Skool Pricing 2026: $9 vs $99 Plans Compared

Skool has two plans: Hobby at $9 a month with a 10% transaction fee, and Pro at $99 a month with a 2.9% fee (rising to 3.9% above $900 per transaction). Both include identical features — unlimited members, courses, videos, and live calls. Above roughly $1,268 a month in community revenue, Pro costs less outright.

AdvLaunch is the paid community growth agency — we run the Meta ad campaigns that fill paid communities on Skool and every other major platform for a living. That's the lens this breakdown uses: not just which plan is cheaper on paper, but what either tier actually costs once you're spending real ad dollars to fill whatever you build on it.

The Two Skool Plans, Plainly

Skool publishes exactly two plans, and the feature list is identical between them: unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited videos, live calls, a custom URL, and an affiliate program. Hobby runs $9 a month and charges a 10% transaction fee plus $0.30 on every payment your members make. Pro runs $99 a month and charges a 2.9% transaction fee plus $0.30 per payment — except on any single transaction above $900, where the fee rises to 3.9%. Neither plan offers a permanent free tier; Skool gives both a 14-day free trial instead.

That means the plan name doesn't buy you anything. Gamification, the member feed algorithm, the mobile app, and every course and community feature are the same on both tiers. The only thing $90 a month actually buys is a lower cut on every dollar your members pay you.

The flat $0.30 per-transaction surcharge matters most for low-ticket, high-frequency communities — a $20/month membership with hundreds of payments racks up far more in $0.30 fragments, relative to revenue, than a handful of $2,000 cohort payments ever would. If most of your revenue arrives as a few large payments rather than many small ones, the percentage fee dominates and the break-even math above holds closely. If your community runs on frequent small charges, re-run the comparison with your actual transaction count before assuming the $1,268 figure applies to you.

The Break-Even Math Skool Doesn't Publish

Skool's own pricing page states both fee percentages but never runs the comparison past that. At low revenue, the extra $90 a month for Pro isn't worth it. Past a certain point, the fee gap more than pays for itself. Here's where that point actually sits, using each plan's base price and percentage fee (this excludes the flat $0.30-per-transaction surcharge on both plans, since that depends on your transaction count, not your total revenue — a figure Skool doesn't publish and this page won't invent).

The math behind the break-even point: Pro costs $90 a month more than Hobby, and Pro's fee is 7.1 percentage points lower (10% − 2.9%). Divide $90 by 0.071 and you get roughly $1,268 — the monthly revenue where the fee savings fully cover the higher base price. This $1,268 figure is AdvLaunch's own calculation from Skool's published rates, not a number Skool itself publishes, and it's a simplification: a high volume of small transactions pushes the real break-even point lower (more $0.30 surcharges hit the 10% plan harder in relative terms), while a handful of large transactions pushes it higher. Run your own numbers against your actual transaction pattern before switching tiers.

Launching a paid Skool community? We handle setup and the first 30 days → →

Which Plan to Start On

The break-even math tells you where the fee crossover sits. It doesn't tell you where to start — that depends on whether you're validating an offer or already selling one, and on how confident you are in your near-term revenue, not just where you happen to sit today.

What Neither Plan Includes

Both Skool plans cover hosting your community, courses, and payments. Neither plan includes the things that actually get a stranger to become a paying member: ad spend, a Meta ads account and creative production, a landing page built for cold traffic, pixel and attribution setup outside Skool's own account, or Skool Games strategy if you're chasing an MRR-growth round. Those are separate costs and separate skills from the $9 or $99 you're paying Skool itself.

Skool Games specifically rewards MRR growth, not raw member count, and the built-in affiliate program on both plans only pays out on members an affiliate actually refers — it doesn't generate new cold traffic on its own. If your growth plan depends on strangers who've never heard of your community discovering it through a paid channel, that's a separate acquisition system layered on top of whichever Skool plan you're paying for, not a feature either $9 or $99 unlocks. Budgeting for that acquisition system, on top of the $9 or $99 plan fee, is the real first cost most new operators underestimate.

How AdvLaunch Fills a Paid Skool Community

Neither plan's pricing page answers the question that actually determines whether $9 or $99 a month was the right call: how a stranger becomes a paying member in the first place. AdvLaunch is the paid community growth agency, and that's the part we run every day, on top of Skool. We call the system The Community Flywheel™:

1. Hook: a Meta ad sends cold traffic to a paid challenge, webinar, or masterclass we control — not to your Skool signup page, where login friction and the Meta Pixel's blind spot past the click both work against you.
2. Result delivered: over 7 days or one live event, your method produces a real outcome, so people experience your teaching before they're asked to join.
3. Community upsell: graduates get your Skool community at a founder rate, through a landing page we control instead of a cold invite link.
4. Retention compounds: members arrive already bought in, and we measure retention and lifetime value against that campaign cohort instead of a generic benchmark.

If you're stuck comparing a 10% fee against a 2.9% one, that's usually a sign the real blocker isn't the plan tier — it's that nobody's tested whether paid acquisition works on your offer yet. The $3,000 Launch Pack is the cheapest honest test: in 30 days we design the paid challenge or webinar funnel, launch the Meta ads, build the landing page, set up the pixel and attribution, and hand you an end-of-sprint report, so the plan decision gets made on your own revenue instead of a spreadsheet. The Launch Pack assumes an ad budget of at least $2,000 a month; the Scale Program runs $8,000 a month with 12+ creatives.