Paid communities and courses

The claim

“it’s pretty crazy seeing how whop groups on legit anything printing six figures per month

for example these dudes pulling six figures telling grown men when to buy charizard packs”

@maxxmalist, 8 December 2025, 8,836 views¹. (“Charizard packs” are packs of Pokémon trading cards.)

This page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted. The scheme is to open a group on Skool or Whop and charge members a monthly fee²⁵. Another tweet, from a small account, says one Skool community owner earns over $280,000 a month, and adds a link to open a Skool account¹. We did not check any income figure in the tweets.

The sums

Fees are small. Skool costs $9 a month and keeps 10% of each payment, or $99 a month and keeps 2.9%, plus 30 cents per payment²³.

Income is price times paying members, less fees. On Skool’s $99 plan, if the owner brings every member and nobody is refunded (our estimate)²³:

A third-party tracker, profitable.app, follows 48,100 Skool communities; about 15,900 charge anything⁹. The median paid one (the middle one) charges $29 and has a “ceiling” of $1,202 a month: price times listed members, which the tracker calls “an upper bound”⁹. Added up, the ceilings are at least about 2.4 times what Skool says its communities earn (our estimate; Skool’s figure is undated and unaudited)⁹¹⁹. Real takings run well below the ceiling.

Members also cancel, and we found no measured rate.

What happens to most people who try

Neither platform publishes how its sellers do.

On Skool, 23,700 of the 48,100 tracked communities, free and paid together, have under 50 members⁹. Paid communities with fewer than 100 members have a median ceiling of $485 a month⁹.

On Whop, the third-party site Whoptrends estimated earnings for 191,654 products in February 2026 and saw no revenue for 87.8% of them²⁰. Among earners, the median was $74 a month, and the top 1% took 56.5% of the money²⁰. Its total is about a quarter of what Whop’s investor’s statement implies, and 87% of the products were created in 2025 or early 2026, so the 87.8% is an upper limit and the $74 is likely too low²⁰⁶¹.

We found no first-person account, with payment proof, from an ordinary Skool or Whop owner.

The upside

• Maker School (Skool). Its page lists 2,571 to 2,573 members at $184 a month¹¹. The $280,000 in the tweet is plausible but not verified: no payout record was found¹¹¹.
• Advise.so, verified. A community for marketers at $169 a month, on its own website, not Skool or Whop²⁷. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue from the payment processor, shows $21,112 a month from 209 subscribers²⁷. Its verified takings are 46% to 60% of price times subscribers (our estimate)²⁷. So the price-times-members ceilings on this page should be cut by half or more⁹¹⁹²⁷.
• DataExpert / TechCreator, verified. A data-engineering course business listed on the same site at $56,294 a month²⁶. Most other community entries we saw there showed a few thousand dollars a month or less²⁶.

Six-figure months exist, for a few hundred businesses out of several hundred thousand⁶⁹²⁰.

A realistic good result (our estimate; no data follows new owners): with an engaged following of a few thousand, or a real professional niche, 30 to 100 paying members at $29 to $49. Counted at 42% to 60% of price times members, that is roughly $350 to $2,900 a month⁹¹⁹²⁷.

What it takes to compete

• People who already listen, or a trade. Maker School’s owner wrote, the week it opened and with no proof shown, that he was already earning about $100,000 a month, with an automation agency among his income streams⁶⁰. By his own account he had about seven months of steady YouTube video by then⁶⁰⁶⁴. His channel now shows 538,000 subscribers; group members are about 0.5% of that (our estimate, one case)¹¹¹².
• Something specific to teach. Higher prices attach to narrow working skills, such as a Meta adverts coaching group at $249 a month with 668 members⁸.

To tell early (our judgment): do people already ask you for this? If Skool finds your members, it keeps 30% of what they pay by default³⁴. If you cannot find a few dozen payers among your own followers, the platform is unlikely to supply them.

Who else makes money from it

Skool is paid $9 or $99 a month by every owner, paying members or not². Whop earns on every payment and payout⁵. Skool pays people who refer new owners “40% of monthly recurring revenue for life”: $39 a month for each owner on the $99 plan, whether or not the group ever gains a member¹⁴⁴⁹.

By our collection’s labels, which we did not re-check, three of 12 tweets carry a platform sign-up link¹.

Nearly every page with figures on this subject, including two of the trackers we rely on, comes from a tool seller, a competing platform or a newsletter carrying a referral link⁹²⁰.