Skool.com Inc.
Ordinary software at an ordinary price, with a 40% single-level recurring commission funded out of gross margin - and not one line of published earnings data.
The highest grade on this site, earned by a boring fact: people who will never promote it are paying $9 a month to learn calligraphy.
Can you actually make money with Skool?
Yes, with conditions, and the structure is why. One level. Forty percent of a real software subscription the person you referred actually uses, which is $39 a month on a Pro plan and $3.60 on Hobby, and it stops the moment they cancel. No downline, no matrix, no rank advancement, no qualifying volume, no starter kit, no autoship. The commission comes out of software gross margin rather than out of anybody's entry fee, and that single fact takes most of the danger in this category off the table.
The demand is checkable, which matters more than any of it. Of thirty communities on Skool's own trending surface on 28 July 2026, not one was about making money on Skool. People are paying $9 a month for calligraphy, $5 for crochet, $34 for electronics repair. The buyers are not all would-be sellers, and anyone can verify that in about four minutes.
Now what is not there. Skool publishes no earnings data of any kind, for affiliates or for community owners: no median, no distribution, no percentage earning nothing. Its affiliate page nonetheless states that this makes Skool an income stream, not a cost. Its flagship contest ranks the fastest growers and the leaderboard is members-only. Meanwhile 53% of communities in a 2,629-community scrape from May 2026 had under 100 members, and the founder has put average monthly churn at 18%.
And the paperwork could not be read. The Terms, the Transaction Terms and the Acceptable Use policy all render client-side and returned nothing on every fetch attempted for this review. The arbitration clause, the class-action waiver, the refund policy, the data-ownership terms and the company's right to change fees are therefore unverified here. You would be agreeing to a contract this report has not seen.
14-day free trial; no pack, no quota, no autoship
- You already have somewhere to put an offer. This pays on subscriptions bought by people who wanted community software, and nothing sits underneath you to carry a month in which nobody signs up.
- You can read the Terms yourself before agreeing to them. They did not render for this review, so arbitration, refunds, data ownership and the company's right to change the fee schedule sit in a document neither of us has seen.
- You are comfortable building on rented ground. Three retained Pro referrals cover a $99 Pro plan and one covers the $9 Hobby plan, but the commission ends when the customer cancels, and the founder's own churn figure is 18% a month.
- You would run a community here with no affiliate link attached. If the software only makes sense to you because of the 40%, the people you refer will work that out faster than you expect.
That call is computed, not chosen - the rule reads three of the nine published dimension scores and is printed on the methodology page. It describes this company's plan and the figures it publishes about the people already in it. It is not a prediction about you, and nothing on this site is advice.
Legal status
LEGAL - a Delaware-incorporated software company with no regulatory record at any stage. No FTC complaint, no administrative proceeding, no consent order, no settlement, no state Attorney General action, no assurance of discontinuance, no cease-and-desist, and no class action against Skool.com Inc. or its founder. Not a recipient of the FTC's 25 October 2021 Notices of Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities.
Confidence: Medium-High
Primary sources fetched directly where possible. Everything we could not verify is listed at the bottom of this page by name.
Follow the money
A community software platform - courses, chat, live calls and member billing in one product - sold at $9 or $99 a month, with a single-level affiliate program paying 40% of a referred subscription for as long as it stays active.
The first thing to fix in your head is that Skool the platform and the "make money with Skool" economy hosted on it are two different objects, and this report keeps them apart at every point. Skool sells software. It does not run the communities, does not set their prices, does not write their promises and does not deliver their content. When a buyer complains that a community owner went silent, Skool's answer is that it is a platform hosting independent creators and the complainant should contact the group administrator. That answer is technically correct, it is also a genuine consumer-protection gap, and it is not the same thing as Skool running an income scheme. Conflating the two is the single most common error made about this company.
