Mighty Networks sells 4 self-serve plans, between $29 and $354 a month on annual billing, plus a custom Mighty Pro tier. Its pricing page shows cards for only 2 of those 4. Every plan also takes a cut of each sale, 5% on the cheapest down to 0.5% on the largest, charged on top of Stripe’s card fee.
Try to answer “what will this cost me” from the Mighty Networks pricing page and you get a number that is missing 2 of its plans. The help docs give a different answer. Google’s AI summary gives a third.
One of the guides ranking on page 1 for this exact term says Mighty Networks takes no transaction fee at all. That is wrong on every plan, and the fee is the part that decides which tier is actually cheapest for you.
So the sensible thing is to skip the reviews and read Mighty’s own pages: every plan page, and every help doc that mentions money. That is what this post is. All 4 self-serve plans with their real annual totals, the fee on each one, what a $48 membership leaves in your account, and the revenue level where the next tier up costs less.
Key Takeaways
- Mighty Networks has 4 self-serve plans, and the pricing page only shows 2 of them. Explore and Growth exist, are documented, and have live pages, but neither gets a card.
- The cheapest plan takes the biggest cut. Explore is $350 a year and 5% per sale. Growth is $4,250 a year and 0.5%. The fee runs backwards to the price.
- The 14-day free trial is a Growth trial, and it carries a 5% transaction fee. Sell during your trial and Mighty Networks takes 5% of it.
- Mighty’s percentage sits on top of Stripe, not instead of it. On a $48 membership you pay Mighty’s cut and then Stripe’s 2.9% plus 30 cents.
- Where your member signs up changes your payout. An iOS app purchase costs 15% to Apple and lands in your account 8 to 12 weeks later.
What Mighty Networks costs on every plan
Mighty Networks runs 4 self-serve plans plus a custom Mighty Pro tier, and 2 of the 4 have no card on the pricing page. Launch and Scale get cards. Explore and Growth do not, though both have their own live plan pages and both are named in Mighty’s own help docs as current options you can choose after your trial.
Paying a percentage of every sale is one of the quiet profit leaks I see most often in creator businesses. If you want the other 4, grab the free 5-day Online Selling Mistakes Challenge. 1 short email a day, no cost.
Explore gets no card and no footer link. The whole pricing page names it twice: once in a dropdown inside the return-on-investment calculator, and once in an FAQ answer about a private group for hosts. Growth at least gets a footer link to its own page.
Explore is $350 a year and takes 5% of every sale, while Growth is $4,250 a year and takes 0.5%, and neither has a card on the pricing page.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual total | Per month on annual | Cut of each sale | Card on the pricing page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Explore | $35 | $350 | $29 | 5% | No |
| Launch | $95 | $950 | $79 | 2% | Yes |
| Scale | $215 | $2,150 | $179 | 1% | Yes |
| Growth | Not offered | $4,250 | $354 | 0.5% | No |
| Mighty Pro | Custom | Custom | Custom | 0.5% | Yes |
A few things worth pulling out of that table.
The annual price is 10 monthly payments, not 12. Mighty prints “2 months free” above the billing toggle and it means it.
Launch is $95 a month or $950 for the year. Scale is $215 a month or $2,150. Explore is $35 a month or $350.
Do not multiply the per-month figure by 12. The $79 you see on the Launch card is $950 divided by 12, rounded down. Multiply $79 back out and you get $948, which is $2 short of the real price. Same on every tier.
Growth has no monthly option. Mighty publishes a single annual figure for it, $4,250 a year, and its own calculator card says “Billed annually” where the other 3 plans say “2 months free when you buy annually”.
The Explore plan Mighty does not put on a card
The Explore Plan is $350 a year, or $35 a month if you pay monthly, and it is the cheapest way to run a paid community on Mighty Networks. Mighty describes it as the plan for testing an idea, and it comes with real limits: 1 host and 1 moderator, Spaces that support a single feature rather than several, limited admin tools and automation, and no advanced integrations. You still get unlimited members, unlimited Spaces, your own ad-free site, and the ability to charge for access.
That is the calculator on Mighty’s own pricing page, with the plan dropdown open on Explore. Scroll up from there and you will find no card for it.
The catch is the fee. Explore carries a 5% transaction fee, which is 2.5 times the Launch rate and 10 times the Growth rate. The cheapest sticker price on the list is attached to the most expensive cut.
The transaction fee, and how it stacks on Stripe
Mighty Networks charges a percentage of every payment your members make, on top of what Stripe charges, and the rate depends on your plan. Mighty’s own help doc lists 5 rates: 5% on Explore, 2% on Launch, 1% on Scale, 0.50% on Growth, and 5% during the Growth free trial.
