Mighty Networks vs Circle vs Skool vs WordPress: True Per-Member Cost at Scale

Mighty Networks, Circle.so, and Skool are the three SaaS community platforms most owners shortlist in 2026. The sticker prices look reasonable: $89 to $419 per month at Circle, $41 to $360 per month at Mighty, $99 per month flat at Skool. The reality at 500 active paying members is that you are losing 8 to 14 percent of your community revenue to platform fees and transaction stacks before you have paid your team or your contractors. At 5,000 members the leakage compounds into the tens of thousands per year. This is the cost math our agency walks through with every community owner who calls us asking whether to migrate to WordPress, why we keep recommending it, and what the actual numbers look like at each scale.

The phone rings most often after the annual renewal email arrives. A community owner who started on Mighty or Circle two years ago at 200 members has grown to 1,500 members, paid memberships at $40 per month, and just realized the platform is taking a chunk that no longer feels reasonable for what it provides. They search for alternatives, find WordPress in the conversation, and ask the question that this post answers: does the math actually work?

It does. The break-even between SaaS and WordPress self-hosted lands somewhere between 80 and 250 members for most paid communities. Past that point, every additional paying member is a member you are subsidizing the platform with. We have migrated communities at 500, 2,500, and 12,000 paid members. The savings range from $4,000 per year on the smallest tier to over $90,000 per year on the largest. The numbers are not small.

This post breaks down the real costs of running a paid community on Mighty Networks, Circle, and Skool against a WordPress self-hosted setup, then walks through the migration playbook for owners who decide the math says move.

What you actually pay on each SaaS platform in 2026

The sticker price is only the first line of the cost sheet. Every SaaS community platform layers transaction fees, member-tier gates, integration add-ons, and email-tool fees on top. Here are the real per-month costs across the three platforms most community owners compare.

Mighty Networks

Mighty Networks runs four primary tiers in 2026:

• Community plan at $41 per month annual ($49 monthly), entry tier with member discussion features and a base set of native apps.
• Courses plan at $99 per month annual ($119 monthly), adds course hosting and assessments.
• Business plan at $179 per month annual ($219 monthly), adds branded mobile apps, deeper analytics, and custom URLs.
• Path-to-Pro plan at $360 per month flat (no monthly discount), unlocks 1,000-viewer livestreams and reduces transaction fees from 2 percent to 1 percent.

Transaction fees: 2 percent on Community, Courses, and Business; 1 percent on Path-to-Pro; plus standard payment-processor fees of 2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction on top. The 2 percent is what Mighty takes; you still pay Stripe.

Reality check: a Mighty community at 500 paid members charging $30 per month earns $15,000 per month. The Business plan at $179 plus the 2 percent platform fee ($300) plus Stripe ($435) takes $914 per month off the top. That is 6.1 percent of revenue going to Mighty and Stripe combined, before any add-on costs.

Mighty also charges separately for branded apps at higher tiers, and a content migration in 2024 reportedly caused some long-time hosts to lose around 75 percent of their stored content during the Spaces transition. That is not a fee, but it is a cost. Lost content in a SaaS community is unrecoverable.

Circle.so

Circle runs three public tiers in 2026:

• Professional at $89 per month annual ($119 monthly), core community plus courses, events, and memberships.
• Business at $199 per month annual ($239 monthly), unlimited workflows, API access, and deeper customization.
• Enterprise at $419 per month annual (Circle Plus), AI agents, advanced analytics, and priority support.

Transaction fees: 2 percent on Professional, 1 percent on Business, 0.5 percent on Enterprise. Stripe fees stack on top at 2.9 percent + $0.30. Effective total transaction stack: 4.9, 3.9, or 3.4 percent.

Add-ons that most communities pay for:

• Email Hub: Circle’s email-marketing add-on, $99 per month for the volume most paid communities need.
• Custom sender domain: $25 per month.
• AI Agents (analytics, search, moderation): part of Enterprise only; would be $100 to $300 per month if priced separately.

Reality check: a Circle community at 500 paid members charging $30 per month on the Business plan with Email Hub and a custom sender pays $199 + $99 + $25 + $150 (1 percent platform fee) + $435 (Stripe) = $908 per month to operate. Same scale, similar leakage to Mighty.

The Circle Email Hub charge is the biggest hidden line. Communities that send weekly newsletters or paid-tier broadcasts hit the Email Hub volume tier within a few months and the $99 per month never goes away.

