Online Community Website Examples: 7 Paid Groups and What Members Pay For

People pay to join online communities all the time, and rarely for the software. They pay to get answers from people who know more than they do, to learn a skill with others doing the same, or to be found by clients. The price only holds if the community gives them one of those things every week.

The seven sites below charge members in very different ways. There's a $5 sign-up fee, a $33 monthly group on Skool, a woodworking school where buying one course makes you a member, and a professional network that costs $2,700 a year. We opened every site and checked it on 3 October 2026. Prices come from each site's own join or pricing page, and we only looked at public pages.

At a glance

MetaFilter

MetaFilter has been going since 1999, and its About page calls it one of the longest-running online communities. Members post interesting links to the front page and talk about them underneath. Smaller sections cover questions, films and books, members' projects, music, jobs and meetups. The front page had three posts from that morning, the first with 19 comments.

Anyone can read for free. Posting costs a one-time US$5 through PayPal, and the sign-up page says the team will waive the fee for anyone who can't afford it. New members wait a week before they can start a front-page thread, and they have to comment in one first. Five dollars is little, but a banned spammer loses it.

The sign-up fee doesn't pay for the moderators. A small paid team moderates around the clock, and member donations pay for it. The funding page offers recurring gifts from $9 to $150 a quarter, or a one-off amount, and the homepage says 8,311 readers help fund the site. A nonprofit, the MetaFilter Community Foundation, runs it.

PatternReview

PatternReview.com has been helping home sewists since 2001. Members review patterns, machines, shops and classes, and the join page counts more than 600,000 members and 249,655 reviews. The forums are lively. On the contest board we opened, a T-shirt contest was running through October, the latest reply had come in that morning, and eight moderators were named at the top.

Basic membership is free and covers the forums and posting reviews. The paid Friends of PR membership costs $19.99 for six months or $34.95 a year. It adds private messages to any member, a daily digest, classified ads, advanced search, some free patterns and shop discounts.

Classes are sold separately. The beginner's jacket class we opened costs $49 for 12 videos that never expire, and students can ask the instructor questions. Every new member gets one free lesson. A pattern shop, sponsors and advertising sit around it, so the free forum supports several kinds of income.

Sams Landscape Painting School

Samuel Earp's painting school is a group on Skool, the hosted platform that puts a discussion feed, courses and a calendar in one place. Skool groups share the same tabs, Community, Classroom, Calendar, Members and Leaderboards, and you can see them on any public group. This one is private, so visitors only get the About page. It showed 605 members and a 5.0 rating from seven reviews.

The offer is a course path with a live class every week. The page lists lessons on painting fundamentals, designing a painting, lights, darks and colour mixing, and finishing a landscape in seven days, plus weekly live classes with replays. Members share their paintings in the group and get comments from other artists.

Membership costs $33 a month. The page also promoted a yearly plan at $199, normally $279, with the offer ending on 30 September. Skool prints how long each reviewer has kept paying, and one review read "Still a paying member after 29 months".

The Wood Whisperer Guild

Marc Spagnuolo has run The Wood Whisperer Guild since 2008, and the homepage says more than 30,000 woodworkers trust it. It sells over 80 video courses. Most are full projects, such as a table, a bench or a set of built-ins, with printable plans, cut lists and SketchUp models where they apply. Guest instructors teach some of them. New releases included a $119 trestle table course by Matthew Cremona.

Buy one course and you're a Guild member for good. The FAQ says there's no fee to stay a member. Members get a discussion under each lesson that the instructor reads, a private moderated forum, live Guild Meetings streamed on YouTube, vendor discounts and direct questions to Marc. Most courses also end with a certificate of completion.

Guild Stream is the cheaper door. It costs $19 a month or $199 a year and rotates two of Marc's courses each month. Stream members can't download lessons, but get 10% off any course they buy.

Editorial Freelancers Association

The Editorial Freelancers Association has served freelance editors and writers for more than 50 years. Clients see it through the member directory, which anyone can search without logging in. As well as name and location, a client can tick skills such as copyediting, indexing or sensitivity reading. They can also filter by genre, specialty, editing style, language and availability, or pick editors who welcome first-time authors.

Every member gets a listing they can edit, and the EFA's benefits page calls it one of the most powerful promotional tools a member has. Clients can also post work on the EFA Job List, which the homepage says reaches more than 4,000 editorial professionals. Members get 20% off classes and a library of free webinars. There are local chapters, affinity groups, forums and a Discord server, and the calendar had meetups set for 16 and 21 October.

Dues are yearly and depend on your career stage. Professional membership costs $164 a year or $299 for two years. Emerging professionals pay $119, students $29, and members in developing countries $79. There's a $2,500 lifetime option and a free Guest level for people who only want classes. Staff review new accounts and approve them within two business days.

Superpath

Superpath is a community for content marketers, and the paid part, Superpath Pro, lives in a private Slack. The homepage says the wider network has over 13,000 members and Pro is a smaller group of about 325. Pro members get more than 15 Slack channels, a monthly call with a matched peer, over 40 content marketing courses, member-led interest groups, monthly socials and challenges, and a tour of in-person meetups through 2026.

Pro costs $50 a month after a 30-day free trial. Visitors who aren't ready to pay can sign up to the free newsletter, which keeps them close until they are. The homepage also names a title sponsor each month, so companies pay to reach the same readers.

