Online communities are a great way for content creators to expand their reach. This is particularly true for digital tutors and educational content creators, for it allows them to provide their coaching services conveniently while growing their tutoring business at the same time.
If you're a digital creator then you've likely heard of Skool, an online community platform.
But how much does Skool cost, and is it worth it?
Let's find out.
A brief overview of Skool
As mentioned before, Skool is a platform for building online communities. It comes with several features that allow you to create, customize, and manage virtual communities across a wide range of niches.
It's used by coaches, creators, and businesses, as they engage with their members seamlessly while attracting new followers.
With Skool, you can create online courses for your followers, manage interactive discussions, conduct live events, or gamify different activities.
What can you sell with Skool?
Skool's main focus on online courses and communities. As a result it's suited to all kinds of creators, including online coaches, artists, traders, teachers - if it can be sold as an info product, then it can be sold with Skool.
What do you get with Skool?
In this section, we will take a look at some of the key elements of Skool. The platform makes use of five core features - they are as follows.
1. Community
The community feature of Skool is arguably the most prominent aspect. After all, Skool is a platform that is focused on building online communities, so this is a key feature.
New members can access your community after joining your respective group. Within the community, you can encourage active interactions among members to drive engagement. This can be done by creating new posts, adding comments, participating in discussions, and so on.
Apart from that, you can interact with your members directly by answering questions and responding to feedback.
2. Calendar
Needless to say, one of the most important aspects of an online community is engagement. Without proper engagement, a community will not be able to fulfill its purpose of encouraging discussions and providing a collaborative learning environment.
This is particularly applicable in the case of learning communities, where the lack of any planned engagement can prevent members from gathering any useful knowledge.
This is why a feature like Calendar is important, for it allows you to plan for your community engagement events beforehand. The Calendar feature on Skool allows you to pick specific dates and times for any live event, online meetings, or interactive sessions with your community.
This can be helpful for the members of your community since it notifies them of the important dates for any community engagement event that you may have planned. That way, you can eliminate any confusion and ensure maximum cooperation and engagement among your community members.
3. Classroom
This is one of the most popular features among course creators, as it allows them to share their information efficiently.
Put simply, the Classroom feature enables you to create or upload learning materials like text documents, links, and videos, and package them into course content.
4. Leaderboard
When it comes to online communities, member engagement is a crucial factor to consider. But simple engagement may not be enough to keep your members interested in your community in the long term. You need to provide some incentives so that users are more inclined to stay in your community.
Skool's Leaderboard is one such incentive. The Leaderboard is a part of the platform’s gamification aspect that aims to boost community engagement. It shows you a list of all the members who have the highest levels of engagement within any given time frame.
That way, you can easily pick the candidates who deserve to be rewarded while simultaneously inspiring others to engage more.
5. Members
The members feature displays all the members who are part of your community. It is an invaluable tool as it allows you to check how big your community is or how fast it is growing.
Aside from that, it allows you to quickly review individual members if needed. That way, it becomes easier to monitor your group and ensure a positive community environment.
Other features of Skool
We have looked at the key pillars of Skool - here are some other features that you get access to as a Skool creator.
1. Unified scheduling
Usually, when you create new courses or schedule new events, you need to host them independently on other social media and communication platforms like Discord, Facebook, Slack, and more. However, Skool offers unified scheduling for your events, which means that once you plan an event on your Skool community, they are automatically shared on these sites.
2. Real-time communication
Skool offers several tools that facilitate real-time communications. Members of a community can receive active notifications about all the groups they are a part of.
For instance, if there is an event coming up in your community, your members will be notified of it well before time. This eliminates any potential communication gaps and ensures increased community participation.
With the built-in chat functionality, you can communicate freely with your members, regardless of time and place. The chat enables you to send files and other content to your users directly in real time.
3. Search functionality
Skool's search function allows you to monitor your groups better. When you search for a particular keyword, for instance, you can see all the relevant comments and member discussions that contain that specific keyword.
Aside from that, all the relevant course contents that contain that keyword are also displayed. This can be particularly helpful for your members who are looking for specific resources.
4. Intuitive user interface
The website features a clean and intuitive user interface. The signup process is pretty quick and straightforward, and the main account dashboard has a simple layout that is easy to navigate. As a result, your members can familiarize themselves with the platform within a fairly short time.
5. User profiles
The presence of user-profiles improves the overall interactivity of the platform. Each community member has a comprehensive profile that shows their username, image and bio, profile level, location, contributions, joined communities, and plenty of other information.
So, if you want to know more about a particular community member, you can click on their user profile and look up all these details. This makes it easier for you to understand the background and preferences of your members.
6. Skool Games
The Skool Games is another interesting aspect of this platform that is primarily targeted toward creators. Developed in collaboration with the industry veteran and renowned entrepreneur Alex Hormozi, the Skool Games is a program that aims to you earn money efficiently.
This program has been designed as a business-building challenge, where you're tasked to market and sell products to customers. There are leaderboards that keep track of the sales being made, and at the end of the month, the top 10 sellers on the leaderboard get to meet Alex Hormozi in Vegas.
So, how much does Skool cost?
Now that you know what Skool is and how it works, it's time to ask the most important question - how much does Skool cost?
Skool’s pricing model
Skool follows a simple pricing strategy. A Skool subscription will cost you $99 per month. But before that, there is a 14-day trial period, where you can use all the features of the platform free of cost. Once the trial is over, the paid subscription will begin.
Things included in Skool’s subscription
When you get a Skool subscription, you get access to all of the site’s tools and features. These include:
- One group: The subscription allows you to create a single Skool group. If you want to create more, you will need to pay an additional $99 per month. So for each group you create on Skool, you need to take out another paid subscription.
