Here is the whole post in two sentences. Skool Pro costs $99 a month, which is $5,940 over five years before its 2.9% transaction fee touches a single dollar of your revenue. Seedly Communities costs $399 once, or $249 as the add-on when you buy it together with Seedly CRM in one checkout.
Everything below is the supporting arithmetic. I sell the pay-once option, so check my math rather than taking my word for it... that is sort of the point of the post.
The full five-year table.
Plan prices compound quietly. Transaction fees compound loudly. This table assumes a modest community earning $2,000 a month in member revenue, which is $120,000 over five years.
Five years on each platform
Platform
5-yr plan cost
Fees at $2k/mo revenue
Own the software?
Full content export?
Skool Pro ($99/mo)
$5,940
$3,480 (2.9% all-in)
No
No, members CSV only
Circle Professional
$5,340 to $16,500 with add-ons
$2,400 (2%) plus Stripe
No
Partial, support-assisted
Mighty Networks Launch
$4,750 to $5,700
$2,400 (2%) plus Stripe
No
No, member .xlsx only
Heartbeat Grow ($149/mo)
$8,940
$3,000 (2.5%) plus Stripe
No
Support-ticket only
Kajabi Growth (annual)
$11,940
~$3,360 processing (2.8%)
No
Contacts CSV, subscriptions do not migrate
Whop ($0 plan)
$0
~$6,840 plus 30c a sale
No
API export, revenue freeze risk
Facebook Groups
$0
No native payments
No
None
Seedly Communities
$399 once, plus your hosting
$0 platform fee (Stripe only)
Yes, full source
You hold the database
Plan math is monthly price times 60. Fee math applies each platform's published rate to $120,000 of member revenue. Circle's upper bound uses the documented add-on stack covered in the Circle teardown. Whop's figure is the effective ~5.7% plus $0.30 per transaction that its processing and platform fees combine to. Mighty's enterprise Pro tier is excluded because its price is not published. Prices verified September 6, 2026 against each vendor's public pricing page.
Make it something yours.
Explore Seedly's software and the guides to help you get started.
Most people comparison-shop the plan price and ignore the percentage. That is backwards. At $5,000 a month of member revenue, here is what each structure actually takes every month.
Monthly platform cost at $5,000/mo member revenue
Skool Hobby $9 plan + 10% fee$509/mo
Whop ~5.7% + $0.30 effective~$285/mo
Skool Pro $99 plan + 2.9% all-in$244/mo
Circle Professional $89 plan + 2% + Stripe$189/mo + Stripe
Seedly Communities after the one-time $399$0/mo
Verified September 6, 2026. Circle and Mighty charge their percentage on top of Stripe processing. Skool's rates are all-in. Seedly Communities takes 0% because members pay through your own Stripe account, so there is no place for a platform cut to come out of.
A platform that takes a percentage of your revenue is a business partner you never chose.
Skool Hobby is the sharpest example. The $9 plan reads like the cheapest option on the market, and at $5,000 a month it quietly costs more than every other row in the chart. The full teardown is in the Skool pricing post.
What rent legitimately buys you.
Renting is not stupid. It buys real things, and pretending otherwise would torch the rest of this post.
Managed uptime and security patching. Their pager, not yours.
Zero setup. You can have a Skool group taking payments this afternoon.
Someone to email when something breaks.
If you are brand new, still testing whether anyone wants your community, renting for a few months is the right call. Same if the idea of connecting a Stripe key makes you close the laptop. The rent-vs-own question only gets interesting once the community works and the monthly line item plus the fee percentage stop being rounding errors.
What $399 buys instead.
Renting, every month
A plan price that can be repriced under you
A percentage of every member payment
Features sold back to you as add-ons
An exit limited to whatever export exists
Owning, once
Full source code with a commercial license
0% platform fee, members pay your own Stripe
Unlimited members, no member or seat cap in the code
Your database, your domain, your exit
Seedly Communities is the full source code of a community platform, sold once. Members are unlimited because no member, seat, or admin cap exists in the code, and payments run through your own Stripe account so the platform fee is structurally 0%. Feed, chat, classroom, events, live streaming, webinars, coaching, and gamification ship in one codebase.
And here is what $399 does not buy, stated plainly. It is the all-in software cost, not the all-in cost. You deploy the frontend to Vercel and the backend to Convex, and you pay those providers directly as your community grows. Live video needs a Daily.co key, and email needs SendGrid or Postmark. Source you own, deployed on infrastructure you control. What that means in practice, including where it is not for you, gets the full treatment in the ownership pillar guide.
Break-even, three ways.
The napkin math is simple. Take your platform's monthly plan price, add its percentage of your monthly revenue, and divide $399 by that number. That is how many months of rent equal owning the software outright.
Five-year total by persona (vs $399 once)
Hobbyist, $0 revenue Skool Pro $99/mo$5,940
Coach, $3k/mo revenue Skool Pro $99 + 2.9%$11,160
Creator, $10k/mo revenue Skool Pro $99 + 2.9%$23,340
Seedly Communities any revenue level$399 + hosting
Our arithmetic from the verified fee schedules. The hobbyist passes $399 of cumulative rent in month five. The coach passes it in month three. The creator passes it in month two, and the fee line is why the gap explodes from there.
Notice what changes across the three personas. The plan price is identical, and the five-year total quadruples anyway. Fees scale with your success. The software does not have to.
FAQ.
Not to us. You pay $399 once for the software (or $249 as the add-on when bundled with Seedly CRM in one checkout). Your ongoing costs are your own hosting bills from Vercel and Convex, which you pay those providers directly.
Vercel and Convex both offer free tiers that small communities can start on, then usage-based pricing as you grow. The honest answer is that it scales with your traffic, and it is your bill, not ours. We do not see it or take a cut of it.
No. There is no member, seat, or admin cap anywhere in the code. Unlimited is not a plan tier here, it is just the absence of a limit.
That is the bundle price. Seedly Communities is $399 on its own, and $249 only when added to a Seedly CRM purchase in the same checkout.
