Circle Pricing in 2026 - The Real Monthly Cost Once Add-Ons Stack Up.
Circle starts at $89 a month, then Email Hub, profile fields, sender email, and a 2% fee stack on top. The real 2026 cost, and a $399 pay-once alternative.
Andrew Lee Jenkins · 2026-07-02 · 8 min read · Updated 2026-09-06
Circle is the polished option in this category, and its pricing page is polished too. $89 a month sounds like the price. It is the starting deposit. The real bill assembles itself from add-ons and a transaction fee that sits on top of Stripe's, and none of that is obvious until you are already moved in. Here is the arithmetic.
The 30-second answer.
Circle plans, verified September 6, 2026
Plan
Monthly price
Platform fee
Notes
Professional
$89/mo billed annually
2%
The tier most creators land on
Business
$199 billed annually, $219 monthly
1%
Workflows, API access
Circle Plus
Custom
0.5%
Branded app territory
Source is circle.so/pricing. The platform fee stacks on top of Stripe's processing cut, unlike Skool's all-in rate. Different structure, so compare carefully.
Prices verified September 6, 2026. Circle's add-on prices drift fastest of anything we track, re-check at decision time.
Make it something yours.
Explore Seedly's software and the guides to help you get started.
This is the core of the post. The features you assumed were included are line items.
What a real Professional setup costs
Line item
Monthly cost
Professional plan
$89/mo annual-billed
Email Hub
$99/mo at 10,000 contacts, scales with your list
Custom profile fields
$49
Custom sender email
$40
Realistic total
$188 to $277 a month
That lands between roughly $2,300 and $3,300 a year for a working Professional setup, before the transaction fee. The low end is the plan plus Email Hub; the high end adds custom profile fields and a branded sender.
None of these are exotic. Email to your own members, fields on your own member profiles, and sending from your own domain are the table stakes of running a paid community. On Circle they are rent line items.
The fee on top of the fee.
Circle's 2% platform fee is charged in addition to Stripe's processing. Here is the monthly platform-fee bill at three revenue levels, Stripe not included.
Circle Professional 2% fee by revenue
Member revenue/mo
Circle fee (2%)
Plus Stripe processing
$2,000
$40
~$58 more
$5,000
$100
~$145 more
$10,000
$200
~$290 more
Our arithmetic. Stripe column estimated at 2.9% plus 30 cents. Contrast with Skool Pro, whose 2.9% is all-in. Circle's 2% plus Stripe's 2.9% is an effective ~4.9% on card revenue.
What the reviews say.
Circle's review record splits in a way worth understanding. G2, where buyers review, has it at 4.5. Trustpilot, where more members and burned ex-customers show up, has it at 2.5 with roughly 55% one-star reviews as of April 2026. Both numbers are real. The product is genuinely good and the billing experience genuinely generates anger.
The monthly Professional price moved from $89 to $129, described by one long-time customer as arriving “with no explanation after more than two years.”
A November 2025 reviewer reported being double-charged $214.97 after a confirmed cancellation.
A February 2026 reviewer wrote that “the system randomly DELETED my checkout pages,” hours of work gone.
From G2, “$2K annually for just 20 workflows seems excessive.”
Sourced from Trustpilot and G2 review pages, read July 2026. Individual reviews are anecdotes. The pattern is the data.
Credit where due.
Two things Circle deserves, stated without hedging. First, its export story is the best of the big three. You can pull a member CSV yourself, and support will assemble a fuller export of posts and spaces on request, which is more exit than Skool or Mighty offers. The export comparison has the details and the caveats. Second, the product is polished and the brand-name creators running on it are real. If you want a managed, design-forward community and the bill does not bother you, Circle is a fine landlord. This post is for the people the bill bothers.
Yes. 2% on Professional, 1% on Business, 0.5% on Circle Plus, all charged on top of Stripe's processing fees. Verified September 6, 2026.
Partially, and it is the best of the big hosted platforms. Member CSV is self-serve. A fuller export of spaces, posts, and comments goes through support, post images are excluded, and some creators describe chasing support for weeks. Details in the export comparison.
No. Pages advertising one are bait for a product that has never had one. If pay-once is what you are searching for, that option exists, here is the math on it.
