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There are two completely different kinds of product being sold under the same phrase, and picking the wrong kind is the mistake I see most often.
One kind is a way to collect money from people who like your work. The other is a place where those people talk to each other. Both get called a fan community platform. They are not substitutes, they are priced on completely different logic, and the question of which one you need has almost nothing to do with fees.
I’ll show you the fee arithmetic anyway, because it is clean and there is a specific point where it flips. But I want to be upfront that it is the second most important thing here, not the first.
The problem with how this decision usually gets made
You have an audience. Some of them have said, in one way or another, that they would pay you. So you go looking for where to put them, and within about ten minutes you have a browser full of tabs: Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Substack, Circle, Mighty Networks, Skool. Every one of them shows smiling creators and a number with a percentage sign.
So you start comparing percentages, because that is the only axis all seven share. And that comparison leads you somewhere misleading, for two reasons.
The first is that a percentage and a fixed monthly fee cannot be compared without knowing your revenue. Ten percent is cheaper than $99 a month until it isn’t, and the point where it flips is a specific figure you can work out in about thirty seconds.
The second is more fundamental. Some of these products are a payment layer with a comments section attached. Others are a community with a payment layer attached. The fee comparison treats them as the same thing, and they are not remotely the same thing.
The five things worth checking
1. Who your members talk to
This is the one that actually decides it, so it goes first.
On Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee and Substack, the structure is you at the centre, posting, and members around the edge receiving. There are comments. Members can reply to you and sometimes to each other underneath a post. But the shape of the thing is one-to-many, and the product is built that way.
On Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool, the structure is a space that keeps running when you are not in it. Members start their own threads, answer each other, and form the kind of sideways relationships that make someone stay subscribed for reasons that have stopped being about you.
That second shape is harder to build and worth considerably more when it works, because it changes what people are paying for. A membership where the value is your weekly post dies when your posting slows down. A membership where the value is the other members survives a quiet month.
It is also much easier to fail at. An empty forum is worse than no forum, and a space built for conversation that nobody is having makes a membership feel dead in a way that a quiet post feed does not.
2. How the platform charges you, and where that crosses over
Two shapes here as well.
Percentage of revenue, no monthly fee. Patreon takes 10%. Substack takes 10%. Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee take 5% on memberships. You pay nothing until you earn something, and your cost scales perfectly with your income.
Fixed monthly fee, plus a smaller percentage. Circle’s Professional plan is $99 a month plus 2%. Mighty Networks’ Launch plan is $95 a month plus 2%. Skool’s Pro plan is $99 a month plus 2.9%. You pay from day one whether anyone has joined or not.
Setting those equal and solving gives the crossover. Against Patreon’s 10%:
crossover revenue = monthly fee ÷ (10% − platform's own %)
| Platform | Calculation | Cheaper than Patreon above… |
|---|---|---|
| Mighty Networks Launch | $95 ÷ 0.08 | $1,188 a month |
| Circle Professional | $99 ÷ 0.08 | $1,238 a month |
| Skool Pro | $99 ÷ 0.071 | $1,394 a month |
Pricing in this article was taken from each platform’s own pricing page on 25 October 2026, with billing set to monthly rather than annual. Several of these pages open on annual pricing by default, which shows a lower figure than you would actually pay month to month. Source pages: Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Substack, Skool, Mighty Networks, Circle. These links go straight to the pricing pages and earn me nothing.
So the rough answer is a thousand dollars a month in membership revenue. Below it, the percentage platforms cost you less. Above it, the fixed-fee platforms cost you less, and the gap widens every month you grow.
3. Whether you can take your people with you
Before you commit anywhere, find out two things: can you export your member list with email addresses, and can you contact those people off-platform.
This matters more than any fee on this page. A platform that holds your relationship with your audience has leverage over you for as long as you stay, and the time to check is before you have four hundred people on it rather than after. Policies change, so check the current answer rather than what someone wrote about it a while ago.
4. Whether the platform brings you anyone
Some of these have people browsing them. Patreon has a discovery surface. Substack recommends publications to readers of other publications, and for some writers that recommendation network has become a meaningful share of their growth.
Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool bring you nobody. They are software you run; they are not a place people go to find things. If you do not already have an audience, moving to one of them will not fix that, and the monthly fee will be the least of your problems.