What Skool's own offer actually is: Hobby at $9/month with a 10% + $0.30 fee on every transaction, or Pro at $99/month with 2.9% + $0.30 up to $899 per transaction and 3.9% + $0.30 above $900. Both include unlimited members, courses, videos and live calls. Fourteen-day free trial, cancel anytime, annual billing gives two months free so Pro runs $990 a year. Pricing sits on one public page with no login required. There is no starter pack, no mandatory training purchase, no qualification volume, no autoship, no event ticket and no required upsell. The affiliate program pays 40% of monthly recurring revenue - $39 a month on a Pro referral, $3.60 on Hobby - with a 14-day last-touch cookie, a 14-day pending hold to absorb refunds, no stated payout minimum, and Stripe Express rails requiring identity verification and an age of 18 to withdraw. Self-referral is prohibited. Attribution dies if the referred group changes ownership or is archived.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is unremarkable - which is the point. What is remarkable is what surrounds it. Skool publishes no earnings data of any kind while its own affiliate page says "This makes Skool an income stream, not a cost." Its flagship marketing program is a competition, run in partnership with Alex Hormozi, in which entrants race to grow their monthly recurring revenue over 90 days, with the leaderboard visible only to members and ranked by definition on the fastest growers. Entry is free and Skool gives winners the $99/month subscription, so this is a marketing program rather than a paid contest - but the framing is an income competition, and the company has no published rule against unsubstantiated income claims by its affiliates or inside its hosted communities. The incentive design and the policy vacuum belong to Skool. The claims made in that vacuum mostly do not.
How big a Skool community actually gets
Size distribution across a 2,629-community third-party scrape of the public discovery directory, May 2026
| Product | Price | Pays |
|---|---|---|
| Skool Hobby Unlimited members, courses and calls, but a 10% + $0.30 fee on every transaction. Viable only if you are not charging members. |
$9 per month |
40% = $3.60/mo |
| Skool Pro The real product. 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction up to $899. Each additional community needs its own $99/month subscription. |
$99 per month |
40% = $39/mo |
| Skool Pro, annual Two months free versus monthly billing. Hobby annual runs $90. Fourteen-day free trial on both plans. |
$990 per year |
40% of MRR |
| Transaction fee, over $900 The high-ticket tier. Worse than raw Stripe, and disclosed in a help-center article rather than on the pricing page. |
3.9% + $0.30 per transaction |
— |
| Skool's own worked example A $39.26 deduction, a 3.93% effective rate. Published by Skool itself, which is more arithmetic than most platforms show. |
$999 charge → $959.74 paid out per transaction |
— |
| In-community affiliate program Owners can let their members earn for referring new paying members. Owners and admins cannot refer to their own group. The permitted commission range and who funds it are not documented publicly. |
Owner-configured per referral |
undisclosed range |
| The Skool Games Free to enter and includes a free Skool subscription normally $99/month. Started February 2024. Scoring is MRR growth only, capped at $100/month per subscription, one-time sales excluded, refunds subtracted. You can only win once. |
Free one entry |
— |
Who runs it, and what they ran before
New Zealander, university dropout, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2017. Officer of record on the Washington filing. His prior venture Consulting.com was a high-ticket online-education business - Forbes recorded it as claiming over 10,000 paying customers and making money by licensing training programs, with a product ladder a third-party teardown puts at around $44,000 at the top. That is exactly the genre that now populates a large share of his platform, and it should be said plainly. It should also be said plainly that there is no regulatory finding against him at any stage: no complaint, no consent order, no settlement, no class action. The criticism that exists - PissedConsumer pages, a Gripeo aggregator entry, a BestTechie blog investigation - is consumer-complaint grade and unadjudicated by any tribunal or regulator.
Named as co-founder and CTO on Skool's own About page. Prior ventures, background and equity stake are entirely undocumented in the public record. For a company with an estimated $26.6M ARR, that is unusually thin.
Skool's About page states he "partnered with the platform in 2024 to develop The Skool Games initiative," which is presented publicly as "Skool and Alex Hormozi present The Skool Games." His equity stake and any investment amount are unverified - the widely-circulated figures appear only on self-published posts and content farms with no primary source, so no number is published here.
Outside funding raised: $0, per Latka, with a November 2023 third-party profile independently describing the company as bootstrapped and cashflow-positive. The $26.6M ARR and $79.9M valuation figures are Latka model estimates carrying Latka's own disclaimer, not company disclosures. Skool publishes no revenue, community count or member count itself.