Skool

Skool keeps pricing simple. There are two tiers:

• Hobby plan at $9 per month, 1 community, capped features, 10 percent + $0.30 transaction fee.
• Pro plan at $99 per month flat, full features, 2.9 percent + $0.30 transaction fee on payments under $900, 3.9 percent + $0.30 on payments above.

The tradeoff: Pro is one flat number, but the per-community billing means a creator running three communities pays $297 per month. There is no multi-community discount. And the transaction fees kick in at the full processor stack rate; Skool does not separate platform fees from Stripe fees, but the math is roughly equivalent to a 0 to 1 percent platform take embedded.

Reality check: a Skool Pro community at 500 paid members at $30 per month pays $99 + $435 in Stripe-equivalent fees = $534 per month. That is the lowest of the three at this scale. The catch: Skool’s feature set is tightly constrained. No custom domain on Hobby, limited customization on Pro, and the platform decides which features ship. If you outgrow Skool, the migration off is hard.

Cost math at 500, 2,000, and 10,000 paid members

Real numbers across all three platforms vs WordPress self-hosted, assuming $30 per month memberships:

At 500 paid members ($15,000 monthly revenue, $180,000 annual)

Platform	Plan	Monthly cost	Annual cost	% of revenue
Mighty Networks	Business + 2% fee + Stripe	$914	$10,968	6.1%
Circle	Business + Email Hub + 1% fee + Stripe	$908	$10,896	6.1%
Skool	Pro + 2.9% Stripe	$534	$6,408	3.6%
WordPress self-hosted	Cloudways + Jetonomy Pro + Stripe direct	$115	$1,380	0.8%

WordPress self-hosted breakdown at this scale: $50 per month managed hosting (Cloudways DigitalOcean 2GB or equivalent), $79 per year for Jetonomy Pro license, $0 platform fee, plus the standard Stripe processing of $435 per month that every option pays.

The annual savings vs the cheapest SaaS (Skool) are $5,028. Vs the higher-end SaaS (Mighty or Circle), savings are $9,500+.

At 2,000 paid members ($60,000 monthly revenue, $720,000 annual)

Platform	Plan	Monthly cost	Annual cost	% of revenue
Mighty Networks	Path-to-Pro (1% fee) + Stripe	$2,700	$32,400	4.5%
Circle	Enterprise (0.5% fee) + Email Hub + Stripe	$2,279	$27,348	3.8%
Skool	Pro + 2.9% Stripe	$1,839	$22,068	3.1%
WordPress self-hosted	Kinsta Business + Jetonomy Pro + Stripe direct	$1,890	$22,680	3.2%

WordPress at this scale: $150 per month managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta Business or Cloudways DigitalOcean 4GB), $79 per year Jetonomy Pro, plus $1,740 per month Stripe processing.

The interesting number at 2,000 members is that Skool stops being the cheap option because the percentage transaction fee compounds. WordPress edges past Skool slightly and beats both Mighty and Circle by $5,000 to $10,000 annually.

At 10,000 paid members ($300,000 monthly revenue, $3.6M annual)

Platform	Plan	Monthly cost	Annual cost	% of revenue
Mighty Networks	Path-to-Pro (1% fee) + Stripe	$12,060	$144,720	4.0%
Circle	Enterprise (0.5% fee) + Email Hub + Stripe	$10,919	$131,028	3.6%
Skool	Pro + 2.9% Stripe	$8,799	$105,588	2.9%
WordPress self-hosted	Dedicated VPS + Jetonomy Pro + Stripe direct	$9,150	$109,800	3.1%

WordPress at enterprise scale: $400 per month dedicated VPS or self-managed AWS, $79 per year Jetonomy Pro, $8,700 per month Stripe processing. The hosting line scales modestly; the platform fee disappears entirely.

At 10,000 paid members the savings are $20,000 to $35,000 per year vs Mighty or Circle. Skool gets close on price but you are still locked into a feature set you cannot extend.

Why the SaaS percentage compounds against community owners

The platform fees on Mighty, Circle, and Skool look small in isolation. One percent here, two percent there. The compound effect is what makes the math break.

Take a community growing at 30 percent year over year, starting at 100 members at $30 per month. Year-five revenue is around $1.1 million annually. The platform fee taken off that revenue at 1 percent (Mighty Path-to-Pro or Circle Business) is $11,000 per year by year five. Across the five-year run, the total platform fees paid are roughly $28,000. None of this builds equity in your community asset.

