The line item that isn’t on the pricing page
When you compare community platforms, you compare monthly prices, because that’s what’s on the pricing page. But for any community that charges its members, the monthly fee is often not the biggest cost. The transaction fee, the cut the platform takes from every payment your members make, frequently is, and it’s the number platforms are least eager to put front and center. Here’s how those fees actually work in 2026, and the math that should change how you compare.
How the fees stack up across platforms
Circle charges 2% on its Professional plan and 1% on Business, on top of standard payment processing. Mighty Networks is the cautionary example: its fees run from 2% on the entry plan down to 0.5% on its priciest standard tier, and crucially, they never reach zero, even on the $354/month Growth plan. Skool charges a steep 10% on its $9 Hobby plan, dropping to 2.9% on Pro. Kajabi‘s headline rate looks standard at around 2.9%, but its own documentation adds surcharges, an extra fee on every subscription or payment-plan transaction and another on international cards, which pushes the real rate on memberships higher than advertised.
The pattern most reviews miss: on several of these platforms, there’s no way to buy your way out of the fee. Normally you’d expect the top tier to drop transaction fees to zero. Mighty Networks doesn’t, and that half-a-percent floor on a high-revenue community is real money, every month, forever.
The math that reframes the comparison
Run the numbers at a realistic revenue level. At $5,000/month in member payments, a 2% fee is $100/month, or $1,200/year, on top of your subscription. At $20,000/month, even a 0.5% “low” fee is $100/month, $1,200/year, again, on top of everything else. Over three years, a 1–2% fee on a growing community quietly extracts thousands of dollars that never appeared in your platform comparison spreadsheet. The fee scales with your success, which means the better your community does, the more it costs you, on a line item you didn’t weigh when you chose.
This is why comparing sticker prices is misleading. The honest comparison is what you pay for the same revenue on each platform, subscription plus fees, not the monthly number in isolation. A platform that’s $20/month cheaper but takes 2% of a $10,000/month revenue stream is $180/month more expensive in reality.
What to look for instead
When you evaluate platforms, ask three questions the pricing page won’t answer for you. Does this platform charge a percentage on member payments, and if so, can I ever get it to zero? What’s the effective rate once subscription and international surcharges are included? And what does that fee cost me at the revenue level I’m actually targeting, not today’s?
Platforms built on a different revenue model, charging for the platform rather than skimming every transaction, change this calculus entirely. Mobieus is structured around its platform model rather than per-transaction fees on member payments; confirm the current specifics directly at mobieus.io, because for a revenue-generating community, the fee model can matter more than the monthly price. Whatever you choose, do the fee math before you sign, not after you’ve scaled.
Note: platform pricing and fee structures change frequently; verify current rates with each vendor before deciding.
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