Skool vs Circle vs Mighty Networks: what a paid community actually costs

Quick verdict

Add the card processing before you compare anything. Two of these three platforms quote a percentage that is not the percentage you pay.

The fee column is not one number

Every roundup of community platforms builds the same table with a column headed "transaction fee". In September 2026 it reads 2.9% for Skool Pro, 2% for Circle Professional and 2% for Mighty Launch, and the obvious conclusion is that Skool takes the biggest cut. The conclusion is backwards, because the three numbers are measured from different starting points.

Skool's help documentation describes Skool as a "merchant of record" and is explicit that this is not a normal Stripe arrangement: you connect a Stripe Express account for payouts only. Skool notes that Stripe charges an additional 1.5% for international cards and 0.5% for subscriptions — surcharges its own rate does not add on top. Read plainly, Skool's 2.9% plus 30 cents is the whole deduction.

Circle says the opposite in as many words. Its payments page states that "Circle's transaction fees are in addition to Stripe's standard processing fees, which vary by country." You connect your own Stripe account, Stripe takes its cut, and Circle takes 2% after that. Mighty Networks documents the same structure: its help article says Stripe and the card companies charge fees "beyond" the Mighty Networks transaction fee, typically "between 2.5% and 5% per transaction", deducted before money reaches your Stripe balance.

Stripe's published US rate for online card payments is 2.9% plus 30 cents. Putting that where each vendor says it belongs:

Our arithmetic, applying Stripe's published US online rate where Circle and Mighty Networks state it applies. Fee rates from Skool's payments FAQ, circle.so/pricing, skool.com/pricing and mightynetworks.com/pricing.

The platform advertising the highest percentage charges the lowest one. The gap is about two points, which is the same order of magnitude as the differences these tables usually treat as decisive.

What it costs all-in

Percentages are easier to argue about than to feel, so here is the monthly bill for a membership community charging $30 a month, at four sizes. Every figure is subscription plus platform fee plus card processing, so the columns are finally comparable.

Our arithmetic on the published rates, at monthly billing, excluding tax. Bold marks the cheapest in each row.

Three things fall out of that table.

The sticker prices are 11x apart and the bills are not. At 300 members the cheapest sticker on the page, Skool Hobby at $9, is the most expensive platform by more than double — and the dearest sticker, Pro at $99, is the cheapest by $160 a month.

Skool Pro pulls further ahead as you grow, not closer. That is what a two-point rate advantage does: it compounds with revenue, while a $20 gap in subscription price does not. At $1,500 a month Pro saves $10 against Mighty Launch; at $9,000 a month it saves $160, or $1,920 a year.

Below roughly $1,000 a month, the cheap-subscription plans win outright, because a tiny community pays almost no percentage on almost no revenue. It is the same shape we found in Teachable vs Podia vs Thinkific, where a 5% storefront beats every subscription tier until roughly $800 a month, and in Substack vs beehiiv vs Ghost.

The crossovers, if you want to place your own numbers: Hobby beats Pro below about $1,268 a month ($90 of extra subscription divided by 7.1 points of fee); Pro beats Mighty Launch above $1,000 and Circle Professional above $500. Because the Hobby-to-Pro switch comes first, one of the two Skool plans is cheapest at every level we modelled.

The fee ladder that mostly does not matter

All three vendors sell the same upgrade story: move up a tier and your transaction fee falls. Circle goes 2% to 1% to 0.5%, Mighty goes 2% to 1% to 0.5%, Skool goes 10% to 2.9%. It reads like the same offer three times. It is not.

Divide the extra subscription by the points of fee it buys back, and you get the revenue at which each upgrade pays for itself:

Our arithmetic on the published plan prices and fee rates.

On Skool the fee genuinely decides your tier, at a number a real community reaches — roughly 42 members at $30 a month. On Circle and Mighty it is close to irrelevant: you need five-figure monthly revenue before a one-point saving covers the upgrade, and by then the fee is a rounding error against everything else.

So on those two you are not upgrading for the fee, whatever the pricing table implies — you are upgrading for admin seats, spaces and storage. Circle Professional gives 3 admins, 10 moderators, 20 spaces and 200 GB; Business gives 5, 15, 30 and 500 GB. Mighty Launch gives 3 hosts, 10 moderators and 200 GB; Scale gives 5, 15 and 500 GB. Price the seats you need, treat the fee cut as a small rebate, and you will not talk yourself into a $199 plan to save one percent of $2,000.

The $900 cliff on Skool Pro

Skool's advantage is not uniform, and the exception matters before you build an offer around it. Its payments FAQ states that Pro charges 2.9% plus 30 cents "for transactions up to $899 USD" and 3.9% plus 30 cents "for transactions above $900 USD".

