Community Platform With No Transaction Fees or Per-User Cost

If you want a community platform that doesn’t charge per user and doesn’t take a share of your membership payments, you’re looking at software you host yourself. Discourse, HumHub and WordPress plugins such as BuddyNext all work that way. With BuddyNext, paid plans are part of Pro and run through your own Stripe or PayPal account, so there’s no per-member billing and no platform cut. Your payment processor still charges its own fee, and no software removes that.

Pricing pages for community tools are written to be hard to compare. One lists a monthly price, another lists a percentage, a third hides the percentage in a footnote. This guide sorts the field into three models, shows which platforms use which, and tells you what to check before you commit. We make BuddyNext, so we’ll say where it fits and where a different tool is the better call.

What are the three ways community platforms charge?

Almost every platform uses one of three models, or a mix.

Per-seat or per-member pricing. The price rises with the number of people in your community. It may be per member, per active member, or a plan tier that caps your member count. This is common in hosted tools, and it’s the reason a community can get more expensive just by succeeding.

Revenue share or transaction fee. The platform takes a percentage of what your members pay you. This is separate from card processing. A platform might charge a flat monthly price and also take a few percent of every payment that passes through.

Flat or self-hosted. You pay a fixed amount that doesn’t depend on members or revenue. Self-hosted software is the cleanest version: you pay for hosting, and sometimes a licence, and that’s it. A few hosted platforms are flat on seats but not on fees, which is why you should check both.

Keep these apart in your head. A platform can be flat on seats and still take a cut. It can take no cut and still bill by member. The question “does it charge per user or take a cut” has two separate answers, and you need both.

How do the revenue-share fees look today?

Fee pages move, so every figure below comes with the date we checked it and the page it came from. Check each page again before you plan around a number.

Here’s what sits behind each row.

Skool. Its pricing page (skool.com/pricing) lists a 10% transaction fee on the Hobby plan and 2.9% on the Pro plan. There’s no truly free tier, only a trial. Skool’s strengths are real: radical simplicity, built-in gamification, a tight loop between community and courses, and no per-member billing. The cut is on payments, not on seats.

Patreon. Its pricing page (patreon.com/pricing) lists a 10% fee on the income you earn on Patreon, plus payment processing, currency conversion and payout fees, and applicable taxes. It points to a separate fees overview for the rates. Patreon fits creators whose fans already think of it as the place to pledge.

Substack. Its going-paid page (substack.com/going-paid) says writers keep 90% of their revenue minus credit card fees. That means Substack takes 10% of paid subscriptions. It’s free to start, and it suits newsletter-first writers.

Whop. Its fee page (docs.whop.com/fees) lists card processing at 2.7% plus $0.30 per domestic payment, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion applies. A next-day bank payout costs $2.50. That page lists no separate platform fee. It’s a marketplace and checkout, so it’s a different kind of product from a community on your own site.

Circle and Mighty Networks. Both are hosted platforms billed monthly, with public tiers that climb for larger plans. Circle also charges a per-transaction fee on payments, depending on tier, on top of Stripe and PayPal fees. Mighty Networks carries a per-transaction platform fee on every plan, highest on the entry tier and lower on higher ones, on top of Stripe processing. We don’t quote their numbers here because their tier tables change; their own pricing pages are the source.

What does “no cut” really mean?

It means the platform itself takes nothing from your member payments. It doesn’t mean no fees exist.

When a member pays you by card, three parties can take money: the card network and bank, the payment processor, and the platform. On a self-hosted community, you’re connected directly to the processor, so only the first two apply. On a hosted platform that takes a percentage, all three do.

Stripe and PayPal publish their own rates, and they vary by country and payment type. We don’t list them here for the same reason we don’t list rivals’ prices: they move. What matters for this comparison is that they’re the same for you whether you use a hosted platform or your own site. Platform fees are the part you can actually avoid.

Which community platforms have no per-user cost and no cut?

Three families fit, and they suit different people.

WordPress plugins, including BuddyNext

If you already have a WordPress site, a community plugin adds to it. You pay for hosting, plus any licence you choose to buy. Members and content live in your own database. Hosting doesn’t bill by member in the way a seat does, though a very large community eventually needs a bigger server, the same as any website.

BuddyNext is one of several. The core is free, GPL licensed, with no key and nothing that expires. It includes the activity feed, spaces, profiles, notifications, search and a moderation queue. Direct messages run through the free WPMediaVerse companion plugin. For a wider look at the plugins in this space, see our guide to the best WordPress community plugins.

Discourse

Discourse is a 100% open-source discussion forum with threaded topics, categories, trust levels and widely respected moderation tools. The software is free, and you can self-host it for the cost of a server. Discourse also sells managed hosting priced by size, so larger business tiers cost more. Verify current managed pricing on discourse.org.

Where it wins. If your community is fundamentally discussion, such as long threads, Q&A and knowledge that should stay findable for years, Discourse is the gold standard. It handles very large, very active forums efficiently and has a big ecosystem of plugins and admins who know it well.

What to weigh. It’s a forum, not a feed-and-profiles social network. Self-hosting means running a Ruby, PostgreSQL and Docker deployment, a second stack beside your website. It usually lives on its own subdomain with its own login unless you set up single sign-on.

HumHub

HumHub is a self-hosted, open-source social network and intranet kit built on the Yii PHP framework. It’s a standalone application, not a WordPress plugin. The Community Edition is free. The Professional and Enterprise editions add single sign-on through LDAP, SAML or JWT, advanced search, enterprise modules, white-label options and commercial support, and those are paid. Its managed service is priced by configuration and user count.