- Unlimited courses: You can create and host as many courses as you like on your group’s Classroom section.
- Unlimited members: Skool does not impose any group size limits, which means you can add an unlimited number of members to your community.
- Community tools: You can access all the community-building tools Skool.com has to offer, such as community feed, live events, discussion boards, polls, and other engagement features.
- 2.9% transaction fees: Skool takes a transaction fee of 2.9% from every sale generated, which is quite reasonable.
Is Skool worth it?
As you can see from the above discussion, Skool.com is a versatile online platform that enables creators to sell digital courses and other learning materials in a community setting. However, like any other online platform, Skool comes with its set of limitations, which you need to take into account before you decide to go with it.
In this section, we have discussed the pros and cons of Skool.com so that you can decide whether it is worth subscribing to.
Skool pros
- Easy to use: The interface of Skool.com is highly convenient to learn and use.
- Gamification of learning: Skool.com gamifies the learning experience, which makes it more enjoyable and efficient as a learning platform.
- Nurtures community: The increased focus on building community helps in creating a highly collaborative learning environment.
- Convenient pricing model: Skool.com offers a single, unified pricing model that makes the subscription process easier.
- Ad-free user experience: The platform does not serve any distracting ads or promotions to its members or creators, thereby improving the overall user experience.
Skool cons
- Only one community per subscription: You can create only a single community with each subscription, and additional communities require extra subscriptions.
- No support for add-on products: You cannot sell any type of add-on products for your business - such as merch - on Skool.com.
- Lack of course assessment tools: There are no objective course gradation and assessment tools available on Skool.com, which means that you have to rely on subjective feedback from members.
- Basic marketing and sales features: While Skool.com does provide some tools for marketing and sales, they are mostly basic in nature and are lacking in any advanced sales and marketing capabilities.
- No free plan: If you are an inexperienced creator looking for free community-building platforms, you will not be able to use Skool since it doesn't have any free plans.
Whop: The number one choice for online courses and communities
Skool is a good option if you want to monetize your skills and knowledge. But it's not the only option on the market.
We believe that Whop is the best place to sell anything digital - including courses, communities, downloadables, masterminds, webinars, and more. Whop is another community-based social commerce platform like Skool, with a few key differences.
First, you can sell practically any type of digital goods with Whop. Whether it’s your courses, ebooks, or coaching programs; PLR digital products, Canva templates or sports picks, you can sell it with Whop. As a result Whop does not put any limits on your business, which makes it a great platform for veterans and beginners alike.
With Whop you create whops. whops are your online hub, the home of your business. You create your whop your way, using native 'apps' as the features of your whop. So, you can add Video Calls, Chat channels, Files, Twitter Trackers, Trading Signals, Courses, Giveaways Apps and more to your whop - add what you want, leave out what you don't need. It won't cost you a thing.
Plus, Whop excels at marketing. As a creator you can get your whop on the Whop Discover page in front of millions of monthly viewers. You can also use the Bounties app to encourage members to share your content, and the Whop Clips app to get marketers to clip your videos.
You can even share your affiliate links easily to attract new customers.
Like Skool you can sell paid memberships to communities. Unlike Skool there is no limit to the number of communities you can create under one account, and you don't have to pay anything to launch a new community.
That way, you can save a lot of money on your monthly Skool membership. Whop only charges a small fee (starting at 3%) on sales, meaning Whop doesn't make money unless you make money.
Aside from that, the community of Whop consists of a large number of experienced sellers. Thus, if you need any kind of help, you can seek advice from its sprawling community at any time - and join Whop University for hands-on help from Whop's team.
As an online creator, Whop is your platform, resource, payment processor and customer service provider. So, why let this golden opportunity go? Join Whop today and watch your online learning business grow before your eyes!
FAQs
1. Does Skool.com have a free plan?
No, Skool.com does not offer any free plan to its members. You will need to sign up for the paid membership plan of $99 per month if you want to use the platform. However, you can avail yourself of the 14-day free trial before you make your first payment.
2- Do I need a credit card to sign up to Skool.com?
Yes, if you want to create a community, you will need to provide your credit card details when signing up. Without one, you will not be able to create a group at all. This information will be required even for the 14-day trial period.
3. Are there any other costs to using Skool.com?
If you only want to sell online courses to your Skool community, then you don’t have to spend any more money besides the initial $99 subscription. However, if you want to set up a proper enterprise, then the tools provided by Skool won’t be enough. In that case, you may need to spend extra money on third-party marketing and sales tools.
4. Does Skool have built-in video hosting?
No, Skool does not yet provide built-in video hosting capabilities. However, you can link your videos from third-party websites instead. Skool supports embedding videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, and Wistia, to name a few.
5. Does Skool.com have a mobile app?
Yes, Skool.com does come with mobile apps on Android and iOS. However, these apps were rolled out recently, which means that they have limited functionality at present.
6. Can you set up a free community on Skool.com?
Yes, you can set up a free community on Skool if you want. However, such a community will not bring in any additional income, which can make it a financially risky endeavor. So, if you want to set up such a community, you need to have complementary income sources to avoid making losses.
7. How does Skool process payments?
Skool uses Stripe Express to process payments. The platform takes a cut of 2.9% and an additional $0.30 from every transaction as service fees.
8. Does Skool.com support international payouts?
Yes, Skool is available in around 100 countries worldwide. Therefore, creators in these countries can get payouts from Skool in their local currencies. The payments are processed by Stripe Express, and they take 3 to 5 business days to complete.
Check out our full review on Whop vs Skool.