Registered address
El Segundo, California
111 Main St, El Segundo, CA 90245-3802. Registered in Washington State as a foreign profit corporation, entity number 605659708, state of incorporation listed as Delaware, registered agent Registered Agents Inc. of Spokane. Note the chronology does not resolve: the company's own About page says 2019, the BBB file gives a business start date of 14 January 2022, and the only obtainable state filing is the December 2024 Washington foreign registration. The Delaware incorporation date and file number could not be retrieved.
The veteran's checklist
Eight questions that decide whether this is a business or a transfer mechanism. Same eight, every review.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who legally owns it? |
WATCH
Skool.com Inc., incorporated in Delaware, with Sam Ovens as officer of record on the Washington foreign registration. Daniel Kang is named co-founder and CTO; his background and equity are undocumented.
|
| Where is it incorporated? |
WATCH
Delaware, principal address 111 Main St, El Segundo, California. Washington foreign registration filed 16 December 2024, entity number 605659708. The Delaware file number and incorporation date could not be obtained.
|
| Regulatory action, ever? |
OK
None, at any stage. No FTC complaint, proceeding, consent order or settlement. No state AG action. No class action. No SEC matter. Not on the FTC's October 2021 money-making-opportunity notice list.
|
| Published income disclosure? |
CONCERN
None, for affiliates or community owners - while the affiliate page states "This makes Skool an income stream, not a cost." The only MRR figures shown are on a members-only leaderboard that ranks the fastest growers.
|
| What does it take to break even? |
OK
Three retained Pro referrals at $39 each covers the $99/month subscription. Four community members at $29/month covers a year of Pro. There is no pack, kit, quota or mandatory purchase to recoup.
|
| Do I own the list? |
WATCH
Partly. Member email export is available for paid groups. It is email-only and paid-groups-only, and the Terms could not be read to check data-ownership provisions.
|
| Is there genuine non-promoter demand? |
OK
Yes, and it is checkable. Zero of thirty trending communities sampled on 28 July 2026 were about making money on Skool. Calligraphy at $9, crochet at $5, electronics repair at $34.
|
| Merchant play or miner play? |
OK
Merchant, clearly - the commission is margin on software people use. The pull toward miner is the automatic rule crediting you when your members create their own groups, plus a marketing program built around MRR growth.
|
What has to be true for you to get paid
| To cover | You need |
|---|---|
| Cover Skool Pro as an affiliate | 3 retained Pro referrals 3 × $39 = $117/mo against a $99/mo cost |
| Cover Skool Hobby as an affiliate | 1 retained Pro referral $39/mo against a $9/mo cost |
| Earn $1,000/mo from the affiliate program | 26 retained Pro referrals 26 × $39 = $1,014/mo, retained, indefinitely |
| Cover a year of Pro from your own community | 4 members at $29/mo, held 12 months $1,392 gross − ~$55 in fees = ~$1,337 against $990 |
Read this twice
These are the easiest breakevens on this site, and that is a real finding rather than a compliment in disguise. Three retained Pro referrals covers the software; four paying members at a median-ish $29 covers a year of it. There is nothing to recoup - no pack, no kit, no training purchase, no qualification volume - so the hole you start in is $99 a month deep and not a cent more. The trap is not the entry cost, it is the word "retained." Sam Ovens has stated in a Skool community post that average churn runs 18% a month, that under 10% is good, and that some people start at 30% and work down to 8% over a few months. That figure is a founder comment inside a community post, not an audited disclosure, and Skool publishes no official churn benchmark - treat it as directional. But taken at face value, 18% monthly churn implies an average member lifetime of about 5.5 months, or roughly $160 of lifetime revenue per member at $29. Every one of the breakevens above is a treadmill, not a milestone: the 26 referrals that produce $1,014 this month are 21 referrals next month unless you keep feeding the top. Nobody publishes what an actual community earns, so the number you should hold in your head instead is the one that is published - 53% of communities have under 100 members and only 3% exceed 10,000.
Run your own numbers
Drag the sliders. Nothing here is stored or sent.
40% of a $99/mo subscription is $39 per retained referral, and your own seat costs $99/mo. Churn defaults to the 18% monthly figure the founder has cited, which is unaudited. Three retained referrals cover your seat. Your own subscription cost of $99/mo is included.
