No. Skool acts as the merchant and processes payments itself, so the 10% on Hobby and the 2.9% on Pro are all-in — there is no separate Stripe charge behind them. Skool also absorbs Stripe's international-card and subscription surcharges that most platforms pass on to you.
You can verify this from Skool's own published example: a $999 sale pays out $959.74, which is exactly 3.9% + $0.30 and nothing else. This matters because most comparison articles get it wrong in one direction or the other.
Below roughly $3,500/month in revenue, yes. Above it, no. Whop charges $0/month plus about 5.7% + $0.30 all in. Skool Pro charges $99/month plus 2.9% all in. The rate difference is 2.8%, and $99 divided by 0.028 gives a crossover at about $3,536/month.
Two things push the crossover in Whop's favour: running more than one community, since each extra Skool community is another $99/month while Whop charges nothing, and being pre-revenue, where Whop costs literally nothing.
No. Hobby is $9/month plus 10% all-in, which is more than Whop's roughly 5.7% at every revenue level — the gap is $9 plus 4.3% of your revenue, and there is no volume where it closes. Hobby's 10% is the highest transaction fee among the major community platforms.
Its purpose is to lower the barrier onto Skool. If you are on Hobby and doing real revenue, the break-even to Pro is around $1,200 to $1,300 per month — but the wider question is whether either plan is right for your volume.
A second tier on the Pro plan. Transactions above roughly $899 are charged 3.9% + $0.30 instead of 2.9% + $0.30, and it applies to the whole transaction rather than just the amount above the threshold. Most reviews leave this out entirely.
On a $1,500 cohort sale that is $58.80 rather than $43.80. Still cheaper per transaction than Whop's 5.7% + $0.30, which would be $85.80 on the same sale — high-ticket selling is one place where Skool's rate genuinely wins.
Yes. There is no bundle pricing and no multi-community discount on either plan. Three Pro communities cost $297/month in subscriptions before any transaction fees, which is $3,564 a year.
This is the single strongest argument for a platform with no monthly floor if you plan to run several distinct offers. On Whop, additional products and communities cost nothing extra.
No. Skool is a self-contained platform — the community has to live inside Skool. It cannot grant or revoke Discord roles, add members to a Telegram channel, gate a TradingView script or deliver software licence keys.
Whop does all of those natively, which is why people whose community already lives on Discord tend to move to Whop rather than to another community platform. Your members never have to change where they hang out.
Some, yes, and there is no way around it. Recurring subscriptions cannot be transferred between platforms because the payment authorisation belongs to the original platform. Every member has to actively re-subscribe somewhere new.
You can reduce the loss substantially: export your member list first, grandfather existing members at their current price for life, and run both platforms in parallel for three or four weeks instead of setting a hard cutoff.
Yes, and it is a genuine advantage. Skool calculates, adds and remits VAT and sales tax where required, so international compliance is not your problem. Platforms where you connect your own processor generally leave that to you.
If you sell across borders at any real scale, factor this in properly and get advice specific to your situation before moving revenue. Nothing on this site is tax advice.
Gamification. Points, levels and leaderboards are Skool's actual product, and they drive daily engagement that plain forum tools and chat servers do not come close to. Reviews consistently single this out as the reason members stay subscribed.
If churn rather than cost is your bottleneck, that is worth more than the $99. Be honest with yourself about which problem you actually have before you optimise for the wrong one.
Every rate was checked against the platforms' own published pricing and fee documentation in July 2026, including Skool's help-centre fee tiers. Community-platform pricing changes frequently — Skool's $9 Hobby tier did not exist before July 2025 — so confirm current rates on the official pricing page before you decide.
All the maths on this site is shown rather than asserted, so you can check it against your own numbers instead of taking our word for it.
Elsewhere on this site
Still deciding?
Take your monthly revenue and compare 5.7% against $99 plus 2.9%. If you are under $3,500, the switch pays for itself in month one — and opening a Whop is free.
Start selling on Whop →