Now take the same community on a WordPress self-hosted setup. The hosting line scales from $50 to $400 per month over the same five years. Total infrastructure spend across all five years: approximately $15,000. Platform fees: zero. Total saved vs the SaaS path: $13,000 to $28,000 per year by year five, depending on which SaaS tier you compared against.

This is before factoring in:

• Email tool fees that the SaaS platforms charge separately and that a WordPress self-hosted setup gets via plugins with no per-volume markup.
• Transaction-fee tier-downs that only happen if you pay the higher SaaS tier ($199/mo Circle or $360/mo Mighty).
• API and integration costs that SaaS platforms cap, throttle, or gate behind enterprise tiers.

The five-year delta on a community of 1,500 paid members is realistically $50,000 to $80,000 in pure platform-fee savings on the WordPress side. That is one full salary, or one major product launch budget, every year.

What you give up vs what you actually get

The SaaS platforms market three things that they say justify the per-member percentage: speed of setup, mobile apps, and zero hosting headaches. Worth examining each.

Speed of setup. A Mighty or Circle community can be live in 30 minutes. A WordPress self-hosted community with Jetonomy takes about two to four hours from zero to operating, including hosting setup and theme matching. The difference at $30 per member at 500 members is a one-time savings of three hours, weighed against five years of percentage fees. The math does not favor SaaS speed.

Mobile apps. Mighty and Skool offer branded mobile apps as a flagship feature; Circle does not. The branded app is real value at the high tiers ($179 to $360 per month on Mighty), but most paying members access the community via web in 2026. App-store install rates on community apps run 8 to 18 percent of paid members. The cost-per-active-app-user on the SaaS app tier ends up around $25 to $40 per month, which is more than the membership itself for most communities. Most owners would be better served by a responsive WordPress site (which any reasonable community theme provides) than a native app gating $179 to $360 per month.

Hosting headaches. Managed WordPress hosting in 2026 (Cloudways, Kinsta, WP Engine) is operationally a non-issue. Backups, scaling, security, SSL all handled. The “headache” framing dates back to 2015 era WordPress, not the 2026 managed-hosting reality. We have run client communities on managed hosting for over six years with zero hosting-induced downtime.

What you actually get on WordPress self-hosted that SaaS does not provide:

• Full database access. Every member, every post, every metadata field is in a database you own. Export to CSV or full SQL anytime.
• Plugin ecosystem. 60,000+ plugins for membership, payments, email marketing, CRM integration, analytics, custom forms. Most are free or under $100 per year.
• Theme freedom. Visual control extends to every pixel. The community looks like a native part of your brand site, not a sub-domain SaaS portal.
• Payment processor freedom. Stripe direct, PayPal direct, or any other gateway with zero platform fee on top.
• No member caps, no feature gates. Every feature, all members, no upcharge for sending more email or hosting more events.
• Data export at any time. No “higher tier” gate, no migration tax. The data is yours by default.

Why we recommend Jetonomy as the WordPress community plugin

There are several WordPress community plugins; we recommend Jetonomy because it is what we ship, what we use ourselves, and what we have tested at scale. The free version handles forums, Q&A mode, idea boards with member voting, six trust levels, and 48 REST endpoints. Pro adds AI moderation, real-time reactions, private messaging, polls, badges, analytics dashboards, webhooks, and eight more modular extensions.

The relevant parity points vs Mighty, Circle, and Skool:

• Trust levels. Day-zero members are limited (cannot post links, cannot DM); long-tenure members earn moderation rights. This is the spam-prevention layer that platform features were missing on X Communities and that Skool only partially provides.
• Q&A mode. Stack Overflow-style accepted-answer surfacing for any category. Mighty has nothing equivalent. Circle has rudimentary support. Skool has none.
• Idea boards with voting. Member roadmap input with admin status updates. Used by both consumer and SaaS communities to crowdsource what to build.
• REST API. 48 endpoints out of the box, more in Pro. CRM sync, mobile app, custom integrations all wireable. Mighty and Circle gate API access behind their highest tiers; Skool has no API.
• Theme adaptation. Reads the active WordPress theme’s colors and typography, so the community matches your brand site without custom CSS.

For most paid communities, Jetonomy free is enough through year one. Jetonomy Pro at $79 to $149 per year unlocks the moderation and analytics that scale-stage communities need. Either way, the price floor is dramatically below any SaaS tier.