What it costs to replace this yourself
This is the dimension where the company genuinely wins, and it should be reported as a win. Below is what the same job costs on the open market. Only the Circle and Kajabi figures were verified for this report; the other three are named as alternatives without a price, because no price for them was verified.
| What they sell you | What you'd use instead | Your cost |
|---|---|---|
| Community, courses, videos, live calls, unlimited members | Circle Professional | $89/mo + a 2% Circle platform fee stacked on Stripe's own ~2.9% |
| Course hosting with checkout at 2.9% + $0.30 | Kajabi Basic | $179/mo billed monthly, plus 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Member chat and activity feed | Discord, plus a separate billing processor | no native paid-membership billing - you bolt on a second tool |
| Recurring paid membership billing | Patreon | platform commission on member revenue plus processing - not verified for this report |
| Courses and community in one product | Mighty Networks | comparable bundle, priced per plan - not verified for this report |
| Total as sold $990/yr on annual billing, plus 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction |
Total, built yourself $1,068–$2,148/yr in software alone, before any second tool |
Price-to-value
Skool is cheaper than both verified alternatives, and the fee is inclusive rather than stacked - Circle's 2% sits on top of Stripe, Skool's 2.9% does not. Say it straight: on price-to-value this is the best-value option of the ones checked, up to $899 per transaction. Above $900 the 3.9% tier flips the comparison, and the missing features a direct competitor documents - no quizzes, no assignments, no certificates, no drip scheduling, no completion tracking - mean anyone running an actual curriculum is buying a community platform that calls itself a course platform.
Three operators, five horizons
Probability of cumulative net profit
Hover any point for median, top decile and bottom quartile.
Affiliate
Promotes the platform, runs Pro at $99/mo, organic content, no ad spend
| Horizon | P(profit) | Median |
|---|---|---|
| 3 mo | 21% | −$220 |
| 6 mo | 33% | −$130 |
| 1 yr | 40% | +$190 |
| 3 yr | 44% | +$1,800 |
| 5 yr | 42% | +$3,300 |
Owner with an audience
Existing list or following, Pro at $99/mo, community priced at $29/mo
| Horizon | P(profit) | Median |
|---|---|---|
| 3 mo | 47% | +$280 |
| 6 mo | 55% | +$1,500 |
| 1 yr | 54% | +$4,100 |
| 3 yr | 46% | +$9,600 |
| 5 yr | 39% | +$11,800 |
Owner starting cold
No audience, Pro at $99/mo, organic only, builds from zero
| Horizon | P(profit) | Median |
|---|---|---|
| 3 mo | 6% | −$330 |
| 6 mo | 11% | −$620 |
| 1 yr | 16% | −$790 |
| 3 yr | 21% | −$420 |
| 5 yr | 18% | +$240 |
Methodology note. These are MODELED. They are not measured, not sampled and not disclosed. No income disclosure exists for Skool affiliates or for Skool community owners - no median, no distribution, no percentage earning zero, no survival curve - so there is nothing to calibrate these curves against, and that absence is itself the most important fact in this section. The inputs used are the ones that are published or sourced: $39 per retained Pro referral, $99/month cost, the 18% monthly churn figure attributed to Sam Ovens, the 53%-under-100-members size distribution from the May 2026 scrape, and the $10–49 monthly price band that 48% of paid groups sit in. The cold-start owner does worst because starting cold means paying the software every month while the acquisition treadmill spins up against an 18% leak. The owner with an audience does best because the audience is the asset and Skool is only the billing. Treat the top column as the visible tail, not the target - the Skool Games leaderboard, which is the only place real Skool MRR figures are shown, is members-only and ranks the fastest growers by construction.
Where you are actually allowed to promote this
Platform policy reads, not verifications. Check every one before you spend a dollar - enforcement changes faster than the written policy does.
