The monthly price is the smallest number in this decision. The one that decides it sits four lines further down their pricing page, and it is not a price at all. It is a percentage of everything you sell.
The line four rows down
On 17 August 2026 I opened Skool's pricing page and saved the picture. Two plans. Hobby at $9 a month, listed with a 10% transaction fee. Pro at $99 a month, listed with 2.9%. There's a yearly tab on that page giving two months free, so paid up front those come to $90 and $990 for the year.
Ours is $47 a month, and we take nothing out of what you sell. You connect your own Stripe account, and Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents is the only cut anybody takes, which is the cut you pay wherever you go.
Now put a real training business through both. Say you run your foundation course twice a year at $600 a place, eight people each time. That's $9,600 coming in. On the $9 plan, taking their cheaper yearly billing, you'd pay $90 in subscription and $960 in fees on those sales, so $1,050 all in. On our flat $47 you'd pay $564 and nothing on the sales. The cheap plan costs you nearly twice the expensive one, and it takes most of it in the month your intake is fullest, which is exactly the month you notice.
The crossover is around $4,740 of sales a year. Below that, $9 plus 10% really is the better deal. Above it, the percentage has already eaten the $38 a month you thought you were saving, and it keeps going up as you get better at this.
Seven or eight places on a $600 course. That is the whole of the discount.
And if you move up to their Pro plan to get away from the 10%, the fee drops to 2.9% but the subscription becomes $99 a month, or $990 a year paid up front, before a single student has paid you anything.
Two things I should say plainly before the rest of this. If you're not selling yet, or you're selling very little, $9 and 10% of not much is genuinely cheaper and I'd take it in your position. And we're a good deal smaller and newer than Skool, which is a fair thing to hold against us.
Where Skool is the better buy
Skool is good software, and for a lot of people it's the right answer.
It's built group first. The conversation is the main event and courses hang off the side of it. If what you run is a large open room where people come for the room, pay monthly to be in it, and a course is a bonus, that's the shape it was made for and you should buy it. The affiliate machinery on their Pro plan is built for that model too, and we do not have anything equivalent.
Line by line, from their own page
| CourseSpaces | Skool | |
|---|---|---|
| Cut of what you sell | 0%. Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents, nothing to us | 10% on the $9 plan, 2.9% on the $99 plan |
| Monthly price | $47, one plan | $9 or $99 a month; $90 or $990 paid a year up front |
| Students included | 1,000 active | unlimited members, both plans |
| Video | hosted, 1TB of bandwidth a month, $10 a terabyte after that | unlimited videos, both plans |
| One to one chat with a student | yes, alongside the group | not listed on the page we captured |
| Assignments you mark and give feedback on | yes | not listed on the page we captured |
Everything in the right-hand column comes from that one dated capture and nothing else. Prices move, so check theirs before you decide anything, and check ours too. Where their page didn't mention something, the table says so rather than guessing on their behalf.
While I was on it: there's a cartoon cat asleep across their Pro button. It has nothing to do with anything, and it's the nicest thing on either of our pricing pages.
The part the percentage doesn't cover
There's a second bill, and it is not money.
Someone asks a question in the group about a lesson nobody else in the group can see, so you answer it there, and then again by email for the ones who never joined. The answer now exists twice and is findable neither time. None of that is Skool's doing. It's what happens when the group and the course are two separate things, and it would happen just the same if the group were on Facebook.
If that's the part you're stuck on rather than the money, I wrote about it on its own: [where your hypnotherapy community should live](https://coursespaces.io/blog/where-your-hypnotherapy-community-should-live.html).
One login, and everything behind it
Your students sign in once and the course, the recordings, the group and anything else you've given them are on one screen.
Communities are unlimited, so each cohort can have its own. The practitioners who trained with you in March aren't scrolling through three months of questions from people they've never met. You're not learning a second system to set it up either; it's the same menu you already use to add a lesson.
Not everything belongs on the thread
This matters more in your work than in most trades.
Somebody who's been through your programme will sometimes want to say something to you and not to the other forty people. It might be a client they want a second opinion on. It might be something that came up in their own supervision. In a tool built around the group, the public post is the default and the private word is the awkward exception, so it goes to whatever address they can find, which is usually your personal inbox at half past ten at night. There's one to one chat sitting alongside the group, in the same place. The private question stays private, and the general one goes where everybody gets the benefit of the answer.
Work you actually mark
A foundation course usually has real work in it. Case write-ups. A recorded practice session. Something you reaetween running a training and hosting a chat about one.
Justine Lette runs Hypnosis New Zealand, and she was paying over $100 a month elsewhere for a platform she used a fraction of. That's our one customer story in your field, and we are not going to stretch it. Around 3,670 students are on the platform altogether. Treat that as thin, because it is.
Where we're the wrong answer
If the group is the business. Some people run a large public community where the conversation is the product and the course is the bonus. Skool is built for that from the ground up. We're a course platform with a group inside it, which is a different shape, and if yours is the first shape you should stay.
If you're not selling anything yet. The arithmetic at the top runs the other way below about $4,740 a year. Come back when your second cohort fills. If it is GoHighLevel you are weighing up rather than Skool, that one runs differently again.
If everything must sit on your own domain, end to end. You can point your own domain at your portal. What we do not offer is full white-label hosting, where every address a student sees is yours. Their $99 plan lists a custom URL and their $9 plan does not, so this is a real difference at the top of their range.
If your current group has years of posts you need to keep. We can import a list of members. Ask us about the old posts before you count on bringing them, because the week after a move is a terrible time to find out.
$47, flat
One price. Nothing to work out, no tier to decode, no upgrade waiting for you at the point where the business starts working.
That covers unlimited courses and products, up to 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant with 1,500 messages a month, unlimited communities and one to one chat. The group is not an add-on and it is not a higher plan. Extra video bandwidth is $10 per terabyte if you ever need it. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Your students see your name and your colours the whole way through.
Try it on the cohort you already have
There's a 30-day free trial and it does not ask for a card.
Don't move anything. Put the course you're teaching now in, open one community beside it, and watch where the questions land for a fortnight. Then work out what 10% of your next intake comes to, and compare it with $47.