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“A hundred members at fifty dollars a month is five thousand dollars.”
It isn’t. It’s somewhere between $4,316 and $4,741, depending on choices you’ve probably already made without realizing they were choices.
That gap is $425 a month — about $5,100 a year — and it’s the smaller of the two findings in this article. The bigger one surprised me, and it’s the reason I’d tell most people they’re worrying about the wrong decision entirely.
The question people ask
Almost everyone planning a paid community asks the same question first: which platform should I use?
It’s a reasonable question. It’s also, based on the arithmetic below, roughly the fifth most important one.
The questions that move the number more are: what do you charge, how often do you bill, and how many members do you actually need. Those get far less attention, and they’re worth ten times more.
Let me show you rather than tell you.
What actually comes out of each payment
When a member pays you $50, three things happen before the money is yours.
Your platform takes a percentage. Between 0% and 10% depending on the platform and plan.
Stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents. The percentage is intuitive. The 30 cents is the part people forget, and it behaves very differently from a percentage — more on that shortly.
Your platform subscription comes out of the total, not out of each payment. It’s a fixed monthly cost regardless of how many members you have.
So the real formula for what you keep is:
Take-home = (members × price)
− platform subscription
− (members × price × platform fee %)
− (members × price × 2.9%)
− (members × $0.30)
Ugly, but it’s the truth. Let’s run it.
100 members, three price points
All platform prices below are monthly-billing rates from each company’s own pricing page. Stripe is calculated at 2.9% + $0.30 per member per month.
At $25/month — $2,500 gross
| Platform & plan | Platform cost | Stripe | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Podia Shaker | $84 | $102.50 | $2,313.50 |
| Mighty Networks Launch | $129 | $102.50 | $2,268.50 |
| Circle Professional | $139 | $102.50 | $2,258.50 |
| Skool Pro | $171.50 | $102.50 | $2,226 |
| Heartbeat Build | $174 | $102.50 | $2,223.50 |
| Kajabi Basic | $229 | $102.50 | $2,168.50 |
| Skool Hobby | $259 | $102.50 | $2,138.50 |
At $50/month — $5,000 gross
| Platform & plan | Platform cost | Stripe | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Podia Shaker | $84 | $175 | $4,741 |
| Mighty Networks Launch | $179 | $175 | $4,646 |
| Circle Professional | $189 | $175 | $4,636 |
| Skool Pro | $244 | $175 | $4,581 |
| Heartbeat Grow | $274 | $175 | $4,551 |
| Kajabi Basic | $279 | $175 | $4,546 |
| Skool Hobby | $509 | $175 | $4,316 |
At $100/month — $10,000 gross
| Platform & plan | Platform cost | Stripe | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Podia Shaker | $84 | $320 | $9,596 |
| Mighty Networks Launch or Scale | $279 | $320 | $9,401 |
| Circle Professional | $289 | $320 | $9,391 |
| Kajabi Growth | $349 | $320 | $9,331 |
| Skool Pro | $389 | $320 | $9,291 |
The finding
Look at the spread within each table, then look at the spread between them.
Within a table — that is, changing platform while keeping your price the same — the difference between best and worst is about 4 to 8% of your take-home. At $50/month that’s $425 between the best and worst option.
Between tables — that is, changing your price while keeping your platform the same — the difference is more than double. Moving from $25 to $50 takes you from roughly $2,260 to roughly $4,650 on the same platform with the same hundred people.
Your price point moves the number about ten times more than your platform choice does.
I don’t think this is obvious, and I don’t think it’s how most people spend their planning time. The platform decision feels weighty because it’s a commitment and it involves comparing things. Pricing feels like something you’ll figure out. It’s backwards.
None of which makes the platform irrelevant — $425 a month is real money, and I’ll come back to where it does matter. But if you’re deciding between two platforms and you haven’t seriously stress-tested your price, you’re optimizing the smaller variable.
How many members you actually need
Here’s the same math run in the other direction, which I find more useful for planning.
To take home $5,000 a month, on Mighty Networks’ Launch plan (2% fee, $79/month), you need:
| Your price | Members needed |
|---|---|
| $25/month | 216 |
| $50/month | 108 |
| $100/month | 54 |
Same income. Four times the number of people at the bottom compared to the top.
And those aren’t equivalent amounts of work. Two hundred and sixteen members is a different job from fifty-four — more questions to answer, more onboarding, more moderation, more churn to replace every month. The low-price path costs more in effort and produces the same money.
The usual argument for a low price is that it’s easier to sell. Sometimes true. But four times easier? That’s the bar it has to clear, and it often doesn’t.
Why cheap memberships get taxed harder
This is the part that’s genuinely counterintuitive, and it comes down to Stripe’s 30 cents.
A percentage fee takes the same proportion regardless of price. A flat fee doesn’t. Watch what 30 cents per transaction does at different price points:
| Member price | Flat fee as % of that payment |
|---|---|
| $10/month | 3.0% |
| $25/month | 1.2% |
| $50/month | 0.6% |
| $100/month | 0.3% |
Add that to the 2.9%, and a $10 membership loses 5.9% to payment processing while a $100 membership loses 3.2%. The cheap membership is taxed nearly twice as hard on a percentage basis.
This compounds with everything else. Low-priced communities need more members, and each of those members costs you a fixed 30 cents to collect from, every month, forever.
The practical version: if you’re considering a membership under about $15 a month, run this number before you commit to it. It may still be the right call for your audience. But you should make that choice knowing what it costs.
There’s a related point worth noting: this is one of the real arguments for annual billing. One payment of $600 a year incurs the 30-cent charge once. Twelve payments of $50 incur it twelve times. Across a hundred members that’s $30 a year in flat fees versus $360 — before you account for the fact that annual billing also removes eleven chances per member per year to cancel.
So where does the platform actually matter?
Not much for your take-home, as we’ve established. It matters for three other things, and they’re not small.
Whether members stay. Churn does more damage to your income than any fee structure. If a platform your members find confusing or unpleasant costs you an extra 2% monthly churn, that swamps a 3% fee difference within a few months. This is the argument for paying more for something people like using.
Whether you can raise your price. Given how much price drives the numbers above, anything that makes your community feel more valuable is worth more than a fee discount. A polished, well-organized space supports a higher price than a bare one.
How much of your time it costs. If a platform saves you three hours a month, and you value your time at anything reasonable, that’s worth more than the $95 gap between the cheapest and most expensive option at 100 members.
Which is to say: pick the platform on fit, not on fee. The fee difference is real but small. The fit difference shows up in churn and pricing power, and those are where the money actually is.
What I’d do with this
Pressure-test your price first. Before anything else, work out what you’d need at $25, $50, and $100 to hit your target. If the higher price requires a community you can’t imagine delivering, that’s useful information. If it doesn’t, you’ve just found the highest-leverage decision available to you.
Then check your crossover point. If you’re already running a community, the plan you’re on may be costing you money — I worked out the exact revenue level where each platform’s cheap plan stops being cheap in a separate piece on running costs.
Then pick on fit. Take the trials. Mighty Networks and Circle both offer 14 days without a card, and both sit at 2% on their entry plans — close enough on cost that you can decide purely on which one your members will actually enjoy. If your community is conversation-led rather than content-led, Heartbeat is worth adding to the trial list. And if you’re not yet sure anyone will pay at all, Skool’s $9 plan is the cheapest way to find out — just move up once you pass $1,268 a month.
The platform is a decision you can revisit. Your price is one you should get closer to right the first time.