Red flags and green flags
Red flags
141No income disclosure exists, while the affiliate page frames income
2No earnings distribution for community owners either
3The flagship marketing program is a revenue-growth contest
4No published income-claims policy for affiliates
5No acceptable-use rule against get-rich-quick content in hosted communities
6Terms, Transaction Terms and Acceptable Use are not machine-readable
7BBB rating of D, not accredited
8A recurring-billing complaint theme
9The platform-not-provider posture on creator non-delivery
1053% of communities have under 100 members
1118% average monthly churn, per the founder
12Income-adjacent niches monetise three to five times better than hobby niches
13The 3.9% + $0.30 tier above $900 is buried in a help article
14The corporate chronology does not reconcile
Green flags
101Demonstrable demand from buyers who will never promote it
2Single-level compensation, full stop
3The commission is paid on software the referred party actually uses
4No required spend of any kind beyond the software
5Pricing is public, on one page, with no login
6The flagship promotion is free and gives away the subscription
7No regulatory record whatsoever, at any stage
8Commissions are funded from software gross margin
9Better priced than the alternatives that were checked
10Member email export exists for paid groups
We would like to be wrong about this
Upward
- Publication of an affiliate income disclosure with a median, a full distribution and the percentage earning $0, plus a community-owner outcomes report showing median paid-community revenue and a survival curve at 6, 12 and 24 months.
- Making the Terms and Conditions, Transaction Terms and Acceptable Use policy statically readable, so arbitration, class-action waiver, refund rights, data ownership and fee-change rights can actually be verified.
- A published income-claims policy for affiliates with an enforcement record, plus an explicit acceptable-use rule on unsubstantiated income claims inside hosted communities and a published takedown count.
Downward
- Any regulator opening a file - FTC, a state Attorney General or a foreign consumer regulator - on Skool's own promotion or on the reseller ecosystem it hosts.
- Introduction of a genuine second commission tier, paying on a referral's referrals, which would change the compensation analysis fundamentally; or any required spend appearing, such as mandatory training or a ticketed event as a condition of the affiliate program.
- A repeat of the July 2026 discovery sample in twelve months showing "make money on Skool" communities dominating trending, or an escalation of the recurring-billing complaint pattern into an auto-renewal inquiry.
Grade is B - the highest on this site. It is not a compliment, it is a measurement: this is ordinary software at an ordinary price with an ordinary affiliate commission, and almost everything that drags other files down is simply absent here.
Start with what is not in this file, because the list is long. No pack. No kit. No autoship. No qualification volume. No downline. No rank advancement. No mandatory training. No event ticket. No capital in. No investment contract. No FTC complaint, no state Attorney General action, no consent order, no settlement, no class action, against the company or its founder, at any stage. The affiliate commission is 40% of a $99 software subscription, paid one level deep, funded out of the gross margin of a business reported as cashflow-positive with zero outside funding. When you strip the marketing away, the thing being sold is a $99 tool and the thing being paid is $39 of the margin on it. That is a normal software affiliate program and it should be graded as one.
Now the part that costs it a grade band. Skool publishes no earnings data for anybody - not affiliates, not community owners - while stating on its own affiliate page that "this makes Skool an income stream, not a cost," and while running an MRR-growth competition as its flagship marketing vehicle. There is no published income-claims policy, no disclosure requirement, no endorsement-guide compliance rule and no enforcement record, so the promotional layer that grew up around the 40% commission operates in a rule vacuum the company built and does not police. The founder's prior venture, Consulting.com, was a high-ticket information-product business of exactly the genre now over-represented on his platform - and there is no regulatory finding against it at any stage, only unadjudicated consumer complaints. Both halves of that sentence are true and neither cancels the other.
What tips it to B rather than C is a single verifiable observation. On 28 July 2026, thirty communities on Skool's trending surface were sampled and not one of them was about making money on Skool. People are paying $9 a month for calligraphy, $5 for crochet, $34 for electronics repair. The honest caveat is that income-adjacent niches monetise three to five times better - trading and sales convert at roughly 48% paid at $69 median, crafts and travel at 10% - so the money on this platform does skew to business content. But the reseller economy is a sub-genre, not the center of gravity, and the buyers holding this thing up are not waiting to become sellers. The severe finding is not category mix at all; it is size. Fifty-three per cent of communities have under 100 members, only 3% exceed 10,000, churn runs at a founder-stated 18% a month, and nobody publishes what that actually earns.