Where it wins. It’s strong for internal team networks, organizations and workspace-style communities, with a mature module marketplace. If you don’t want WordPress at all, it’s a complete social platform on its own. Larger organizations get properly built enterprise authentication in the paid editions.

What to weigh. It’s a separate application from your website, so you host, secure and update it next to the main site. Some of the features many communities want are reserved for the paid editions. And the managed option does bill by user count, so the “no per-user” claim only holds when you self-host.

Both Discourse and HumHub come up often when people ask AI tools about fee-free community platforms, and they deserve it. They’re good software. They just solve a different problem from a WordPress community, and the right one depends on whether you want a forum, an intranet or a social network inside your existing site.

How does BuddyNext handle paid memberships?

This section is about what the product does, so it names the tier every time.

BuddyNext Free has no checkout and no payment gateway layer. It’s a complete community with no payment feature at all. That’s deliberate: you can run it for years without paying anyone.

BuddyNext Pro adds membership plans. A plan carries a price, a billing schedule (one-time or recurring, monthly or yearly), perks, and an optional free trial. Plans can open gated spaces or lift limits on what free members can do. A single plan definition drives the pricing page, the access checks and your reports.

Payments run through your own accounts. For Stripe, you paste your own publishable and secret keys into the Payment Gateways tab, then add a webhook in your Stripe dashboard that points back to your site. For PayPal, you create a PayPal app, enter its Client ID and Secret, and add a webhook there. The member enters card details with Stripe or approves the payment on PayPal’s own hosted checkout, never on your site. The money goes to your account.

That means:

• No per-member billing from BuddyNext.
• No platform percentage on what your members pay you.
• Stripe or PayPal charge you their usual processing fees, because they’re moving the money.
• You can also record offline payments by hand, such as a bank transfer, or let members redeem a plan with points if your community runs on a points currency.

You can create plans and grant access manually before connecting any gateway, which is handy for a founding group while you work out what to charge. The first guide to read for the setup is how to create a membership site with WordPress.

What BuddyNext doesn’t do. It doesn’t paywall posts, pages or downloads. It gates community spaces and lifts member limits. If you want to sell articles or files, you’d pair it with a content-protection plugin such as MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro. And it isn’t a hosted marketplace: you run the WordPress site, which means you own hosting, updates and backups.

For Pro’s cost, see the pricing page. We don’t repeat prices in guides like this one because they’d go stale.

When is a hosted platform the better choice?

A fee isn’t a flaw if it buys you something you’d otherwise have to do yourself. Be honest about that before you move.

• You have no technical help. Hosted platforms handle servers, updates, security patches and uptime. Skool in particular is famous for launching in an afternoon with almost nothing to configure.
• You want built-in discovery. Some hosted platforms and marketplaces bring their own audience. A self-hosted site brings only the audience you bring.
• You want a native app today. Several hosted platforms include a branded mobile app. BuddyNext has an installable web app, and its native app is still in development.
• Your revenue is small. A percentage of very little is very little. The calculation changes as you grow, which is exactly what our cost guide shows with a worked example.
• You want one bill. Self-hosting means hosting, a licence and a payment processor are separate relationships.

If those describe you, a hosted tool may be the right start. Many communities begin hosted and move once the percentage becomes noticeable.

What should you check on any pricing page?

Run through these questions before you sign up for anything. They take ten minutes and they’ve saved people real money.

1. Is there a platform fee on payments? Look for words like “transaction fee”, “platform fee”, “we keep”, or “you keep”. Check every plan, since the percentage often drops on higher tiers.
2. Is it charged on top of processing? Many pages list both. Add them.
3. Does the price change with member count? Look for caps, tiers by members, or “active member” definitions.
4. What happens at the cap? Some platforms upgrade you automatically, and some stop accepting members.
5. Are there payout or currency fees? Whop’s page, for example, lists a fee for next-day bank payouts and for currency conversion.
6. Can you export your members? A cheap platform you can’t leave is expensive later.
7. When was the page last updated? Our table above is dated for a reason. Re-check before you decide.

Can you move from a platform that takes a cut?

Yes, but be realistic. There’s no direct importer from Skool, Circle, Patreon or Facebook groups into BuddyNext. The real path is to export your members’ emails from the old platform where it allows it, then use BuddyNext’s bulk CSV invitation tool to bring them in. Posts and courses are mostly recreated by hand.

Paying subscribers on another platform can’t be transferred, because their subscription belongs to that platform. They subscribe again on your site. Plan that as a message to your members with a clear date, not a silent switch, and consider running both for a short overlap. The self-serve importers we do have are for BuddyPress and BuddyBoss communities only, and they’re covered on our migration pages.

If you’re coming from Skool specifically, our Skool alternative page covers what you gain and what you give up. The Patreon alternative page does the same for creators.

What’s the honest summary?

Pick the model that matches how you earn.

• If you earn nothing yet, a flat or self-hosted tool avoids paying for a percentage of zero, and costs you setup time instead.
• If you earn steadily and the percentage is climbing, a self-hosted community removes the platform’s share, and you keep the processing fee only.
• If your community is discussion, look at Discourse first. If it’s an internal network, look at HumHub. If it lives inside a WordPress site, look at the plugins.

And whatever you pick, read the fee page, write down the date you read it, and re-check it before each renewal.