Here is the whole post in two sentences. Skool Pro costs $99 a month, which is $5,940 over five years before its 2.9% transaction fee touches a single dollar of your revenue. Seedly Communities costs $399 once, and if you already own Seedly CRM it drops to $150 as a bundle add-on in the same checkout.
Everything below is the supporting arithmetic. I sell the pay-once option, so check my math rather than taking my word for it... that is sort of the point of the post.
The full five-year table
Plan prices compound quietly. Transaction fees compound loudly. This table assumes a modest community earning $2,000 a month in member revenue, which is $120,000 over five years.
| Platform | 5-yr plan cost | Fees at $2k/mo revenue | Own the software? | Full content export? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skool Pro ($99/mo) | $5,940 | $3,480 (2.9% all-in) | No | No, members CSV only |
| Circle Professional | $5,340 to $16,620 with add-ons | $2,400 (2%) plus Stripe | No | Partial, support-assisted |
| Mighty Networks Launch | $4,740 to $5,700 | $2,400 (2%) plus Stripe | No | No, member .xlsx only |
| Heartbeat Grow ($149/mo) | $8,940 | $3,000 (2.5%) plus Stripe | No | Support-ticket only |
| Kajabi Growth (annual) | $11,940 | ~$3,240 to $3,480 processing | No | Contacts CSV, subscriptions do not migrate |
| Whop ($0 plan) | $0 | ~$7,850 effective | No | API export, revenue freeze risk |
| Facebook Groups | $0 | No native payments | No | None |
| Seedly Communities | $399 once, plus your hosting | $0 platform fee (Stripe only) | Yes, full source | You hold the database |
Plan math is monthly price times 60. Fee math applies each platform's published rate to $120,000 of member revenue. Circle's upper bound uses the documented add-on stack covered in the Circle teardown. Whop's figure is the effective ~5.7% plus $0.30 per transaction that its processing and platform fees combine to. Mighty's enterprise Pro tier is excluded because its price is not published. Prices verified July 2, 2026 against each vendor's public pricing page.
The fee line matters more than the plan line
Most people comparison-shop the plan price and ignore the percentage. That is backwards. At $5,000 a month of member revenue, here is what each structure actually takes every month.
Verified July 2, 2026. Circle and Mighty charge their percentage on top of Stripe processing. Skool's rates are all-in. Seedly Communities takes 0% because members pay through your own Stripe account, so there is no place for a platform cut to come out of.
A platform that takes a percentage of your revenue is a business partner you never chose.
Skool Hobby is the sharpest example. The $9 plan reads like the cheapest option on the market, and at $5,000 a month it quietly costs more than every other row in the chart. The full teardown is in the Skool pricing post.
What rent legitimately buys you
Renting is not stupid. It buys real things, and pretending otherwise would torch the rest of this post.
- Managed uptime and security patching. Their pager, not yours.
- Zero setup. You can have a Skool group taking payments this afternoon.
- Someone to email when something breaks.
If you are brand new, still testing whether anyone wants your community, renting for a few months is the right call. Same if the idea of connecting a Stripe key makes you close the laptop. The rent-vs-own question only gets interesting once the community works and the monthly line item plus the fee percentage stop being rounding errors.
What $399 buys instead
Renting, every month
- A plan price that can be repriced under you
- A percentage of every member payment
- Features sold back to you as add-ons
- An exit limited to whatever export exists
Owning, once
- Full source code with a commercial license
- 0% platform fee, members pay your own Stripe
- Unlimited members, no cap exists in the code
- Your database, your domain, your exit
Seedly Communities is the full source code of a community platform, sold once. Members are unlimited because no cap exists anywhere in the code, and payments run through your own Stripe account so the platform fee is structurally 0%. Feed, chat, classroom, events, live streaming, and gamification ship in one codebase.
And here is what $399 does not buy, stated plainly. It is the all-in software cost, not the all-in cost. You deploy the frontend to Vercel and the backend to Convex, and you pay those providers directly as your community grows. Live video needs a Daily.co key, and email needs SendGrid or Postmark. Source you own, deployed on infrastructure you control. What that means in practice, including where it is not for you, gets the full treatment in the ownership pillar guide.
Break-even, three ways
The napkin math is simple. Take your platform's monthly plan price, add its percentage of your monthly revenue, and divide $399 by that number. That is how many months of rent equal owning the software outright.
Our arithmetic from the verified fee schedules. The hobbyist passes $399 of cumulative rent in month five. The coach passes it in month three. The creator passes it in month two, and the fee line is why the gap explodes from there.
Notice what changes across the three personas. The plan price is identical, and the five-year total quadruples anyway. Fees scale with your success. The software does not have to.
FAQ
Is there really no monthly fee?
What do I actually pay for hosting?
Is there a catch on member counts?
What is the $150 price I have seen mentioned?
If you want the per-platform breakdowns, start with Skool or Circle, or go straight to the head-to-heads on the Skool vs page and the Circle vs page. And when the math convinces you, the checkout is one page.