The migration playbook from SaaS to WordPress

This is the same 21-day playbook our agency runs for clients moving off any SaaS platform. We ran a full version of this for X Communities migrations in our recent X Communities playbook, and the pattern is similar regardless of which SaaS you are leaving.

Days 1 to 3: Decide stack and procure hosting

Hosting recommendation by community size:

• Under 1,000 paid members: Cloudways DigitalOcean 2GB or SiteGround GrowBig, $25 to $50 per month.
• 1,000 to 5,000 paid members: Cloudways DigitalOcean 4GB or Kinsta Starter, $50 to $115 per month.
• 5,000 to 25,000 paid members: Cloudways DigitalOcean 8GB or Kinsta Business, $150 to $400 per month.
• 25,000+ paid members: Custom dedicated VPS or AWS/GCP managed setup, $400+ per month.

Spin up the host, point a subdomain (e.g., community.yoursite.com) at it, install WordPress. Two hours of work for someone who has done it before, half a day for someone learning. We do this in 30 minutes for clients on day one.

Days 4 to 6: Install Jetonomy and configure

Install Jetonomy free. The setup wizard creates the base structure: Categories, Topics, Posts. Configure:

• Trust levels: defaults work for most communities; tighten posting limits if your previous SaaS had spam issues.
• Categories: mirror the structure of your existing SaaS community. If Circle had Spaces, those become categories. If Mighty had Topics, same mapping.
• Q&A mode: toggle on for any category where members ask questions and want curated answers.
• Idea boards: enable for product feedback or feature-request channels.
• Theme: pick a clean WordPress theme. We recommend BuddyX Pro for community-tuned defaults, but Astra, Kadence, or GeneratePress work fine.

About 60 to 90 minutes of configuration work.

Days 7 to 12: Export from SaaS and seed the WordPress community

This is the painful part of any migration. Each SaaS handles export differently:

• Mighty Networks: member data export available on higher tiers (Business, Path-to-Pro). Content export is limited to your own posts; member-authored content stays on the platform unless you can scrape it via the public-facing pages.
• Circle.so: full content and member export available on Business and Enterprise tiers. The lower Professional tier has restricted export.
• Skool: member CSV available; content export not supported natively. Manual scrape required for posts and threads.

Whatever you can export, do so before you cancel your SaaS subscription. The platforms gate exports behind active subscription on most tiers. Once you cancel, the data goes with the platform.

For content the platforms will not export, the playbook is the same as our X Communities migration walkthrough: pick the 25 to 50 highest-value threads, screenshot or scrape them, recreate them as flagship forum posts in the new home with original-author attribution preserved. The seeding work is what makes member retention land at 25 percent rather than 5 percent on launch day.

Allocate three full work days to this phase. It is the work most teams skip and the work that decides whether the migration succeeds.

Days 13 to 18: Run member migration

The high-conversion playbook:

1. Pin a transition post on the existing SaaS community. Title it something like “Important: We are moving to a new home.” Include the new URL, a short explanation, and a deadline.
2. Pin a welcome post on the new WordPress forum. Address migrants directly. Mention the seeded threads.
3. Direct-message your top 50 most-engaged members. Personal outreach has the highest conversion. These members create the activity that retains everyone else.
4. Email any members you have email for. Newsletter, paid tier, signup form: any list. Email-driven conversion runs higher than in-platform notice.
5. Post on adjacent channels. Your main social, your podcast, your newsletter. Reach the broader audience that follows you off the SaaS.

Conversion rate from SaaS member to active WordPress forum member in the first 30 days runs 25 to 50 percent for paid communities with strong email lists, 10 to 25 percent without. The seeding work and personal outreach are the difference.

Days 19 to 21: Final archive and SaaS cleanup

Pull final exports if your SaaS subscription is about to lapse. Update the pinned SaaS post: “We are now operating at [new URL]. The SaaS community is closing on [date].” DM any high-value member who has not yet joined. Cancel the SaaS subscription on the day after your last paid member migrates.

After the cutover, your community runs on infrastructure you own. Month-over-month costs are flat (hosting), not member-tier scaling. You can integrate any tool, run any analytics, send any email volume, and modify any feature without asking a vendor.

Cost breakdown for the agency-run migration

This is what we quote for community owners who want us to run the move:

Community size	Agency-managed price	Delivery
Under 1,000 paid members	$2,500 flat	5 business days
1,000 to 5,000 paid members	$4,500 flat	7 to 10 business days
5,000 to 25,000 paid members	$7,500 flat	14 business days
25,000+ paid members	Custom-quoted	21 to 30 business days

Included in every tier: hosting setup, WordPress install, Jetonomy configuration, theme matching to your existing brand, up to 50 high-value thread seedings from the SaaS export, member outreach email templates, 7-day post-launch monitoring.