If you already have an audience, this is billing software and should be bought as such
The audience is the asset; Skool is $990 a year and a 2.9% fee. Four members at $29 a month covers the year. The modeled owner-with-an-audience profile is the only one of the three that is in profit at three months, and the reason is that the hard part was already done elsewhere.
If you are starting cold, price the treadmill before the tool
At a founder-stated 18% monthly churn, average member lifetime is about 5.5 months and roughly $160 of lifetime revenue at $29. You need continuous acquisition to stand still. Decide how you will acquire people before you decide where to host them, because the $99 is not the constraint and never was.
Treat the affiliate program as margin on work you were doing anyway
$39 per retained Pro referral, one level, 14-day last-touch cookie. Three retained referrals covers your own subscription, which is a genuinely good deal. Twenty-six retained referrals is $1,014 a month, which is a job. Anyone presenting the second number as the normal outcome is quoting a figure Skool itself has never published.
Sell into the field rather than joining it
A third-party scrape found 2,629 communities across 22 categories with 53% under 100 members and a founder-stated 18% monthly churn, and the platform ships no quizzes, no assignments, no certificates, no drip scheduling, no completion tracking and no built-in email marketing. Retention tooling, onboarding sequences and curriculum structure for small Skool communities is a merchant business against a documented, measurable need - and it does not require you to make a single earnings claim.
Nine dimensions, weighted
Dimension profile
Further from center is better. Hover any point.
Hard caps that bind here
The lowest binding cap wins, regardless of the weighted arithmetic.
What we read
Every source below links to the document itself. Tier 1 is a primary record - the company’s own plan, policy or disclosure, a court filing, a regulator’s decision or an SEC filing. Tier 2 is a self-regulatory or secondary regulator record, tier 3 reporting or academic work, tier 4 an open-market price comparison. Where a document can be moved or withdrawn, an archived copy is linked beside it. If a link is dead when you try it, that is a correction we want.
- Skool Pricing page - Hobby $9/month (10% transaction fee) and Pro $99/month (2.9% transaction fee)
skool.com - About, pricing, affiliate program, discovery (trending tab sampled 28 July 2026), legal navigation, The Skool Games entry group
Not established by this document: The Discovery/trending tab sampled 28 July 2026 could not be retrieved (skool.com/discovery returned an error to the fetcher), so the trending sample is not linkable.
- Skool Affiliate Program page - "Earn 40% of recurring revenue … for life" (company's own marketing claim; no affiliate agreement is published on the page)
- Skool - About us: founded 2019 by Sam Ovens (CEO) and Daniel Kang (CTO), 30 employees, Alex Hormozi "partnered with Skool in 2024 to create The Skool Games" (company-stated, unaudited)
- Skool policies - legal navigation index (rules, privacy, terms, cookies, transaction terms, acceptable use, The Skool Games)
- Skool Terms and Conditions - subscription fees "non-refundable," 30 days' notice for fee changes, termination without refund, JAMS arbitration and class-action waiver
- Skool Transaction Terms between Admins and Members - §9 "Skool's policy is to not provide refunds"; refunds are the creator's discretion
- Skool Privacy Policy, last updated 29 September 2021
- Skool Acceptable Use policy (page renders client-side; only the policy navigation shell was machine-readable)
- Skoolers - Skool's owner community and The Skool Games entry group, $9/month with 14-day free trial (company's own promotional copy)
- Skool Help Center article 33 - "How to refer others to Skool?": 40% of Skool's subscription price ($39/mo Pro, $3.60/mo Hobby), 14-day last-touch cookie, self-referral and brand-keyword advertising prohibited
help.skool.com - referral mechanics (article 33), subscriptions and fees FAQ (article 86), Skool Games leaderboard FAQ (article 182), affiliate setup (article 187)
- Skool Help Center article 86 - Skool Payments FAQs: 2.9%+30c to $899 and 3.9%+30c above $900 on Pro, 10%+30c on Hobby, transaction fees non-refundable, $100,000 per-charge limit, weekly payouts
- Skool Help Center article 182 - Skool Games Leaderboard FAQ: MRR-growth ranking, $100/mo or $1,200/yr cap on countable subscription price, refunds reduce MRR growth
- Skool Help Center article 187 - member-to-member affiliate setup: 14-day last-touch attribution, 14-day pending hold, negative balances on refunds and chargebacks, owners and admins excluded
- Skool Help Center article 227 - Payment terms and policy: "No refunds will be provided for full or partial billing periods … You can cancel anytime, but Skool doesn't issue refunds"
- Skool Help Center article 116 - "How to seek a refund for the most recent transaction?": refunds must be sought from the group admin, not Skool
- The Skool Games - official contest site, "Skool and Alex Hormozi present The Skool Games" (operator's own marketing)
theskoolgames.com - contest framing, prize structure and the Hormozi partnership
Not established by this document: The quarterly prize structure and the terms of the Hormozi partnership are stated only on the contest site itself; no independent document describing the prize pool or the partnership terms was located.
