Our pick · Verified 18 August 2026
Circle — the tier most institutional buyers should start on is Professional, not Business
From $89/mo · 14-day free trial
For a department, society or research network, Professional at $89/month is almost always the correct starting point. Every paid tier includes courses and unlimited members, so the entry tier is not crippled on the two things institutional buyers usually care about most: you can run a training programme and admit an entire faculty without a headcount charge. What Professional limits is people with power — 3 admins and 10 moderators — and the transaction fee sits at 2% rather than 1%. Neither of those bites until you know the community sustains itself. Because the 14-day trial requires no card and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, the honest advice is to buy Professional monthly, run one real cohort or one membership renewal cycle through it, and only then decide whether the step to Business at $199/month or a custom Circle Plus contract is justified by the numbers you have rather than the numbers you hoped for. Verified 18 August 2026.
Start a Circle trial Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link
Read the full Circle review → — If you have not decided on Circle at all yet, start there rather than with the price list.
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In summary
- Professional $89/mo — 2% transaction fee, 3 admins, 10 moderators.
- Business $199/mo — 1% transaction fee, 5 admins, 15 moderators.
- Circle Plus custom pricing — 0.5% transaction fee; this is the institutional tier.
- Courses and unlimited members are on all tiers; 14-day trial with no card and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Verified 18 August 2026.
- At 500 members, Professional works out at roughly $0.18 per member per month before any transaction fees.
Circle cost per member at three community sizes
Subscription cost only, divided by membership. Plan prices verified from the vendor pricing page, 18 August 2026
| Dimension | Professional $89/mo | Business $199/mo | Circle Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 members — per member / month | $0.89 | $1.99 | Custom quote |
| 100 members — per member / year | $10.68 | $23.88 | Custom quote |
| 500 members — per member / month | $0.18 | $0.40 | Custom quote |
| 500 members — per member / year | $2.14 | $4.78 | Custom quote |
| 2,000 members — per member / month | $0.04 | $0.10 | Custom quote |
| 2,000 members — per member / year | $0.53 | $1.19 | Custom quote |
| Transaction fee on payments taken in Circle | 2% | 1% | 0.5% |
| Admins / moderators | 3 / 10 | 5 / 15 | Negotiated |
| Courses included | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Per-member figures are arithmetic on the published monthly plan price, nothing more. They exclude transaction fees and payment processor fees, both of which scale with revenue rather than headcount.
What each tier actually unlocks
The most useful thing to know about Circle pricing is what it does not gate. Courses are included on every paid tier, and every tier carries unlimited members. That combination is unusual and it matters for institutional buyers, because the two questions that normally force an upgrade elsewhere — “can we run training in here?” and “what happens when the cohort doubles?” — are answered on the cheapest paid plan.
Professional, $89/month. A 2% transaction fee on payments taken through Circle, 3 admins and 10 moderators. This is a complete product: community spaces, courses, events, paid memberships. For a single department, a special interest group, or a society running one membership class, it is genuinely sufficient. The constraint is administrative, not functional — three admins is thin if your professional services team rotates, and ten moderators runs out quickly if you devolve moderation to sub-group convenors.
Business, $199/month. The transaction fee halves to 1%, admins go to 5 and moderators to 15. Read the $110/month difference as two separate purchases bundled together: more delegated authority, and cheaper money movement. Most societies upgrade for the first reason and then discover the second pays for it.
Circle Plus, custom pricing. The transaction fee drops to 0.5% and this is the tier where institutional requirements — negotiated admin structures, a white-label mobile app, the security and identity controls a university IT review will ask about — get discussed. Circle does not publish a figure for it and neither will we. We only quote prices we have read off a vendor page, and for this tier there is nothing to read.
For a fuller feature-level walkthrough rather than a price model, see our Circle review, and for the platform-versus-platform question our community platform comparison.