I would not pick a platform because of its discovery — it is a bonus rather than a strategy, and treating it as your growth plan puts you at the mercy of someone else’s algorithm. But it belongs on the list, and it is one of the few genuine advantages the percentage platforms have.
5. What it costs you to be wrong
Moving a post feed is annoying. Moving a community is close to impossible.
If your members only ever receive from you, switching platforms costs you an email announcing a new link and some churn from people who never get around to it. If your members talk to each other, switching asks several hundred people to abandon the threads and habits they have built and start again somewhere unfamiliar. Many will simply not come.
Which means the more valuable your community gets, the more expensive your original choice becomes to undo. That is an argument for thinking about it now, and also an argument against overthinking it before you have members at all.
The seven platforms, side by side
Every figure below is from the platform’s own pricing page. Payment processing is separate and applies to all of them — typically 2.9% plus 30 cents per payment through Stripe — so I have left it out to keep the differences visible.
| Platform | Monthly price as listed | Fee on your revenue | Shape | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patreon | None | 10% | Payment layer | — |
| Ko-fi | $0, or $12 (Gold) | 5% on memberships; 0% on Gold | Payment layer | — |
| Buy Me a Coffee | None | 5% | Payment layer | — |
| Substack | None | 10% | Payment layer | — |
| Skool | $9 (Hobby) / $99 (Pro) | 10% / 2.9% | Community | Yes, length not stated |
| Mighty Networks | $95 (Launch) / $215 (Scale) | 2% / 1% | Community | 14 days, no card |
| Circle | $99 (Professional) / $219 (Business) | 2% / 1% | Community | 14 days, no card |
And what that costs in practice, at three realistic sizes. This is the subscription plus the platform’s fee, per month:
| Platform | At $500/mo | At $2,000/mo | At $5,000/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patreon | $50 | $200 | $500 |
| Substack | $50 | $200 | $500 |
| Ko-fi (free) | $25 | $100 | $250 |
| Buy Me a Coffee | $25 | $100 | $250 |
| Ko-fi Gold | $12 | $12 | $12 |
| Skool Hobby | $59 | $209 | $509 |
| Skool Pro | $114 | $157 | $244 |
| Mighty Networks Launch | $105 | $135 | $195 |
| Circle Professional | $109 | $139 | $199 |
The uncomfortable row in that table
Ko-fi Gold is $12 a month with no service fee on anything. At $5,000 a month in membership revenue it costs you $12, while Patreon costs $500 and Circle costs $199.
On fees alone, nothing here is close to it. It beats Patreon from about $120 a month in revenue onwards, and the advantage only grows. If the only question were “which platform takes the smallest cut”, this article would be one sentence long and it would say Ko-fi Gold.
It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because it tells you something about the whole comparison. The fee differences between these products are smaller than the differences between the products. If you are paying Circle $199 a month at $5,000 of revenue instead of paying Ko-fi $12, you are paying $187 a month for something other than collecting payments, and you should be able to say what it is.
Here is the honest answer to what it is: a space where your members talk to each other, with the tools to make that happen. Courses, events, member directories, spaces split by topic, moderation. If your members do not need that, you are buying something you will not use, and the cheap option is genuinely the right one.
What the table doesn’t tell you
Three things, and they all cut against the more expensive options.
There is no free plan on Circle, Mighty Networks or Skool. You pay the subscription from the first day, before a single member has joined. On a percentage platform your cost at zero members is zero. That asymmetry matters a great deal in month one and not at all in month twenty-four — but month one is when you are deciding.
Admin seats are limited on the entry plans. Circle’s Professional plan includes 3 admins; Mighty Networks’ Launch plan includes 3 hosts and 10 moderators. If you have a team of five who all need to manage things, check that before you price the plan, because it may push you up a tier and change the arithmetic above.
A fixed fee is a fixed fee in a bad month too. Percentage pricing is sympathetic: if your revenue halves, so does your cost. A $99 subscription does not care that you were ill in February. For anyone whose income is genuinely lumpy, that is a real consideration and not a small one.
Three readers, three answers
You’re under about $1,200 a month, and your fans mainly want your work
Stay on a percentage platform. Patreon, Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee. If fees are the thing you care about most, Ko-fi Gold at $12 a month is hard to argue with.
