I paid $13,000 for a mastermind once.
I was making $15K to $20K a month at the time. Stupid decision, right?
Six months later I was at $75K a month.
So when founders ask me "is Skool worth it", I don't dismiss the question. Paying to be in the right room is one of the highest-return things I've ever done. But Skool is not one room. It's a platform hosting 10,000+ paid communities of wildly different quality, plus a $9 to $99/month tool you can build your own community on.
Those are two very different questions. Let's answer both.
What Skool actually is
Skool is a community platform founded in 2019 by Sam Ovens (the Consulting.com guy).
In late 2023, Alex Hormozi made what he called the biggest personal investment of his life and became a partner. That's when Skool went from "niche Circle competitor" to the default home of the creator-economy money-making community.
One community on Skool gets you:
- A discussion feed (think private Facebook group, minus the ads)
- A basic course area they call Classroom
- A calendar for live calls
- Gamification: points, levels, leaderboards
- A member directory and DMs
That's it. And honestly, the constraint is the point. There's almost nothing to configure, so communities on Skool tend to actually get used.
Hormozi and Ovens also run the Skool Games, a competition (monthly at launch in January 2024, now 90-day rounds) where community owners compete on revenue for coaching and prizes. Keep that in mind for later, because it explains a lot about what you'll find on the platform.
Skool pricing in 2026
Two plans:
- Hobby: $9/month. Unlimited members, courses and live calls. 10% transaction fee on everything you charge.
- Pro: $99/month. Same features. Transaction fee drops to 2.9%. Custom URL.
Both come with a 14-day free trial, and yearly billing gets you 2 months free.
The only real difference is the transaction fee, so the math is simple: Hobby is cheaper until your community makes about $1,270/month. Past that, the 10% cut costs you more than the $90 price gap and you switch to Pro.
For a software product, that's cheap. A Circle plan with similar features runs $89 to $219/month. Mighty Networks starts at $41 and climbs fast.
One more thing on pricing. Start on Hobby even if you think you'll grow. The 10% fee on your first $500 of member revenue is $50, and you'll know within 60 days whether your community has a pulse. Upgrading later takes two clicks. Paying $99/month for an empty feed is how most Skool experiments die.
But "the tool is cheap" is not the question. The question is whether what happens inside it is worth your money and your hours.
Is joining a paid Skool community worth it?
This is the version of the question most founders are actually asking. Somebody's ad followed you around, the community costs $49 or $99/month, and the testimonials look great.
Here's my honest take after being on both sides of this.
The good ones are genuinely good. A tight community run by an operator who's actually done the thing can compress years into months. I've watched it happen. It happened to me (that $13K room again).
But the incentives on Skool specifically should make you slow down.
The Skool Games rank community owners by revenue. Not by member results. Revenue. The winning move for an owner is maximum members at maximum price with minimum delivery cost. Some owners resist that gravity. Many don't.
The gamification cuts both ways too. Points and leaderboards give Skool some of the highest daily-login rates of any community platform, which sounds great until you realize you can be "active" every day (level 7, nice) while your MRR hasn't moved in a quarter.
Engagement is not progress.
So before you pay for any Skool community, run it through three filters:
- Who's actually in there? If it's 4,000 people and most posts are "Day 1, excited to be here", you'll be lonely in a crowd. You want people at your stage or slightly ahead, few enough that they know your name.
- Does the owner make money from the thing they teach, or from teaching the thing? Check what they actually built outside of their community.
- Is there a structure for getting help on YOUR business? Hot seats, small group calls, accountability. A feed you scroll is content. A room that reviews your pricing page is a mastermind.
If a community passes all three, the platform it runs on is irrelevant. Skool, Circle, a WhatsApp group. Doesn't matter.
Most don't pass. I wrote a whole piece on how much a mastermind costs and the pattern is consistent: price tells you almost nothing, structure tells you almost everything.
Is building on Skool worth it for a SaaS founder?
Different question. Maybe you're thinking about a community around your product, or a paid group as a second income stream.
Where Skool wins:
- You can launch in an afternoon. No plugins, no Notion-duct-tape.
- People show up. The gamification works, and feeds stay alive with less prompting than any Facebook group I've run.
- Built-in distribution: Skool has a discovery marketplace, and the 40% lifetime affiliate commission turns members into a referral channel.
- Charging people is native. Subscriptions and one-time payments without touching Stripe configs.
Where it falls short, and these matter for SaaS people:
- The course tools are bare-bones. Video, text, basic unlocks. No quizzes, no certificates, no real drip sequencing.
- There's no email marketing. You can't run proper lifecycle emails to your members from inside Skool. For a SaaS founder used to owning the funnel, that hurts.
- No API and barely any integrations, so your community data lives in Skool's walled garden.
- Every community looks identical. On Pro you get a custom URL and that's roughly it.
My verdict for product communities: if your users are creators or business builders, Skool works. If you need your community woven into your product, your data and your email stack, you'll outgrow it fast.
The bottom line
Skool the software: worth it. $9 to try, $99 when you're making real money, and it does the "keep people engaged" job better than anything at its price.
Skool communities: worth it sometimes, and the filters matter more than the platform. The best rooms on Skool are great. The average room is a content library with a leaderboard bolted on.
Here's the part I care about though.
If you're a bootstrapped SaaS founder with paying customers, your bottleneck is probably not another $49/month feed of motivation. It's having a small group of founders who know your numbers, call you on your excuses, and have already solved the problem you're stuck on.
That's exactly why I built Profitable Founder Club. It's a mastermind at scale for bootstrapped SaaS founders: batches of 7 to 10 founders at your stage, one call a week for 12 weeks, a monthly live Q&A with Florian, and a Discord. $97 a year, price locked, and you need paying customers to join. No leaderboard. Just the room I wish I'd found before I spent $13K finding out what a good one looks like.
Join Profitable Founder Club →
And if you're still comparing options, my breakdown of the best mastermind groups for entrepreneurs covers the whole landscape, Skool communities included.
FAQ
How much does Skool cost in 2026?
Two plans: Hobby at $9/month with a 10% transaction fee, and Pro at $99/month with a 2.9% transaction fee. Both include unlimited members, courses and live calls, plus a 14-day free trial. Yearly billing adds 2 months free. Hobby is cheaper until you're collecting roughly $1,270/month from members, then Pro wins.
Is Skool legit or an MLM?
Skool is a legit software company founded by Sam Ovens in 2019, with Alex Hormozi as partner and investor since late 2023. It's not an MLM. That said, the communities hosted on it are independent businesses of very mixed quality, and some lean hard on "make money by teaching people to make money" loops. Judge each community on its own.
Can you make money on Skool?
Yes, over 10,000 community owners charge for access on Skool, and the Skool Games showcase owners doing five and six figures a month. But most of the winners already had an audience or a proven offer. Skool handles payments and engagement. It does not create demand for you.
What are the best Skool alternatives?
Circle if you want more customization, integrations and email features. Mighty Networks if you want courses and community with more branding control. Discord if your audience is technical and you want free. And if what you actually want is peer support at your revenue stage, a small vetted mastermind beats a large community on any platform.
Is Skool worth it for SaaS founders specifically?
As a place to host a user community: decent, if you don't need API access or email control. As a place to find your peer group: usually not. Most Skool communities target creators, agencies and info-product builders. SaaS-specific rooms are rare, and the ones that exist are broad. Founders at $5K+ MRR get more from a small structured group of people at the same stage.