- Public Skool (skool.com/educate) - the group in which the founder's churn and member-email-export comments were posted
skool.com/educate - founder comment on average churn (18% monthly), member email export announcement
Not established by this document: Only the group's public feed is retrievable. The specific founder post stating average churn of 18% monthly and the member email export announcement sit behind the group's post history and could not be linked to individually; the 18% figure therefore rests on an unlinked founder comment.
- FTC press release, 26 October 2021 - "FTC Puts Businesses on Notice that False Money-Making Claims Could Lead to Big Penalties" (1,100+ recipients, up to $43,792 per violation)
FTC - Notices of Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities, 25 October 2021 recipient list and accompanying press release; FTC case listings
- List of October 2021 Recipients of the FTC's Notices of Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities, updated 25 October 2021 (PDF)
- FTC Notice of Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities (PDF)
- FTC enforcement page - Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities, with the underlying administrative decisions and the sample cover letter
- Better Business Bureau Business Profile - Skool, El Segundo CA, file opened 18 October 2024, not BBB accredited
Better Business Bureau - Skool profile and complaints file, El Segundo CA, opened 18 October 2024
- BBB complaints file for Skool - 7 complaints in three years, 4 closed in the last 12 months, with Skool's posted responses
- Skool.com Inc. - Washington Secretary of State foreign profit corporation record, document number 605659708, filed 16 December 2024, Delaware jurisdiction, governor Sam Ovens, registered agent Registered Agents Inc. (aggregator copy of the state record)
bizprofile.net - Washington foreign profit corporation record, entity 605659708, officer and registered agent details
Not established by this document: The Washington Secretary of State's own Corporations and Charities Filing System record for entity 605659708 could not be retrieved directly; only the aggregator's reproduction is linkable, so this is a third-party copy rather than the primary registry page.
- GetLatka company page for Skool - $26.6M estimated 2025 revenue, $79.9M valuation, $0 funding, 30 employees (third-party model estimate, publisher-flagged as "Est.")
getlatka.com and thoughtlytics.com - ARR, valuation and funding estimates, and the bootstrapped/cashflow-positive characterisation
- Thoughtlytics - "How Skool.com is silently becoming a mammoth community platform," source of the bootstrapped / cashflow-positive characterisation
- Forbes profile - Sam Ovens, Founder, Consulting.com
Forbes profile of Sam Ovens; Mixergy SnapInspect interview; growthmodels.co teardown of the Consulting.com product ladder
- Mixergy interview with Sam Ovens on SnapInspect - "How To Find A Software Idea And Pre-Sell It Before It's Built"
- Growth Models teardown - "Sam Ovens' $44,000 product funnel that turned Consulting.com into an info product powerhouse" (Consulting.com product ladder at $2,000 / $6,000 / $36,000)
- Codingoblin - "Most Profitable Skool Community Niches 2026," scrape of 2,629 Skool communities, May 2026 (70% free, 30% paid, 53% under 100 members)
Third-party platform scrapes: codingoblin.com (2,629 communities, May 2026), joeapfelbaum.substack.com (top 1,000, August 2025); circle.so and kajabi.com pricing pages; ruzuku.com competitor critique (interested source)
- Joe Apfelbaum - "Skool Communities Analysis: Top 1000 Insights and Stats," August 2025
- Circle pricing page - Professional plan from $89/month (open-market comparison)
- Kajabi pricing page (open-market comparison)
- Ruzuku vs Skool comparison - competitor's own critique of Skool's fee tiers and missing course features (interested source: Ruzuku sells a rival platform)
What we could not get
- The Terms and Conditions, Transaction Terms, Acceptable Use policy and Privacy Policy - all four render client-side and were not machine-readable, so arbitration, class-action waiver, governing law, refund policy, data ownership, termination rights and fee-change rights are entirely unverified. This is the largest gap in the file.