The pricing page’s comparison table repeats 2 of those, for Launch and Scale, then adds a figure the fee doc never states at all: 0.5% for Mighty Pro. Explore and Growth get no column there, so their rates live only in the help doc.
Mighty puts it plainly: the fee is “automatically deducted from your earnings in Stripe” and “is not charged to your members”. It comes out of your side.
What Stripe adds on top
Stripe’s published rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful transaction for domestic cards, confirmed on Stripe’s own pricing page, with another 1.5% for international cards and 1% more if a currency conversion is needed. Mighty’s help doc describes the same charge more loosely, as “typically between 2.5% and 5% per transaction”.
Stripe is also the only option. Mighty’s own words: “We do not currently support PayPal or other payment processors.” Several guides on page 1 mention PayPal as though it works.
On a $48 monthly membership, which is the average price Mighty says its hosts charge, Explore leaves you $43.91 and Growth leaves you $46.07, and taking the payment through Mighty’s iOS app leaves you $40.80 whichever plan you are on.
| Plan | Mighty’s cut | Stripe’s cut | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explore | $2.40 | $1.69 | $43.91 |
| Launch | $0.96 | $1.69 | $45.35 |
| Scale | $0.48 | $1.69 | $45.83 |
| Growth | $0.24 | $1.69 | $46.07 |
| Any plan, bought in the iOS app | $0.00 | $0.00 | $40.80 |
The gap between the best and worst web rate is $2.16 a month per member. Across 100 members that is $2,592 a year, which is more than the whole Scale subscription.
Your free trial is not fee free
The 14-day free trial charges 5% on anything you sell during it. Mighty’s fee doc lists “Growth Free Trial” as its own line at 5%.
Its pricing page FAQ confirms which plan you land on: “Every free trial of a Mighty Network is on our Growth Plan.” No credit card needed.
That combination is easy to miss. You are handed the most expensive plan for free, at the highest fee rate on the list, during the exact 2 weeks you are most likely to run a founding-member launch. Sell $3,000 of memberships in your trial and $150 of it goes to Mighty Networks before Stripe has taken its share.
The iOS route costs more and pays out much later
A membership bought inside the Mighty Networks iOS app costs you 15% to Apple, and Mighty adds no fee of its own there and Stripe takes nothing. Apple publishes its reduced App Store commission at 15% for developers under $1 million in prior-year proceeds.
15% is worse than any web combination on the list. On Launch you keep $45.35 from a web payment and $40.80 from the same payment in the app, a difference of $4.55 a month, or $54.60 a year for every member who happens to join on their phone.
Mighty’s payout doc adds a long delay on top. It says iOS payments “take 8-12 weeks to process and typically arrive about one month behind the current date”, and your first income report lands 8 to 12 weeks after you set up your first paid plan. Launch a community in March, take app payments, and you are not seeing that money in March.
Does Mighty Networks have a free plan
Mighty Networks has no free plan you can sign up for, and its own documentation disagrees with itself about whether one still exists at all. The free-trial help page says that if your trial lapses “your Mighty Network will move to our Free Plan”, then lists what that plan includes: 1 host and 1 moderator, unlimited Spaces and members, 1 custom landing page, and 10 GB of storage. The Legacy Plans page lists “Free Plan” among plans that are “no longer available”.
A host writing in r/CommunityManager described the free tier being cut in a way that broke a half-built community, adding that “even on the free plan, they still take a 2% fee on all payments”. Their conclusion was blunt: building on a platform that can raise prices 5 to 100 times overnight felt too risky.
Budget for a paid plan. The cheapest real entry point is Explore at $350 a year.
Which plan is actually cheapest for you
The cheapest Mighty Networks plan for you depends entirely on how much you sell, because the subscription and the transaction fee move in opposite directions. A low subscription with a 5% cut beats a high subscription with a 0.5% cut right up until it does not, and the switchover points are easy to calculate because Stripe’s charge is identical on every plan and cancels out.
On annual billing, the numbers land here:
- Explore beats Launch below $20,000 a year in member payments. That is roughly 35 members at $48 a month.
- Launch beats Scale below $120,000 a year. Roughly 208 members.
- Scale beats Growth below $420,000 a year. Roughly 729 members.
Most solo community hosts never reach the first line, let alone the third. If your community brings in less than $20,000 a year, the plan Mighty does not show you is the cheapest one it sells.
