Cornerstone
The two numbers between a member and your bank account.
The first is payment processing. Whoever moves the card transaction — almost always Stripe — takes roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents. You pay that on Mobieus, you pay it on Skool, you pay it on a plain Stripe checkout you build yourself. It is the cost of accepting a card, and no community platform makes it disappear.
The second number is the one that varies, and it is the one that decides how much of your community you actually own: the platform fee. That is the cut the software company takes on top of processing, just for the privilege of running the payment through their system. Some platforms charge double digits. Some charge a fraction of a percent. Mobieus charges nothing.
The platform fee, by platform.
| Platform | Plan | Platform fee | On top of Stripe? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobieus | Any paid plan | 0% | You connect your own Stripe; Mobieus never touches the payment |
| Skool | Hobby ($9/mo) | 10% | Skool's own payment system |
| Skool | Pro ($99/mo) | 2.9% | Skool's own payment system |
| Circle | Professional ($89/mo) | 2% | Yes, plus Stripe |
| Circle | Business ($199/mo) | 1% | Yes, plus Stripe |
| Circle | Plus (custom) | 0.5% | Yes, plus Stripe |
| Mighty Networks | Lower tiers | up to ~2% | Yes, plus Stripe |
| Mighty Networks | Top tier | 0.5% (never 0%) | Yes, plus Stripe |
The pattern is the same almost everywhere: the platform takes a percentage of your revenue, and the only way to shrink it is to pay for a more expensive plan. You buy down the fee. You never reach zero.
What that costs, in money.
Percentages feel small until you put real revenue behind them. Take a community doing $5,000 a month — a single mid-sized course launch, or a few hundred members paying $20.
On a 10% platform fee, that is $500 a month gone before Stripe takes its share. $6,000 a year. On a 2% fee it is $100 a month, $1,200 a year. Even a "small" 1% fee is $600 a year out of a business that is barely past its first real revenue.
None of those numbers include Stripe's processing, which you would pay regardless. They are purely the platform's cut for sitting between you and your members. And they scale with your success: the better your community does, the more the platform earns from work you did.
Why Mobieus is built the other way.
Mobieus runs on one published price. You connect your own Stripe account, and your members pay you directly. Mobieus is the software your community runs on — it is not a middleman on your money. Course sales, paid forums, the marketplace, member subscriptions: the platform fee on all of it is zero. The only cut is Stripe's, the same cut you would pay if you sold straight off your own site.
That changes the math in a way that compounds. The community doing $5,000 a month keeps the $500, or the $100, or the $600 a year it would otherwise hand over. At $50,000 a month it is the difference between a healthy margin and a five-figure annual tax on your own audience. See the published pricing — no asterisk and no fee table hidden two clicks deep. Members and operators concerned about data control can also read how Mobieus handles data ownership and per-tenant isolation.
The honest caveats.
Three things worth saying plainly, because a comparison that only flatters one side is not worth reading.
At tiny revenue, the platform fee barely matters. If you are making $200 a month, a 2% fee is four dollars. Pick the platform with the features and feel you like; the fee math will not decide it. The fee model starts to matter once you are past roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a month and climbing — which is exactly the point where switching gets more annoying, so it is worth thinking about before you are locked in.
Some platforms bundle payment processing. Skool runs payments through its own system, so you never set up Stripe. That is genuinely simpler at the start. The tradeoff is that you do not control the payment relationship, the payout terms, or the data — and you pay for that convenience in the fee. Mobieus takes the opposite position: your Stripe, your money, your control, and a little more setup up front.
Plan price and fee trade against each other. A platform can advertise a low monthly price and make it back on transaction fees, or charge more monthly and take less per sale. The only way to know your real cost is to run your actual revenue through both numbers. When you do, a published flat price with a 0% platform fee is the version that gets cheaper as a share of revenue the more you grow, instead of more expensive.
Already on a platform that takes a cut?
If you are paying a platform fee today and the math above stung a little, the move is more straightforward than most people expect — members' Stripe subscriptions can transfer without your customers having to re-enter anything. The platform-specific guides walk through it:
Or if you are choosing from scratch, start here — one price, your own Stripe, and the help desk, learning system, and knowledge base in the same login.