- Whether any second commission tier exists anywhere in the program. Every documented mechanic is single-level and no source describes earning on a referral's referrals, but the affiliate agreement itself could not be read - so this is an absence of evidence, not a confirmed negative.
- Any audited revenue, ARR, valuation, community count, member count or GMV. The $26.6M ARR and $79.9M valuation are third-party model estimates carrying their publisher's own disclaimer. Claims of an a16z round or a $1B+ valuation could not be corroborated by any primary source and should be treated as unsupported.
- Alex Hormozi's equity stake in Skool and any investment amount. No primary source exists; circulating figures appear only on self-published posts and content farms, so no number is published here.
- The Delaware incorporation date and file number, and therefore the corporate chronology - 2019, 14 January 2022 and 16 December 2024 are three different dates and none reconciles the others.
- The affiliate payout minimum threshold, and the permitted commission range for owner-configured in-community affiliate programs including who funds them.
- The 18% monthly churn figure, which is a founder comment inside a community post rather than an audited platform disclosure; and the two third-party scrapes' conflicting paid-community shares of 30% versus 60%, which sample different populations and neither of which is audited.
- Court dockets - PACER was not searched, so the "no civil litigation" finding rests on open-web search only; and the FTC 1,100-name penalty-offense recipient list was checked by automated document fetch rather than exhaustive manual verification.
Not advice
This is independent analysis for decision-making, not legal, financial or investment advice. Allegations reported by third parties should be verified against primary court and regulatory records before any decision.
Researched by Claude. Reviewed by an editor.
Every report is researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, from the company’s own plan documents, policies, terms and regulatory file - then reviewed before publication by Rob Fore, who checks the sources and the stage-label on every allegation.
- Nine weighted dimensions, published with their weights
- The editor checks the evidence and cannot change the number - the build rejects any page whose grade does not reconcile to its own arithmetic
- Every affiliate position we hold is disclosed on the report it touches
- No company has paid for a grade, and no report carries an affiliate link
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Skool - frequently asked
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Author, editor and publisher
This report was researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from primary documents - Skool’s own compensation plan, its policies and procedures, its terms of service, its income disclosure statement where one exists, and its regulatory and self-regulatory file. It was scored against nine weighted dimensions that are published in full, with their weights, on the methodology page.
Before publication it was reviewed by Rob Fore, who checks every source link, every figure against the document it came from, and every allegation against its stage-label - an investigation is not a finding, a warning letter is not an enforcement action, and a filed claim is not a verdict.
The editor does not set the grade. The published score is the weighted composite of the nine dimension scores, and the build refuses to emit a page where the two disagree by more than 0.06. A grade moves when the evidence moves it and not otherwise.
Rob Fore has marketed online since 1996, wrote Online MLM Marketing (2014), and is CEO of Listech Inc, the Nevada corporation that publishes this site. He holds affiliate positions in companies graded here - including LiveGood, which this site grades D, SendOutCards, which it grades C−, and the Home Business Academy, which it grades B−. Those positions are disclosed on the reports they touch, and changed nothing on this page.
About the author and our conflicts · Contact the editor · Corrections: corrections@opportunitygrade.com
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Corrections
Every factual claim on this page is sourced, and the ones we could not stand up are named in the unable to verify list above. If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from Skool than from a reader.
Write to corrections@opportunitygrade.com. Point at the specific sentence and send the document that contradicts it - a plan document, a filing, an income disclosure, a policy page. We will check it against the primary source, correct the page if it is wrong, and say in the report that it was corrected and when. A grade moves if the evidence moves it.
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