At 100 members paying $48 a month, Launch costs $4,132 for the year, Scale costs $4,756, Explore costs $5,260 and Growth costs $6,568.
| Plan | Subscription | Mighty’s cut | Stripe’s cut | Total for the year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Explore | $350 | $2,880 | $2,030 | $5,260 |
| Launch | $950 | $1,152 | $2,030 | $4,132 |
| Scale | $2,150 | $576 | $2,030 | $4,756 |
| Growth | $4,250 | $288 | $2,030 | $6,568 |
Notice that the most expensive plan costs 59% more than the cheapest one at that size, and buys you nothing extra in fee savings that comes close to covering the gap.
There is a pull toward the bigger tier anyway, and I know it well. I once bought 54 software lifetime deals through AppSumo and still had not used 90% of them years later.
What got me out of it was a rule I now apply to every tool I buy: only if I need it now or within the next 6 months. The same rule works on a pricing page. Advanced automations and single sign-on are real features, and they are worth nothing to a community of 40 people.
What you get at each tier
Every Mighty Networks plan includes unlimited members, unlimited Spaces, an ad-free site of your own, native iOS and Android apps, direct messaging, chat, and the ability to charge in hundreds of currencies. The differences are capacity and automation, not core features.
Explore keeps 1 host and 1 moderator, and its Spaces carry a single feature each. Launch opens that up to 3 hosts and 10 moderators, adds courses and events, 200 GB of storage, 20 livestreaming hours a month with 100 viewers per stream, a custom domain, and analytics.
Scale moves to 5 hosts and 15 moderators, 500 GB, 30 streaming hours with 200 viewers, plus the Kit and Zapier integrations and 5,000 admin API requests a month. Growth reaches 10 hosts and 100 moderators, 1 TB, 40 streaming hours with 1,000 attendees, single sign-on, white-label email and the headless API.
Courses arrive at Launch, not at Explore. If you are selling a course rather than a membership, $350 a year is not your entry price.
How Mighty Networks pricing compares to Circle and Skool
Mighty Networks sits between Skool and Circle on price, and all 3 charge a percentage on top of the subscription. The pattern across all of them is the same, and it is worth seeing in one place: the cheaper the plan, the bigger the cut.
Skool’s cheapest plan is $9 a month and takes 10% of each sale, Mighty Networks’ cheapest works out at about $29 a month and takes 5%, and Circle’s cheapest is $89 a month and takes 2%.
| Platform | Cheapest paid plan | Cut of each sale | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skool | Hobby, $9 a month | 10% | 14 days |
| Mighty Networks | Explore, $350 a year | 5% | 14 days, no card |
| Circle | Professional, $89 a month on annual billing | 2% | 14 days |
Those 3 numbers are not on the same billing basis. Skool’s $9 is a straight monthly price, Circle’s $89 is the per-month rate you get when you pay a year up front, and Explore is $350 for the whole year, which works out at about $29 a month.
Circle’s percentage stacks on Stripe the same way Mighty’s does, and Circle’s fee ladder is 2%, 1% and 0.5% across its 3 tiers, which matches Mighty’s Launch, Scale and Mighty Pro exactly. Skool works differently, and its own help pages add 30 cents per transaction that its pricing page leaves out. We broke that down in full in Skool’s pricing.
All 6 of the main community tools, priced against the same membership, sit in what community platforms really cost.
What page 1 of Google says Mighty Networks costs
Most of the guides ranking for this term are quoting prices Mighty retired, and 1 of them says there is no transaction fee at all. CoursePlatformsReview, a page-1 result, answers its own FAQ this way: “Are there any additional processing fees? No. Mighty Networks doesn’t take any transaction fees on top of what the payment gateway charges (Stripe).”
Every plan has a fee, and Mighty publishes them itself. A reader who trusts that answer will price a whole year of memberships wrong.
The retired names show up everywhere because Mighty renamed its lineup. Its Legacy Plans page lists Community, Courses, Business, Brand, Indie, Starter, Creator and Free as no longer available. A page-1 review still prices that old ladder as its main table: Community at $49, Courses at $119, Business at $219, Path-to-Pro at $360.
CoursePlatformsReview goes further and treats “$48 per month” as a plan name, when $48 is the average price Mighty says its hosts charge their own members. Even Ruzuku, which has the current table and openly explains the rebrand, still opens its summary with the retired range, and the summary is the part Google quotes.
Google’s own AI Overview does better and still misses the same thing everyone else does.
Read the 2 claims in that paragraph. Pricing “starts at $79 per month for the Launch plan” and fees range “from 0.5% to 2%”.
Neither survives contact with Mighty’s own pages. The entry price is $29 a month on Explore, and the fee range tops out at 5%. Google says as much on its own help pages: AI responses may include mistakes.
None of the 6 written guides I read mentions Explore or the $350 price. I checked each one by searching its full text.