The website mostly explains the offer and takes payment. The talking happens in Slack and on calls.

Pavilion

Pavilion is a network for people in sales, marketing, customer success and revenue operations, which it groups together as GTM, short for go-to-market. You can't just pay and join. Every tier starts with an application, and the pricing page asks for your seniority and location before it shows a plan.

Associate membership, for managers and directors, costs $1,375 a year, shown as $115 a month billed annually. Executive is for VPs and above and costs $2,700 a year. A note says currency and rate differ by location. The top tier, Gold, is invitation-only. The page also links to a tool for asking your employer to pay.

Members get a directory of verified operators, matched one-to-one introductions, private groups by job function, local chapter events and more than 200 virtual events. There are live certified programs each quarter, an on-demand learning library, a members-only job board and salary benchmarks. Executives also get a legal hotline and pay negotiation coaching. The events page had sessions booked through October.

Build your own

These sites share a few habits. Members pay for something on top of access, such as classes, a directory listing, events or a matched peer. Most leave a free way in, whether that's free reading, a free tier, a free newsletter or a free guest level. And each gives people a date to come back to, like a weekly class, a monthly contest, a course rotation or an event calendar.

Most new paid groups start on a hosted platform, as Sams Landscape Painting School did. We checked the three best-known pricing pages today. Skool's Hobby plan was $9 a month plus a 10% fee on each sale, and Pro was $99 a month plus 2.9%. Circle's Professional plan was $89 a month on annual billing, with a 2% transaction fee on top of the card processor's fee. Mighty Networks' Launch plan was $95 a month billed monthly, or $79 a month billed yearly, with a 2% transaction fee.

Take 100 members at $20 a month, which is $2,000 coming in. Skool Hobby would cost about $209 a month, Skool Pro $157, Circle $129 and Mighty Networks $135 on monthly billing. Any separate card processing fees come on top. That's roughly $1,550 to $2,500 a year, and it grows as the group grows.

Those fees do pay for something. The platforms handle hosting, email alerts, live calls and, on Circle, mobile apps, with nothing for you to update.

Self-hosting on WordPress swaps the monthly fee for setup work. One route is plugins. BuddyPress adds profiles, groups and an activity stream, with more than 90,000 active installs on WordPress.org, and bbPress adds forums, with more than 100,000. You'd then add a membership plugin to charge for access and an LMS plugin for courses. We compared the main membership plugins separately, and our post on BuddyPress themes versus a community theme covers the community side. It works, but three or four plugins have to agree on who has paid.

The other route is a theme that already joins courses, payments and members together.

That's the approach our Learning Theme takes, and we checked its features against the released 12.0.42 build, not the sales page. You build each course from sections and lessons, and a lesson can be a video file, a YouTube or Vimeo embed, or text. Any lesson can be a free preview. Students mark lessons complete, see a progress bar and pick up where they left off. You can sell a course once, as a monthly or yearly subscription with an optional free trial, or give it away, and coupons work at checkout.

The community sits inside each course. Enrolled students get a Members tab and a Discussion tab, a group chat nobody else can see, and members can message each other privately. Students can rate and review courses, and other members can publish courses of their own, which you can charge them to list. There are 27 homepage designs across nine kinds of course and community site.

Several things the examples rely on are missing. There's no site-wide feed, forum or groups, so nothing like MetaFilter's front page or PatternReview's boards. There are no events, calendar or live classes, no points or leaderboards, and no quizzes, certificates or drip release. A site-wide membership plan doesn't open up courses, so one monthly price for everything isn't possible, and each course needs its own subscription. There's no member directory like the EFA's and no mobile app, and the course chat sends no alerts. Instructors who sell on your site aren't paid out by the theme. Stripe, PayPal and other gateways are separate plugins.

It fits a teacher selling a few courses who wants students talking inside each one. A forum-first community or a professional directory is closer to BuddyPress or a hosted platform. The licence is $99 once for unlimited sites you own, with six months of updates and then $49 per six months.

Final thoughts

If you teach a skill and want your first paying members, start with Sams Landscape Painting School. A weekly live class plus a course path is simple to launch on Skool and easy to move later. The Wood Whisperer Guild is the next stage, where the courses are the product and the forum is why buyers stick around.

For a group of professionals, read the EFA before Pavilion. A directory that clients actually search gives a freelancer a plain reason to renew, and pricing by career stage keeps students and newcomers in. Pavilion's model needs staff, programs and a full events calendar.

Superpath shows a free newsletter turning into a $50 a month group with very little website. MetaFilter and PatternReview are the forum route. A small sign-up fee keeps spam down, and once a free forum is big enough it can carry classes, a paid tier and sponsors.

FAQ

Sources

• MetaFilter sign-up page, funding page and About page.
• PatternReview membership options, jacket class and contest forum.
• Sams Landscape Painting School About page.
• The Wood Whisperer Guild FAQ and course catalogue.
• Editorial Freelancers Association membership levels, member benefits and member directory.
• Superpath homepage, with the Pro price and programme.
• Pavilion membership pricing and events.
• WordPress.org: BuddyPress and bbPress, with installs and update dates from the WordPress.org plugins API.
• PremiumPress Learning Theme. Features are described from the released 12.0.42 build.

Checked on 3 October 2026.