The $9 Plan Beats the $99 Plan Until You Sell About $1,268 a Month. Then It Quietly Costs You More.
Skool's two-line price list hides a break-even point most creators never calculate — and the same arithmetic decides your plan on Substack, Patreon and Memberful.
Take the number your community collected last month. Multiply it by 0.071. If the answer is bigger than $90, your cheap plan is costing you money.
That's the whole story. Everything below is just showing the work.
Two lines, one trap
Skool's pricing page still offers exactly two choices. Hobby at $9 a month and Pro at $99 a month, with a transaction fee on every payment your members make: 10% plus 30 cents on Hobby, 2.9% plus 30 cents on Pro. Both give you unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited videos and unlimited live calls — Pro adds the custom URL and affiliate tools, and drops the fee.
So the plans are nearly identical products at a 11x price difference. The feature gap is small. The fee gap is enormous.
The arithmetic: $90 of plan difference divided by the 7.1% fee difference is about $1,268 a month in payments. Below that, Hobby wins. Above it, every dollar you collect hands Skool an extra 7.1 cents for nothing you can see.
The gap doesn't stay polite either. At $10,000 in monthly sales, Hobby costs $1,009 and Pro costs $389. That's $620 a month — $7,440 a year — for choosing the cheaper-looking plan.
One more line in the small print: on Pro the fee rises to 3.9% + 30¢ on payments above $899, so high-ticket sellers should run their own version of the sum rather than trusting the headline 2.9%.
Don't wait for a discount
If you're sitting on Hobby hoping a November sale makes Pro easier to swallow, the record says don't. Skool had not announced a Black Friday 2026 deal as of early November, with no platform sale found in 2023, 2024 or 2025 — the last offer on record dates to 2022. On November 2, the pricing page showed Hobby at $9 and Pro at $99 with a 14-day trial and no sale.
The only real discount is annual billing: $7.50 and $82 a month on yearly, which Skool prices as two months free.
The same sum, everywhere else
Percentage versus flat fee is the same decision on almost every platform a knowledge business touches.
On standard plans, Substack and Patreon both keep 10% as of October 2026. That's painless at $400 a month and brutal at $8,000.
Beehiiv charges a flat plan from about $49 to $59 a month and keeps 0% of paid subscriptions, so it costs less once monthly paid revenue passes roughly $490 to $590. Memberful's $49 plus 4.9% beats a 10% platform fee once monthly revenue passes about $961.
Notice the pattern in those three numbers — $490, $961, $1,268. They're all somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars a month, which is exactly the band most course businesses sit in while they're growing fastest and paying the least attention to their software bill.
The percentage plan is designed to feel free when you're small. It stops being free the month you start winning, and nothing on your dashboard tells you when that happened.
Set a calendar reminder for the first of every month. Revenue times 0.071. Compare to $90.
Sources
- Skool Pricing: $9 Hobby vs $99 Pro, and the Fee — Carly
- Skool Pricing: Hobby vs Pro and the Fees — Kevin Welter
- Skool Pricing in 2026: Plans, Fees and the 30% Cut — Cartmango
- Skool Pricing: Plans, Fees & Hidden Costs — Lori Ballen
- Skool Review | Pricing & Community Features — Learning Revolution
- Skool Black Friday 2026: No Sale Since 2022 — AI Funnel Insider
- Substack vs Patreon vs Beehiiv: Fees at $1K to $10K a Month — Everything PR
- Substack vs Patreon: Fees, Features and Which Fits You — Lilach Bullock
Editor’s note: A ten-second calculation that tells a chunk of our readers they've been overpaying every month since they started growing.
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