Is Mighty Networks worth it, and who it fits
Mighty Networks is worth its price for a community-first business where members show up daily, and it is expensive for anyone whose main product is a course. The native mobile apps, the events, the livestreaming and the member directory are genuinely strong, and they are the reason people pick it over a cheaper tool.
It fits you if members talking to each other is the product, if you run cohorts or challenges on a schedule, and if enough of your revenue clears the fee. It fits badly if you sell one-off downloads, if you need PayPal, or if you want your money quickly and most of your members are on iPhones.
Disconnecting Stripe from Mighty Networks is not self-serve. Its own doc tells you to click Need Help and message the team, who will assist you with next steps. On the better side of the ledger, Mighty pays you directly through your own Stripe account rather than holding the money itself.
That question is worth settling before you move a paying audience anywhere, and who keeps your members if you leave works through it across 8 platforms.
If the plan is to teach rather than to host conversation, how to sell online courses covers the choice from the other end.
Alternatives if the pricing does not fit
The closest alternatives to Mighty Networks are Circle, Skool and Kajabi, and which one is cheaper depends on your revenue rather than on their sticker prices. Circle is the nearest match on features and sits above Mighty on price.
Skool is the cheapest entry at $9 a month and takes the biggest percentage. Kajabi is a bigger all-in-one that adds courses, email and funnels, and we pulled apart its tiers in Kajabi’s undrawn Starter tier.
Mighty Networks has no built-in paid affiliate program. It gives every plan a free member referral program, and for commission-based affiliates it hands off to Rootabl or Rewardful, which only connect from the Scale plan up.
Those integrations credit web purchases only, so an affiliate whose referral buys inside the app earns nothing. If paying affiliates is part of the plan, you are adding a separate tool on top, and what affiliate software actually costs puts live prices on 8 of them.
If you landed here selling one-off digital products rather than running a community, the cheaper category is a plain checkout tool like Gumroad, Payhip or CartMango, none of which hosts a community.
FAQ
How much does Mighty Networks cost?
Mighty Networks costs $350 a year on Explore, $950 on Launch, $2,150 on Scale and $4,250 on Growth, with Mighty Pro quoted individually. Paid monthly, Launch is $95 and Scale is $215. Every plan also takes a percentage of each sale, from 5% down to 0.5%, and Stripe charges its own 2.9% plus 30 cents on top.
Does Mighty Networks have a free version?
Mighty Networks has a 14-day free trial with no credit card, and no free plan you can sign up for. Its own docs conflict: the trial page says a lapsed trial drops you onto a Free Plan, while the Legacy Plans page lists Free Plan as no longer available. Anything you sell during the trial carries a 5% fee.
Does Mighty Networks charge transaction fees?
Yes, on every plan. The rates are 5% on Explore, 2% on Launch, 1% on Scale and 0.50% on Growth, plus 5% during the Growth free trial. The fee comes out of your Stripe earnings rather than being added to your member’s bill, and it sits on top of Stripe’s own processing charge.
Is Mighty Networks good?
Mighty Networks is strong on community and mobile, and weaker as a course platform. Members get real iOS and Android apps, live events and a searchable directory, which is why community-first businesses like it. Hosts on Reddit have pushed back hard on price changes, and the transaction fee makes it expensive at low revenue.
What are some alternatives to Mighty Networks?
Circle is the closest match on features, from $89 a month with a 2% fee. Skool is the cheapest entry at $9 a month, with a 10% cut. Kajabi covers courses, email and funnels in 1 subscription. Which is cheapest depends on your revenue, because every one of them mixes a subscription with a percentage.
What to do if you are not running a community
If you are selling one-off downloads rather than running a community, none of these plans is built for what you are doing. Every number in Mighty Networks pricing is put together the same way: a subscription you can see, plus a percentage you have to go looking for, on top of a processor fee that never goes away.
On a community platform that trade is often worth making, because the conversation between your members is the thing people are paying for. It is a much poorer deal when all you need is to take a payment for a file.
Selling an ebook, a template or a preset pack needs a checkout, not a community platform, and it does not need to cost a slice of every sale. CartMango is built for that job, it takes no cut of your sales on any plan, and it is free until October 2026 and then $10 to $30 a year. CartMango does not host courses or a community yet, and both of those arrive on the $30 a year plan in October 2026.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
Related Reading
If Mighty Networks pricing sent you looking at the rest of the category, start here.
- Community platform for creators: the real cost of Skool, Circle, Mighty Networks, Heartbeat, Patreon and Discord
- Membership site platform: 8 platforms priced at 100 members, and who keeps your subscribers if you leave
- Skool pricing: the 30 cents and the 3.9% rate its pricing page leaves out
- Podia pricing: the 5% Mover fee and the metered email ladder hidden behind a dropdown