0% Transaction Fees — Keep Every Dollar You Earn

The Hidden Tax on Community Builders

If you run a paid community, sell online courses, or host ticketed events, you already know the drill: you pour hours into creating something valuable, promote it to your audience, close the sale — and then your platform quietly skims a percentage off the top. It might be 5%. It might be 10%. On some platforms it can climb even higher once you factor in all the line items.

Transaction fees are the silent tax on the creator economy. They show up on every invoice, every payout, every sale. And over time, they add up to staggering amounts. We built Communi to work differently. Zero platform transaction fees. Period. In this post, we are going to break down exactly what that means, show you the real math, and explain why it matters more the bigger you grow.

How Platform Fees Work Everywhere Else

Before we dive into our approach, let us look at the landscape. If you have ever priced out community and course platforms, you have probably encountered fee structures like these:

• Skool charges a flat $99 per month regardless of revenue, which sounds simple — until you realize it offers no courses, no events, and limited customization. You are paying $1,188 a year for a glorified forum.
• Mighty Networks takes a percentage of every transaction on several of its plans, on top of a monthly subscription fee. Sell a $500 course to 200 people and watch thousands of dollars vanish before you ever see them.
• Kajabi removed its transaction fee on higher-tier plans, but those plans start at $199 per month and can run as high as $399 per month. You are paying a premium subscription just to avoid paying a percentage — and you are still paying Stripe on top of that.
• Teachable charges a 5% transaction fee on its basic plan. Upgrade to remove it and you are looking at $119 per month or more.
• Podia takes 8% on its free plan and 5% on its starter tier. The fee only disappears once you are paying $75 per month or more.

The pattern is clear: platforms either charge you a percentage of your revenue, charge you a steep monthly fee to avoid that percentage, or both. Either way, you are paying for the privilege of collecting money from your own customers.

The Real Cost: Let Us Do the Math

Percentages sound small in isolation. Five percent does not feel like much. But let us put real numbers to it.

Say you launch a course priced at $297. You promote it well, and 100 people enroll. That is $29,700 in gross revenue — a fantastic launch by any measure. Now apply a 5% platform transaction fee: $1,485 gone. That is money you earned, money your students paid, and money that goes straight to your platform instead of your bank account.

Scale that up to 500 students and the fee balloons to $7,425. Hit 1,000 students — a milestone most course creators dream about — and you are handing over $14,850. That is enough to hire a part-time team member, fund your next product launch, or invest in better production equipment.

And that is just one product. If you sell multiple courses, run paid events, and operate a membership community, those fees compound across every revenue stream, every month, all year long.

Here is a quick comparison for a creator doing $10,000 in monthly sales:

• Platform with 5% fee: $500 per month lost, $6,000 per year
• Platform with 8% fee: $800 per month lost, $9,600 per year
• Platform with 10% fee: $1,000 per month lost, $12,000 per year
• Communi (0% platform fee): $0 lost to the platform. You only pay Stripe processing.

The difference is not marginal. It is the difference between building a sustainable business and bleeding revenue to a middleman.

How Communi's Model Works

Our approach is straightforward: Communi charges zero platform transaction fees on every sale you make. Courses, events, paid memberships — it does not matter. We do not take a cut.

The only fees you pay are Stripe's standard payment processing fees, which are approximately 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. Those fees go directly to Stripe for handling the credit card processing, fraud prevention, and payout infrastructure. Communi does not add anything on top.

To put that in perspective: on a $297 course sale, Stripe's processing fee is about $8.91. On a platform charging 5% plus Stripe, you would pay $8.91 to Stripe and $14.85 to the platform — a total of $23.76. With Communi, you pay $8.91. That is it.

We make our money through straightforward subscription pricing and lifetime deals — not by taxing your success. When you grow, we do not earn more. Your revenue is your revenue.

