Discord pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Discord (discord.com) is a community platform. Servers are free; monetized servers pay Discord 10% of Server Subscription and Server Shop sales, with payment fees on top.. Free plan: Free servers with unlimited members, channels, roles and full message history.
What Discord costs
- 100 paid members: $100/mo (No subscription fee; Discord keeps 10% of $1,000 = $100. Payment processing is deducted separately ('various fees'), so not counted. US owner, 18+, 2FA, no member minimum.)
- 1,000 paid members: $1,000/mo (10% of $10,000 = $1,000; moderator roles are free.)
- 1,000 free members: free (Free server covers 1,000 members and any number of admins/mods; message history is kept and searchable.)
Plan compared: Server Subscriptions (free server + 10% revenue share). 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 Discord does
Core: Real-time chat.
Important: Discussion community, Events and live rooms, Member mobile apps.
Also has: Paid memberships & subscriptions (partly), Creator discovery marketplace (partly), Member directory and profiles (partly), Paid Discord/Slack access (partly), Public SEO forum (partly), SSO and embedding (partly), Integrations and API (partly).
Discord price hikes
No price hikes on record for Discord.
Cheaper alternatives to Discord
At 100 members paying $10 a month, Discord costs $100/mo. 1 community platform costs less:
- Skool: $50/mo (Hobby), covers 66% of Discord; missing or partial: Real-time chat (partly), Events and live rooms (partly), Paid Discord/Slack access, SSO and embedding, Integrations and API
Discord alternatives: 3 community platforms compared, at every size.
Sources
Pricing page: creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/10423011974551-Server-Shop-For-Server-Owners-and-Admins. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Fee and eligibility from Discord's Creator Support article (90/10 split, US-only, 18+, 2FA, $100 first payout). The FAQ URL in the catalog now covers members only; no sourced fee changes found, but the web-search budget was used up, so the change history wasn't fully checked.