We make Drry, a Skool competitor, so read this with that in mind. Skool costs $9 a month on the Hobby plan or $99 a month on the Pro plan, plus a transaction fee on member payments: 10% plus $0.30 per transaction on Hobby, and roughly card-processing rates (2.9% plus $0.30, rising to 3.9% plus $0.30 above $899) on Pro. That fee, not the subscription, is where the real money goes for most paid communities, and this guide walks the math.
Everything below is our honest read of those numbers as they stand, and we will tell you plainly where our own product enters the picture (one section, clearly labeled, near the end).
The two plans, and what each includes
Skool keeps the plan grid refreshingly small. There are exactly two plans, and the feature list is nearly identical between them:
- Hobby, $9 a month: the full Skool product with unlimited members, unlimited courses, and a custom URL on skool.com. The catch is the fee: Skool takes 10% plus $0.30 of every member payment.
- Pro, $99 a month: the same unlimited members, unlimited courses, and skool.com URL, but the rate drops to 2.9% plus $0.30 on payments up to $899, and 3.9% plus $0.30 above that.
Both of those are all-in rates: Skool takes the payment, so the number it quotes already contains the card-processing cost. That is worth separating out, because it is the difference between what the plans cost youand what Skool itself earns. Card processing runs about 2.9% plus $0.30 wherever you sell, so on Hobby roughly 7 of those 10 points are Skool's own margin, and on Pro Skool's own margin is close to nothing until a single payment passes $899, where 1% comes back.
Keep the two questions apart and neither number below is surprising. Which Skool plan is cheaper for me compares 10% against 2.9%, because you pay the processing either way. What does Skool take that another platform would notcompares 7 points against roughly zero, and that is the comparison that matters when you are looking at leaving.
Yearly billing takes roughly two months off either plan, so Hobby lands near $90 a year and Pro near $990 a year if you prepay. Worth taking once you know you are staying; not worth it while you are still deciding.
Notice what the plan grid is really telling you. You do not upgrade to Pro for features, because there barely are any to unlock. Both plans run the same community, the same courses, the same calendar. The $90-a-month gap between Hobby and Pro buys exactly one thing: the removal of Skool's own margin, about 7 of Hobby's 10 points, on any payment up to $899; above that Skool keeps roughly 1%. Which means Skool's pricing page is not really a feature comparison at all. It is a bet about how much money your community will make, and Skool has priced both sides of that bet in its favor. Small community: they collect 10% of not much, plus $9. Larger community: they collect $99 whether you earn anything or not. The only question the two plans ask you is which side of roughly $1,300 a month you are on, and we will get to that number in a moment.
The transaction fee is the real price
A 10% fee sounds abstract until you put a real community through it. The $9 headline anchors your brain to a trivial number, but the fee scales with revenue while the subscription stays flat, so for any paid community that is actually working, the fee dwarfs the plan price almost immediately. Here is what that looks like at a modest, realistic size:
None of this is hidden, to be fair: the fee is right there on Skool's pricing page. But the framing does a lot of work. A monthly price is a number you feel; a percentage is a number you have to sit down and multiply. Most coaches comparing platforms compare the $9 and $99 headlines, pick the small one, and only discover months later that they chose the plan that takes a tenth of their business off the top.
The break-even: when Hobby stops being cheap
The math has a clean crossover point. The gap between the plans is $90 a month, and the gap between the all-in rates is roughly 7 percentage points (10% versus about 2.9%). It is 7 rather than 10 because you pay card processing on either plan; 7 is what actually leaves your pocket when you move. Ninety dollars divided by that gap puts the crossover at around $1,300 a month in community revenue: below it, Hobby's bigger fee on a small base still costs less than Pro's bigger subscription; above it, the 10% fee starts costing more than the $90 you would spend to escape it.
To make $1,300 a month concrete: that is 27 members at $49, or 44 members at $29, or 14 members at $99. Those are small numbers. A community that is working at all blows past them within months, which is why the practical advice is simple:
- Free community, or just validating: Hobby is fine. Ten percent of zero is zero, and $9 a month is a cheap test.
- Paid and under ~$1,300 a month: Hobby still wins on total cost, but set a calendar reminder. Check your monthly revenue against the crossover every month or two.