Paying $95 or more a month to run a community before you have the members to fill it is the most common version of this mistake I come across. The platform is not what makes a community happen. Having something people want to be in the room for is what makes it happen, and you can test whether that is true for nothing.
You’re past about $1,200 a month, and members are starting to talk to each other
This is the case for moving, and notice that it has two halves. The arithmetic says the crossover has passed, and the behaviour says you need the thing the expensive platforms sell. Both have to be true.
The signal I would look for is specific: members replying to each other rather than to you, and asking for somewhere better to do it. If that is already happening in a comments section, it will happen much better in a product built for it. If it is not happening at all, moving will not start it.
Between the two, Mighty Networks is $4 a month cheaper on the entry plan and has the earlier crossover point. Circle is $99 and tends to appeal to people who want a cleaner, more restrained look. Both offer unlimited members on every plan, both charge 2% at the entry tier dropping to 1% above it, and both run a 14-day trial with no card required. That last detail is why I would not agonise over this one: you can have both open at the same time for two weeks and decide with your own hands rather than from a table.
Writing is the product, or courses are
If what you make is essentially a publication, Substack is built for exactly that, and its recommendation network is a genuine advantage despite the 10%. The fee is real, but you are buying distribution with it, which is more than the other percentage platforms are selling you.
If what you make is courses with a community attached rather than the other way round, Skool is worth a look, with one warning from the table above: the $9 Hobby plan carries a 10% transaction fee, which makes it the most expensive option on this page at $5,000 a month in revenue. The cheap plan stops being cheap earlier than most people expect.
What I’d do
Work out your actual monthly membership revenue, or your honest estimate of it six months from now. Everything above depends on that number, and nothing else resolves without it.
Then ask whether your members want to talk to each other. Not whether you would like them to. Whether they are already trying to, in your comments or your replies or your inbox. If they are not, a community platform is a room you will be standing in alone, and the percentage platforms will serve you better and cheaper.
If both point the same way, use the trials. Mighty Networks and Circle both give you 14 days without a card, which is enough to set up a space, invite five people you trust, and find out whether it feels like somewhere worth paying for. Two weeks of using them beats any comparison table, including this one.
If it’s the running costs you’re trying to pin down, what a paid community actually costs to run breaks down all three fee layers across six platforms. If you want to know how many members you need before any of this matters, what 100 paying members actually earns you has the arithmetic. And if you haven’t settled the earlier questions yet, the five decisions that set your ceiling is the place I’d start.
Questions people ask about this
Can I run a payment platform and a community platform at the same time?
Yes, and plenty of people do: Patreon or Substack handles the money and the public-facing tier list, and a separate community platform is where the paying members actually gather. You give an invite link to anyone who subscribes.
The cost of doing it is that you pay both — the 10% and the subscription — and you now have two member lists that can drift out of sync, which becomes a manual chore the moment someone cancels. My own view is that running both is worth it only while you are deliberately testing whether the community half earns its keep. Past that point, pick one and move everyone onto it, because paying twice and reconciling lists by hand is a tax you keep paying every month.
Does the platform fee include payment processing?
No, and this catches people out constantly. Patreon’s 10%, Ko-fi’s 5%, Circle’s 2% and the rest are all charged on top of what Stripe or PayPal takes, which is typically around 2.9% plus 30 cents per payment.
So a platform advertising 10% is really costing you somewhere closer to 13% of what your members pay, and on small monthly amounts the flat 30 cents pushes it higher still. Processing is the one cost that is roughly the same everywhere, which is exactly why I left it out of the comparison tables — it does not change the ranking, it just shifts every row by a similar amount.
What if I’m starting from zero, with no audience yet?
Then do not pay a monthly subscription for a community platform. Not yet.
At zero members, a percentage platform costs you nothing and a fixed-fee platform costs you $95 to $99 a month to host an empty room. Worse, the empty room tends to become the project: it is far more pleasant to configure spaces and pick colours than to go and find the first thirty people, and the configuring feels like progress when it isn’t.
Start free, get people paying you for something, and let the move to a community platform be a response to a problem you actually have rather than a way of feeling like you have started.