What This Means for Everything You Sell

Zero platform fees apply across every monetization feature in Communi. Here is what that looks like in practice:

• Courses: Sell your online courses at any price point. Whether it is a $47 mini-course or a $2,000 signature program, you keep every dollar minus Stripe processing. No per-sale fee, no revenue caps, no tier restrictions.
• Events: Host paid workshops, webinars, conferences, or masterclasses. Charge $25 or $500 per ticket — the platform fee is still zero. This is especially powerful for recurring events where fees would otherwise stack up month after month.
• Paid memberships: Run a subscription community at $29, $49, $99, or any price per month. With other platforms, monthly recurring fees eat into every single payment. With Communi, your MRR is your MRR.
• Bundles and upsells: Package courses with community access, stack event tickets with membership perks — however you structure your offers, the platform takes zero.

"I switched from a platform that was taking 5% of every sale. In my first quarter on Communi, I saved over $3,200 in platform fees alone. That money went straight back into creating better content for my members."

— Jordan M., online fitness community founder

Why This Matters More as You Scale

Here is the part that most platforms do not want you to think about: percentage-based fees get worse the more successful you become. A flat monthly subscription stays the same whether you earn $1,000 or $100,000. A percentage fee scales with your revenue — punishing you for growing.

Consider a community creator who starts small, earning $2,000 per month, and grows to $50,000 per month over two years. On a platform with a 5% transaction fee, here is what they would pay in platform fees alone:

• Month 1: $100 in fees
• Month 12: $1,250 in fees (at $25,000/mo revenue)
• Month 24: $2,500 in fees (at $50,000/mo revenue)
• Cumulative over 24 months: roughly $37,500 in platform fees

That is $37,500 that could have gone toward hiring, marketing, product development, or simply taking home as profit. With Communi, that number is zero.

This is why our zero-fee model is not just a nice-to-have perk for small creators. It is a structural advantage that becomes more valuable the larger your business grows. The creators who benefit the most are the ones doing the most volume — and those are exactly the creators who deserve to keep what they earn.

The Bigger Picture: Aligning Incentives

There is a philosophical reason we chose this model, and it goes beyond just saving you money. When a platform charges transaction fees, its financial incentive is misaligned with yours. The platform profits when you sell more — but it also profits when you charge higher prices, even if lower prices would serve your audience better. The platform has no reason to help you optimize for customer value; it only cares about gross transaction volume.

With a flat subscription model and zero transaction fees, our incentive is simple: keep you as a happy, long-term customer. We succeed when you succeed enough to keep using Communi. We do not succeed more when you charge $997 instead of $297. That means every feature we build, every improvement we ship, is designed to make your community better — not to inflate your average order value so we can collect a bigger cut.

This alignment matters. It shapes our product roadmap, our support priorities, and the way we think about the creator-platform relationship. You are our customer, not our revenue source.

What About Stripe Fees?

We want to be transparent about this: you will still pay Stripe's standard processing fee of approximately 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. This is the fee that every payment processor charges for handling credit card transactions. It covers card network fees, fraud detection, chargeback protection, and payout infrastructure.

Stripe's fee is not something Communi controls or profits from. It goes directly to Stripe. Every platform that accepts credit cards pays this fee (or one very similar to it) — the difference is whether the platform stacks its own fee on top. We do not.

If you already use Stripe for other parts of your business, you will recognize these fees. They are industry-standard, predictable, and transparent. And if your Stripe account qualifies for volume-based discounts at higher processing levels, those savings are yours to keep as well.

Ready to Keep What You Earn?

Every dollar matters when you are building a business around your expertise. Platform transaction fees are not a minor inconvenience — they are a real cost that compounds over time and scales against you as you grow. Communi eliminates that cost entirely.

Zero platform transaction fees on courses. Zero on events. Zero on memberships. You pay Stripe for processing and Communi for the platform. That is the entire cost structure, and it is one that works in your favor whether you are earning your first $100 or your first $100,000.

If you are currently on a platform that takes a percentage of your sales, we would encourage you to run the numbers. Add up what you have paid in transaction fees over the last six months. Then imagine putting that money back into your business — or your pocket. That is what switching to Communi looks like.