Get alerts
All products/Community & membership/Circle

Circle pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Circle (circle.so) is a community platform. Flat monthly plans with unlimited members, tiered by admins, spaces, storage and features, plus a 2% to 0.5% transaction fee on member payments on top of Stripe.. No free plan.

What Circle costs

  • 100 paid members: $119/mo (Professional $99/mo monthly billing + 2% Circle fee on $1,000 ($20) = $119; Stripe processing not counted. Monthly price is the last published one (Jan 2025); the current page shows only annual-billed prices ($89).)
  • 1,000 paid members: $299/mo (Professional $99 + 2% of $10,000 ($200) = $299 (3 admins included) beats Business $219 + 1% ($100) = $319.)
  • 1,000 free members: $99/mo (No free plan (14-day trial only); cheapest plan is Professional at $99/mo monthly ($89/mo billed annually).)

Plan compared: Professional. Monthly USD on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12) to run a community of a given size, including the platform's own fees on member payments but not standard card processing; WordPress plugins are priced on their licence without hosting, and forum software sold both ways on the vendor's hosted plan. The headline is 100 members paying $10 a month; we also compare 1,000 paying members ($10,000 a month, 2 admins) and a free community of 1,000 members.

What Circle does

Core: Discussion community, Paid memberships & subscriptions.

Important: Real-time chat, Online course hosting (partly), Events and live rooms (partly), Member mobile apps, Custom domain and branding, Email marketing broadcasts (partly).

Also has: Members-only site content (partly), Branded mobile apps (partly), Points & badges gamification (partly), Member directory and profiles (partly), AI features (partly), Public SEO forum (partly), SSO and embedding (partly), Integrations and API (partly).

Circle price hikes

No price hikes on record for Circle.

Cheaper alternatives to Circle

At 100 members paying $10 a month, Circle costs $119/mo. 3 community platforms cost less:

  • Skool: $50/mo (Hobby), covers 63% of Circle; missing or partial: Paid memberships & subscriptions (partly), Real-time chat (partly), Custom domain and branding, Members-only site content, Branded mobile apps
  • Discord: $100/mo (Server Subscriptions (free server + 10% revenue share)), covers 56% of Circle; missing or partial: Paid memberships & subscriptions (partly), Online course hosting, Custom domain and branding, Email marketing broadcasts, Members-only site content
  • Patreon: $100/mo (Standard creator plan (10% platform fee, no subscription)), covers 67% of Circle; missing or partial: Discussion community (partly), Real-time chat (partly), Online course hosting, Custom domain and branding (partly), Branded mobile apps

Circle alternatives: 3 cheaper community platforms compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • May 2025 · Repriced: Circle dropped its entry Basic plan ($49/mo monthly, $39 annual; 100 members, 1 admin, 4% transaction fee), so the cheapest plan became Professional at $99/mo monthly ($89 annual). Seen on archived pricing pages between Jan and May 2025.
  • May 2024 · Price cut: Business plan fell from $249/mo monthly ($239 annual) in mid-2023 to $219/mo monthly ($199 annual) by May 2024.

Sources

Pricing page: circle.so/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Current prices and fees from circle.so/pricing (annual-billed only, no monthly toggle); monthly prices ($99/$219) from the Jan 2025 archived page and may have changed. PricingSaaS lists only the Sep 2026 Scale plan addition; web search was unavailable for this run.