That is per transaction, not per month, so ordinary monthly memberships never reach it — a $30 charge is nowhere near. It bites on high-ticket work: a $2,000 cohort programme, a coaching package, or an annual membership billed as a single payment.

On a $2,000 charge Skool Pro takes $78.30 by our arithmetic against $98.30 on a stacked 4.9%. Skool still wins, but by about one point instead of two. If your business is a few large payments rather than many small ones, run your own numbers rather than assuming the entry-tier ranking holds — and note that billing monthly keeps each charge under the threshold, at the cost of paying 30 cents twelve times instead of once.

What the cheapest option costs you elsewhere

This page prices platforms. It does not claim they are interchangeable, and on features they are conspicuously not.

Skool is deliberately minimal: one community, a discussion feed, courses, a calendar, a leaderboard. No space architecture, no white-label app, no elaborate branding. That constraint is the product. Circle and Mighty both sell considerably more structure — multiple spaces, live rooms and streaming with published attendee caps, deeper member profiles, branded app routes on the upper tiers. If you need any of it, cost is not your deciding variable and this should not be your deciding table.

There is also a real trade inside Skool's price advantage. Being a merchant of record is why Skool can quote an all-in rate, and it means Skool holds the payment relationship, not you. Its documentation describes payouts landing weekly on Wednesdays via Stripe Express, with the first taking up to 14 days. On Circle and Mighty you connect your own Stripe account and keep the processor relationship, the payout schedule and direct access to your customer records. Paying two points a year for that is a legitimate preference. The same question decides between storefronts in Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy, where merchant-of-record status also moves who is responsible for tax.

Whichever you pick, the platform is not the hard part: a paid community needs an audience to launch to — see building a newsletter list from scratch — and a skill worth paying for, the argument in high-income digital skills.

What we could not confirm

Stated plainly rather than filled in with numbers we could not read at source.

• Circle's exact processing stack. Circle's payments page confirms its fee is in addition to Stripe, but its knowledge base article on paywall transaction fees would not render for us. Published reporting of that article describes an extra Stripe Billing charge of 0.7% on top of the 2.9% and 30 cents. We have not applied it, so our Circle figures are the reading most favourable to Circle — if that 0.7% is current, Circle is worse than shown here, not better.
• Circle annual pricing. No annual toggle was displayed to us, so we priced Circle at the monthly figures shown. Any annual discount lowers its totals.
• Mighty Networks billing period. The pricing page shows Launch at $79 a month and $950 a year, and $950 divided by 12 is $79.17 — so the $79 we priced appears to be the annual rate, with no monthly rate displayed to us. Its "2 months free" wording does not reconcile with those two figures either. We have therefore priced Mighty at what looks like its cheapest rate against Skool at its monthly rate, which tilts the comparison against our own conclusion rather than toward it.
• Skool annual pricing. Skool advertises 2 months free on yearly billing but did not display the resulting figures. At the stated terms that is $90 and $990 a year by our arithmetic — which would widen Skool's lead, so we used the monthly rates throughout instead.
• Mighty's Explore plan. Mighty's fee documentation lists an Explore plan at 5% and a Growth free trial at 5%, neither of which appeared on the pricing page we read. We cannot tell whether Explore is currently purchasable, so it is not in our tables.
• Non-US and non-card payments. Every processing figure uses Stripe's published US online card rate. International cards, currency conversion and alternative payment methods all change it, and Skool's structure may absorb surcharges the others pass through. We did not verify that comparison.
• Tax. None of the three pricing pages states tax treatment, and merchant-of-record status usually changes who remits sales tax or VAT. Confirm with each vendor; we make no claim about it.

Site-wide rule: a number we could not read at source does not get stated as a fact. Fee structures on all three platforms have changed within the past year, and the merchant-of-record distinction is the load-bearing fact on this page — check it against the vendor before you commit.

Final recommendation

Before you compare any two community platforms, ask one question: does this percentage include card processing, or sit on top of it? It is the difference between 2.9% and 4.9% here, it is worth $1,920 a year at $9,000 a month in revenue, and it is invisible in every side-by-side table that treats the fee as a single number.

On cost alone the answer is straightforward. Run Skool Hobby while the community is small, move to Pro at around $1,268 a month, and you are on the cheapest option available at every stage. Choose Circle or Mighty Networks when you need what they actually sell — spaces, seats, events, a branded app, or simply your own Stripe account and the customer relationship that comes with it — and go in knowing that convenience costs roughly two points of everything you collect.

Related reads: comparison hub, Teachable vs Podia vs Thinkific, Substack vs beehiiv vs Ghost fees, and Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy — all three turn on the same habit of reading a fee before believing it.