Category pricing · Community and creator platforms
Community platform pricing — Circle, Mighty Networks, Discord, and every alternative
Per-month list looks cheap, but transaction fees on monetized communities are the dominant cost line above 100 paying members.
3 tools in this category. Every row in the table below links to the full per-tier pricing page for that vendor, with hidden fees, recommended tier by team size, and tier-jump pain spelled out.
About Community and creator platforms
Community platform pricing splits cleanly between consumer-facing (Discord, Telegram — free with optional Nitro / Premium upsell) and professional / paid (Circle, Mighty Networks, Geneva, Heartbeat). The paid platforms price per-month with member ceilings: Circle Basic is 39 USD per month for 100 members; Mighty Networks Community is 41 USD per month annual for unlimited members at the entry tier. The pages below cover the per-month list and the per-member ladder where applicable, plus the transaction-fee math for monetized communities (which on most platforms ranges from 0 percent to 5 percent on member subscriptions). The buying decision usually starts with the monetization plan — communities planning to charge members optimize for low transaction fees; communities planning to stay free optimize for member-experience features.
3 community and creator platforms compared
Entry-tier price below is the cheapest paid per-seat or per-month tier each vendor publishes. Custom-quote tiers and usage-based add-ons aren't included; click any tool to see the full per-tier breakdown.
Best for
- Creators building first paid community
- Brands launching a customer / power-user community
- Operators choosing between Circle, Mighty Networks, and Discord Server Boost
What to evaluate
- Per-month base and the included member ceiling
- Transaction fee on monetized communities
- Course / event / live-streaming integration
- Mobile app branding (white-label option)
Frequently asked questions
Is Circle or Mighty Networks cheaper for a 500-member community?
Circle Basic is 39 USD per month annual for 100 members, with the Professional tier (89 USD per month) covering 10,000 members. Mighty Networks Community is 41 USD per month annual for unlimited members at the entry tier. At 500 members, Mighty Networks is cheaper on base price; the deciding factor is feature fit (Circle's UX is closer to Slack / Discord; Mighty Networks bundles courses and events more tightly).
Can I monetize on Discord without paying a platform fee?
Discord does not charge a platform fee on community monetization. Server Boosting (the closest Discord native monetization layer) is paid by individual members at 9.99 USD per month per boost. For paid communities at scale, most creators use a separate payments layer (Stripe, Patreon) and gate Discord access via a Patreon / Memberful integration. The combined fee is typically 5-8 percent of revenue (Patreon's transaction fee + Stripe's processing) — comparable to the embedded fee on dedicated paid-community platforms.
Should I use Slack Connect for an enterprise customer community?
Slack Connect (cross-workspace channels) costs nothing on top of your existing Slack plan, which makes it the cheapest path to a customer / partner community for B2B SaaS. The trade-off is the experience constraints — guests get a limited Slack view, public-channel discovery is awkward, and member onboarding requires manual invites or workflow automation. For SaaS companies with under 1,000 customer community members, Slack Connect typically wins on ROI; above that scale, a dedicated platform (Circle, Vanilla, Insided) usually justifies its line item.