The math against the SaaS-fee leakage usually pays back in 4 to 8 months. A 1,500-member community paying around $9,000 per year in Circle or Mighty platform fees recoups the $4,500 agency fee in the first six months of operating on WordPress, and saves roughly $7,000 per year every year after.

What goes wrong in DIY migrations and how to avoid it

We have seen enough DIY migrations to know the predictable failure modes:

Skipping export early. Most SaaS platforms gate export behind active subscription. Owners who cancel before exporting end up with no member data and no content. Always export before you cancel.

Skimping on seeding. A WordPress forum with 5 threads on launch day looks dead. Members do not stick. Allocate three full days to seeding regardless of community size.

Default theme. Jetonomy adapts to whatever theme it inherits. A default Astra install looks like a default Astra install. Spend an hour matching brand colors and typography. Members notice, even if they cannot articulate why the community feels unfinished.

No email outreach. The single highest-conversion channel is email-to-member. Communities that send the email retain at 25 to 50 percent. Communities that rely only on the SaaS platform’s farewell post retain at 8 to 12 percent.

Cloudflare Bot Management. If your new WordPress install sits behind Cloudflare, the default Bot Management can block parts of the WordPress REST API and certain plugin requests. Disable aibotsprotection if it is on, and add a custom WAF rule for any server-to-server traffic the community needs.

Forgetting the redirects. If your SaaS community sat at a custom subdomain that you control DNS for, set up 301 redirects from the old paths to the new WordPress paths. Members who bookmarked the old URLs land on the new home automatically.

These five places are where DIY migrations slow down or break. None are showstoppers; all are time-consuming. Build them into your day-by-day plan.

Common questions community owners ask before migrating

Will WordPress feel as polished as Circle or Mighty?

With a community-tuned theme like BuddyX Pro and Jetonomy Pro, yes. The visual gap between a tuned WordPress community and a Circle community is small for end users. The admin interface is different (WordPress dashboard vs Circle admin panel), but the member-facing experience is parity or better.

Can WordPress handle a community of 25,000+ members?

Yes, with appropriate hosting. We have client communities at 50,000+ members running on Cloudways DigitalOcean 8GB and Kinsta Business, no issues. The bottleneck at scale is database tuning and object caching, both of which managed WordPress hosting handles by default.

What about mobile apps?

If a branded app is critical, options exist: AppPresser and BuddyBoss App both turn WordPress communities into iOS/Android apps. Cost is $300 to $1,200 per year vs $179 to $360 per month on Mighty’s branded-app tier. The app store review process is the same regardless of the underlying stack.

What if I outgrow Jetonomy?

Jetonomy is plugin code on your WordPress install. The data is in your database. If you ever decide to switch community plugins (BuddyPress, BuddyBoss, bbPress), the migration is internal to your WordPress install with no platform involved. The lock-in risk that exists on every SaaS does not exist here.

Can I run paid memberships on WordPress?

Yes, and with significantly lower fees. WooCommerce + Memberships, Paid Memberships Pro, MemberPress, WP Fusion all integrate with WordPress communities. Stripe direct or PayPal direct, no platform percentage on top. For most paid communities, this is the single largest cost difference vs SaaS.

Is there a hybrid path?

Run a free WordPress community for general access, keep paid premium content on the SaaS platform during transition, then collapse to WordPress fully once member migration is complete. Some communities run this way for 60 to 90 days during the cutover.

How to start

If you are running this yourself, allocate the 21 days on your calendar and start with day one. Hosting and Jetonomy install are doable today. Everything else fits in the next three weeks.

If you want us to run it: send us a note with the rough size of your community, your current SaaS, your target launch date, and any hosting preferences. We quote within 24 hours and start the same day on confirmed engagements. The 4-to-8-month payback math means most engagements are profitable for the community owner inside the first year.

If you want to evaluate the tooling first, download Jetonomy and stand up a test community on a $5 per month Cloudways trial. The free version is enough to validate the choice; you do not need Pro for the migration itself.

The platform fees you pay every month on Mighty, Circle, or Skool are the platform’s revenue, not your asset. Once you migrate, those fees become hosting and tooling costs you control. The money saved compounds. The community remains. The data is yours.