- Paid and over ~$1,300 a month: switch to Pro. Every month you wait on Hobby past the crossover, you are paying extra for the privilege of a smaller subscription line item.
One more wrinkle worth knowing: Pro's rate steps up to 3.9% plus $0.30 on transactions above $899. If your model is high-ticket (a $1,500 program sold through your community, say), each of those payments carries the higher rate. It does not change the Hobby-versus-Pro conclusion, since 3.9% still beats 10% easily, but it belongs in your math if big one-time payments are your main revenue.
What Skool pricing does not include
The plan grid tells you what you pay. It is quieter about what you do not get at either price:
- No free plan. There is no $0 way to run a Skool community. If you want to test an idea before spending anything, Skool is not where you do it.
- No landing pages or funnels. Skool gives you an about page, not a marketing site. If you want a real landing page, an opt-in funnel, or conversion tracking, you are bolting on a separate page builder and paying for it separately.
- Your community lives on skool.com. Both plans include a custom URL, but it is a custom URL on skool.com, not your own domain. The address your members type, share, and remember belongs to the platform, and it comes with you nowhere if you ever leave.
None of these are dealbreakers for everyone. Plenty of thriving communities run happily on a skool.com URL with a third-party page builder out front. But they are real costs, in money or in brand, and they belong in the same spreadsheet as the fee.
How that compares to a flat-price home (our pitch, disclosed)
This is the section where we sell you something, so weigh it accordingly. Drry is built on the opposite pricing bet: we charge a flat subscription and take 0% of member payments on every plan. Your members' money flows through your own Stripe account, so only Stripe's standard processing fee applies and the customer relationship, the billing history, everything, belongs to you.
- A genuinely free plan: 100 members, 5 GB of storage, unlimited courses, no card required. The thing Skool does not offer at any price: a $0 way to validate.
- Then flat $29 or $99 a month. Your hundredth member costs you the same as your tenth, and the platform bill never grows because your revenue did.
- Landing pages and email included, so the front door of your business is not a second subscription.
Run the earlier example through a flat price: the coach grossing $4,900 a month pays a fixed $29 or $99 to us and keeps the roughly $490 a month that Skool Hobby would take, minus only Stripe's processing. That is our whole argument, and it is a structural one rather than a quality one: Skool is a good product with a percentage-shaped business model. If you want the full feature-by-feature comparison, see Drry vs Skool, and if you are weighing the wider field, our Skool alternatives guide covers six platforms with the same disclosed-vendor honesty as this page.
Questions coaches ask
Does Skool take a cut of my sales?
On Hobby, yes: 10% plus $0.30 of every member payment. That rate is all-in, so about 2.9 points of it is card processing you would pay anywhere and roughly 7 points are Skool's own margin. On Pro the all-in rate drops to 2.9% plus $0.30 up to $899 per payment, which is essentially the processing rate alone, so Skool's own margin there is close to nothing until a payment passes $899, where 1% returns. Read Pro as $99 a month to remove those 7 points, paid before your first member joins.
Is the $9 Skool plan worth it?
For a free community, or a paid one earning under roughly $1,300 a month, yes: $9 plus the fee on a small revenue base is the cheapest way to run Skool. Past that point the 10% fee costs more than the $90-a-month gap to Pro, and the further you grow the worse the Hobby math gets. Treat Hobby as a starter plan with a built-in expiration date, not a long-term home for a paid community.
Does Skool have a free plan?
No. Skool has no free plan. Both Hobby and Pro are paid subscriptions, so the cheapest way to run a Skool community indefinitely is $9 a month plus the 10% transaction fee on anything you charge. If you want to validate a community idea at $0, you need a platform with a real free tier or a free tool like Discord.
What does Skool Pro get you over Hobby?
Mostly the fee. Both plans include unlimited members, unlimited courses, and a custom URL on skool.com, so you are not buying features with the extra $90 a month: you are buying the drop from a 10% all-in rate to 2.9%, which is card processing alone until a single payment passes $899, where 1% returns. Since you pay the processing on either plan, what actually leaves your pocket is about 7 points, and that trade pays for itself at around $1,300 a month in member revenue.