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Most advice about starting a paid community is about getting members. That’s the hard part, so it gets the attention.
But there’s a set of decisions you make before you have a single member, and they quietly set the ceiling on what the whole thing can earn. Get them right and a hundred people is a real income. Get them wrong and four hundred people is a part-time job that pays badly.
Here are the five, in the order they actually matter, with numbers attached to each. None of this requires you to have started yet.
Decision 1: What you charge
This is first because it moves the outcome more than everything else combined.
A hundred members at $25 a month and a hundred members at $50 a month are not “a bit different.” After platform fees and payment processing, the first leaves you around $2,260 a month and the second around $4,650. Same hundred people, same amount of work, double the money.
For comparison: switching between the major platforms at a fixed price changes your take-home by roughly 4 to 8%. Your price is worth about ten times your platform choice, and it gets a fraction of the thought.
There’s a second effect that’s easy to miss. Payment processing includes a flat 30 cents per transaction alongside the percentage, and a flat fee hurts small payments disproportionately:
| Member price | What payment processing takes |
|---|---|
| $10/month | 5.9% |
| $25/month | 4.1% |
| $50/month | 3.5% |
| $100/month | 3.2% |
A cheap membership is taxed nearly twice as hard, proportionally, as an expensive one. Low prices cost you twice: fewer dollars per member, and a bigger slice taken from each one.
What to do: pick your price by working backwards from an income target, not by guessing what feels affordable. I’ve run that arithmetic in detail in what a hundred paying members actually earns you.
Decision 2: How many members you’re actually aiming for
Most people pick a number that sounds achievable rather than one that follows from their target income. Then they discover the two don’t match.
Run it in the other direction. Here’s what it takes to take home $3,000 a month — after the platform subscription, the platform’s transaction fee, and payment processing — on a mid-priced plan.
| Your price | You keep per member | Members needed |
|---|---|---|
| $25/month | $23.48 | 132 |
| $50/month | $47.25 | 66 |
| $100/month | $94.80 | 33 |
The calculation, so you can redo it with your own numbers: on a plan costing $79/month with a 2% transaction fee, a $50 member leaves you $50 − $1.00 (platform) − $1.75 (Stripe) = $47.25. Then ($3,000 + $79) ÷ $47.25 = 66 members.
A hundred and thirty-two members is a different job from thirty-three. Four times the onboarding, four times the questions, four times the churn to replace every month — for identical income.
The standard argument for a low price is that it sells more easily. Often true. But the bar it has to clear is four times more easily, and it frequently doesn’t.
Decision 3: Monthly or annual billing
This one is usually decided by copying whatever the last community you joined did. It’s worth two minutes of actual thought.
The reason people give for annual billing — saving on payment processing — is real but tiny: about $3.30 per member per year. If you discount two months to get people onto annual plans, you gave up $100 per member to save $3.30.
The real reason is that monthly billing gives every member twelve chances a year to cancel, and annual billing gives them one. Whether that’s worth the discount depends on your churn — and there’s a clean threshold:
break-even monthly churn = (1 − annual renewal rate) ÷ 10
If you expect about 60% of annual members to renew, annual billing wins whenever your monthly churn is worse than 4%. For a community in its first couple of years, that’s common rather than exceptional.
What to do: estimate your churn honestly and check it against the threshold. The full working, including what the arithmetic doesn’t capture, is in monthly versus annual billing.
Decision 4: Which platform
Now we get to the decision most people make first.
It matters less for your income than decisions 1 and 2, and more for whether the thing survives. Those aren’t the same question.
What the platform actually determines:
- Whether members come back. Churn does more damage than any fee structure. A platform your members find confusing costs you far more than a 3% fee difference.
- Whether you can charge more. A well-organized, polished space supports a higher price — and by decision 1, price is where the money is.
- How much of your week it eats. Setup time, moderation tools, and how much fighting the software you do.
So: pick on fit, not on fee. The fee gap between the main options is real but small. The fit gap shows up in churn and pricing power, and those compound.
What to do: shortlist two, take both trials, and post something real in each. I’ve compared the main options on price, fees, member caps and seat limits in the platform comparison.
Decision 5: Which plan on that platform
This is the one nobody treats as a decision at all. People take the cheapest plan and never look again.
The problem is that cheap plans usually carry high transaction fees, so the cheapest plan stops being cheapest at a certain revenue — and the platform will not tell you when you’ve crossed it.
| Platform | Upgrade when monthly revenue passes |
|---|---|
| Podia | $840 |
| Skool | $1,268 |
| Heartbeat | $4,000 |
| Kajabi | $7,000 |
| Mighty Networks | $10,000 |
| Circle | $11,000 |
Below your platform’s number, the cheap plan is genuinely cheaper. Above it, staying put costs you money every month, and the cost grows the better you do.
Skool’s is the sharpest example: past $1,268 a month in revenue, the $9 plan is more expensive than the $99 one. At $3,000/month, staying on the cheap plan costs you $123 a month.
What to do: write your platform’s number on a sticky note now, and check it when your revenue moves. The full breakdown of every cost layer is in what a paid community actually costs to run.
Putting it together: a worked example
Say you want $3,000 a month in your pocket from this.
Decision 1 — price. You settle on $50/month. Not the cheapest thing you could charge, but a price that lets the community be small enough to run well.
Decision 2 — target. At $50, you keep $47.25 per member after fees. To clear $3,000 plus a $79 platform bill, you need 66 members. That’s your number. It’s a very different target from “a few hundred people,” and it changes how you’d go about getting there.
Decision 3 — billing. You’re new, so you assume churn will be on the high side. Above 4%, annual billing wins even after a two-month discount, so you offer both and push annual.
Decision 4 — platform. You trial two, and pick the one your first few members actually use without prompting.
Decision 5 — plan. 66 members at $50 is $3,300/month in revenue. That’s above Skool’s $1,268 crossover, so you’d want its higher plan rather than the $9 one. It’s below Mighty Networks’ $10,000 crossover, so its entry plan is correct there. Same business, opposite answers, depending on which platform you chose.
Notice that none of this required knowing how to get members. It just tells you what you’re aiming at, and what it’s worth when you get there.
What I’d do first
Write down your income target and solve for members at three price points. Ten minutes with the formula above. Most people find the number is smaller than they assumed at a higher price, and that changes the whole plan.
Then take two trials. Mighty Networks and Circle both give you 14 days without a card and sit at the same 2% fee, so you can decide on feel rather than cost. If your community will be conversation-led, add Heartbeat. If you’re not yet sure anyone will pay, Skool’s $9 plan is the cheapest way to find out — just remember the $1,268 line.
Don’t spend the trial exploring settings. Post something, invite three honest people, and watch whether they come back without being asked. That answers more than any comparison will, including mine.