month in member revenue. Below that the fee plan is cheaper; above it the flat plan is, and the gap only widens as you grow.
Does Drry charge a fee on member payments?
No. Drry charges a flat monthly subscription and takes 0% of your member payments on every plan, including free. Members pay through your own Stripe account, so only Stripe's standard processing fee applies and we take nothing on top. We are the vendor writing this, so weigh it accordingly, but the pricing is public and you can verify it.