What are Skool's fees?
·Founder, Stakk
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16 September 2026
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5 min read
Two plans, and each has a transaction fee on top. Hobby is $9 a month and takes 10% + 30c on every transaction. Pro is $99 a month and takes 2.9% + 30c on transactions up to $899, rising to 3.9% + 30c above $900. There is no separate card processing charge, because Skool runs the payments on its own merchant account and is the merchant of record. Transaction fees are not refunded when you refund a member. Checked 13 September 2026.
Skool's rate includes processing, which is rarer than it sounds and makes it awkward to compare against platforms that quote a cut and leave Stripe's 2.9% off the page. Read what follows as an all-in number, because that is what it is.
How much does Skool cost a month?
Skool's pricing page lists Hobby at $9 a month and Pro at $99 a month, both with unlimited members, courses, videos and live calls, plus a custom URL and affiliates. Paying yearly gets two months free.
The feature list is almost identical across the two. What you are actually buying at $99 is the lower transaction fee, which makes this one of the cleaner pricing decisions in the category: it is arithmetic rather than a feature comparison.
What does Skool take per transaction?
On Hobby, 10% + 30c on all transactions. On Pro, 2.9% + 30c up to $899, and 3.9% + 30c above $900. Those figures are from Skool's own payments FAQ, which also gives worked examples: a $9 a month membership pays out $8.40 on Pro and $7.80 on Hobby.
Three details from the same page that rarely make it into comparisons. Transaction fees are non-refundable, so refunding a member costs you the fee as well as the payment. There is a transaction limit of $100,000 per charge. And Skool notes that its Pro rate can work out cheaper than raw Stripe for some communities, because Stripe adds for international cards and subscriptions where Skool's flat rate does not.
Our own arithmetic on Skool's published rates. It is the only real question between the two plans, since the feature lists barely differ.
Can you use your own Stripe account with Skool?
No, and Skool is unusually direct about it. Its payments FAQ says this is not a regular Stripe account, that all payment processing happens on Skool's merchant account, and that you cannot use your existing Stripe account. Skool always creates a new Stripe Express account to send you payouts.
So the Stripe connection is a payout pipe rather than a payment account. You are connecting your Skool account to your bank via Stripe Express, not running charges through something you own. With a Standard account you would log in to Stripe, see every charge and keep the account if you left. Here you do not, and the difference between those account types is worth understanding before you build a community on top of it.
When does Skool pay you?
Every Wednesday, straight to your bank. US accounts usually see it in 1 to 3 business days and international accounts in 3 to 5. The first payout runs through extra checks and can take up to 14 days, then it settles into the weekly rhythm.
Two currency details matter if you are outside the US. All subscription prices on Skool are in US dollars and members pay in dollars, but payouts are made in your local currency, and Skool does not support dollar deposits outside the US. There is also a minimum payout, which Skool describes as typically one base unit of the local currency, so it is not a real obstacle. Compared with platforms that hold your money for a month, weekly and predictable is a good deal.
Who is the merchant of record on Skool?
Skool is, in its own words, and that is a substantial part of what the fee buys.
Its payments FAQ states that Skool is a merchant of record, that it handles EU VAT by adding the local amount on top of your price and remitting it, and that collection, filing and payment are Skool's responsibility rather than yours. It also explains that it does not collect VAT in the UK, because it is registered there as a virtual training business and that category is VAT-exempt.
That is a genuine service and very few platforms in this space take it on. What it means for you specifically depends on where you and your members are, so ask an accountant in your own country rather than taking a blog's word for it, this one included.
When is Hobby cheaper than Pro?
Below roughly $1,268 of monthly transactions, as the number above shows. For a community just starting, Hobby at $9 is almost always the right call, and the moment to move is when the fee difference stops being theoretical.
One wrinkle worth planning around: the Pro rate steps up above $900 per transaction. If you sell a high-ticket annual membership or a one-off programme above that line, the rate on those specific charges is 3.9% + 30c rather than 2.9%, so a $1,200 annual plan is not priced the same way a $99 monthly one is.
When would I send you somewhere else?
If you want a community, stay on Skool and do not let this page distract you. Stakk has no community, no courses, no live calls, no recurring billing and no membership of any kind. It is the wrong choice for the thing Skool is for, and nothing here is an argument against Skool.
If it is purely the rate you are weighing, Systeme.io is free at 0% and Whop takes 2.7% + $0.30 with no monthly fee, and both beat Skool and us on the number. Stakk also cannot price above $999 or handle any currency other than US dollars, which rules it out for a lot of what gets sold on Skool.
Want a checkout for a one-off product?
The place these two stop overlapping is a single purchase rather than a membership. If you are selling a template, a guide or a preset pack alongside your community, that is a different job from a monthly subscription and Skool is not built for it.
Stakk takes 10% + $0.50 a sale with card processing included, has no monthly fee, and pays into a Stripe account that stays yours. That rate is higher than Skool Pro's and lower than Skool Hobby's, which is about as honest a summary as I can give.
What Skool does not have on either plan is an order bump and a post-purchase upsell. Both ship on every Stakk account with nothing behind a tier. The bump rides the same charge as the product so it carries one fee rather than two, and the upsell afterwards is one tap against the card on file. That is the shape that sells a second thing to someone who already trusts you, and it came out of funnels that ran for agency clients before Stakk existed.