Skool's pricing page shows one transaction fee. Skool's payments FAQ shows two.

The public page advertises the Pro plan at $99 a month with a 2.9% transaction fee. The help centre is more specific: 2.9% + 30c per transaction for transactions up to $899, and 3.9% + 30c per transaction for transactions above $900. One analysis puts it bluntly — Skool's pricing page only shows the 2.9% figure, so check your payouts if you sell high-ticket offers.

That tier break lands exactly where coaching money lives.

What the extra point actually costs

Sell a $1,000 program and you don't pay $29.30. You pay $39.30.

On a bigger ticket the gap widens. Ruzuku's breakdown runs the numbers on a cohort sale: on a $1,500 cohort sale, you pay $58.80 in fees (3.9% + 30¢) instead of the $43.80 you'd expect at the headline 2.9% rate.

Fifteen dollars. Fine. Now do it a hundred times a year on a $2,000 offer and the undisclosed point costs you $2,000 — roughly twenty months of the Pro subscription itself.

There's also a small piece of fine print nobody has resolved. Skool's current FAQ says Pro is 2.9% plus $0.30 up to $899 and 3.9% plus $0.30 above $900, without resolving exactly $900. If your flagship offer is priced at $900 flat, nobody writing about this can tell you with certainty which rate you're on.

Payment plans land on the cheap side of the line

Here's the arithmetic coaches will work out for themselves within about four minutes of reading this.

The tier applies per transaction, not per customer and not per year. A $2,400 program billed as one charge sits above the line. The same $2,400 billed as three monthly payments of $800 sits below it.

Same revenue. Different rate. Which is a strange incentive for a platform that sells itself to people running high-ticket communities.

The friendly $9 plan is the expensive one

The bigger money, though, is at the other end of the price list.

Hobby is $9 a month. It also takes 10% + 30¢ on every transaction. The features are not the catch — Hobby is $9 a month with a 10% transaction fee, Pro is $99 a month with a 2.9% transaction fee. Both plans include unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited videos, unlimited live calls, a custom URL and affiliates, so no features are locked behind Pro.

So it's one line of arithmetic. $90 divided by 0.071 equals about $1,268. Below that, the 10% fee costs you less than the extra $90 of platform fee. Above it, every additional dollar you process on Hobby costs you 7.1 cents more than it needs to.

Run that forward. A coach doing $50,000 a month on Hobby pays about $5,009 in platform costs. On Pro, about $1,549. That's roughly $3,460 a month, or near $41,500 a year, handed over for a plan that gives you nothing extra.

Ruzuku's analysis is harsher still, calling the Hobby rate the highest in the industry — every platform pays standard card processing (2.9% + 30¢), so the part Skool adds is 7.1% of sales.

Even the critics get the structure wrong

The fee question is live enough that WP-Tonic built an episode around it. "This is episode 188," says host Jonathan Denwood. "Skool has done some major changes to their platforms, added some major costs." Co-host Kurt von Ahnen's complaint is about the promise around the platform rather than the price — "you said you had a marketplace, but no one's ever clicked on my course through your marketplace".

But listen to how Denwood describes the fees themselves: "it's on top of the standard processing fees, which is hobby is 10%, and then the pro is two point 9%. That, that's their cut on top of, um, for their processing fees."

That's the common reading, and it isn't what Skool charges. These fees are all-in — Skool acts as the merchant and handles payment processing, so there's no separate Stripe fee on top. Skool's own FAQ argues the same point from the other direction: Stripe charges an additional 1.5% for international cards and 0.5% for subscriptions, and most people switching from Stripe to Skool will save 1-2%.

Which is the real shape of this story. The Pro rate is competitive. The disclosure isn't.

And there's a third number almost nobody budgets for: Growth Boost, a 30% commission Skool takes on members its Discovery feed brings you.

Open your billing page. Find your average transaction value. If it starts with a 9, you already know which rate you're paying.