Circle cost per member at 100, 500 and 2,000
Because Circle does not charge per member, cost per member is a division sum rather than a price — and it collapses fast. At 100 members, Professional costs $0.89 per member per month, or $10.68 a year. At 500 members that falls to about $0.18 a month, $2.14 a year. At 2,000 it is roughly four cents a month, $0.53 a year.
Those numbers are the argument to put in front of a committee, because the comparison is almost never against another community platform. It is against what you already spend. A mailing list manager, an events booking tool, a separate course host and a members-only area bolted onto the website will, between them, usually cost more than $89 a month and produce four member lists that disagree with each other. If your current stack is three or four line items, the consolidation case is straightforward at any of the three membership sizes above.
Where the maths turns against you is at genuinely small scale with no revenue. Under about 100 engaged members with nothing being sold, $1,068 a year buys a forum that a free mailing list already provides. Cost per member is only a persuasive metric once there are enough members for it to look small.
One caution on the denominator: use active members, not registered accounts. Research communities accumulate dormant registrations at a rate that flatters every per-member calculation. If a committee later re-runs your figures against login data, a cost per member built on total sign-ups will not survive the meeting.
Transaction fees on paid memberships — and where they stop applying
The percentage applies to money that moves through Circle: paid memberships, paid courses, one-off products, ticketed events. It is 2% on Professional, 1% on Business, 0.5% on Circle Plus. Payment processor fees sit on top of that and are typically the larger of the two, so model both or your figure will be wrong in the direction that embarrasses you.
The fee stops applying in two circumstances that are common in the sector and worth stating plainly. First, a free community pays no transaction fee at all — if your members are admitted by virtue of institutional affiliation and nothing is sold, the subscription is the entire cost. Second, if you continue to collect subscriptions through your existing finance system — an institutional invoicing route, a membership CRM, or a purchase order process for departmental members — and use Circle purely as the place people gather, the money never touches Circle and the percentage never triggers. A surprising number of societies land here, because their finance office will not accept card payments arriving in a platform it does not control.
If money does flow through Circle, the break-even between tiers is calculable. The step from Professional to Business costs $110 a month, or $1,320 a year, and buys you a one-percentage-point reduction. One percent of $132,000 is $1,320 — so the fee saving alone justifies Business at roughly $132,000 a year of payments processed through the platform. Below that, you are paying the $110 for the extra admins and moderators, which may still be the right call, but call it what it is.
SSO, admin roles and the white-label app
Two requirements reliably push institutional buyers off the published price list. The first is single sign-on. If your information security review requires members to authenticate through the institutional identity provider, that is not an entry-tier conversation — it belongs to the custom Circle Plus tier, and you should get the specifics in writing during the sales process rather than trusting any third-party page, including this one. We have not seen a published SSO line on the pricing page, so we will not pretend to one.
The second is the white-label mobile app. A branded app sits at the Circle Plus level and is a large step up in cost from $199 a month, not a small one. It is worth having a rule of thumb before you enter that negotiation: an app earns its keep when a substantial share of your membership is already opening the community daily on a phone, and when push notification is the channel that drives attendance. If your engagement is weekly and email-led — which describes most learned societies — a branded app will be an expensive way to change the icon people tap. Ask for engagement data from your trial period before you commit, not after.
The admin and moderator ceilings deserve more attention than they usually get in institutional settings. Three admins on Professional is workable for one team; it is not workable if you intend to give every sub-group convenor real authority. Circle distinguishes admins from moderators, and moderators are the cheaper currency — 10 on Professional, 15 on Business — so design your governance around moderators wherever you can and reserve admin seats for the people who actually need billing and configuration access.
Annual billing saves money and costs you optionality
Circle, like most platforms in this category, prices an annual commitment below the monthly rate. We are quoting the monthly figures here because those are what we verified on 18 August 2026, and we do not publish a discount percentage we have not read directly off the vendor page — ask for the current annual rate in writing before you sign.
The strategic point stands regardless of the exact discount. Annual billing on a community platform asks you to pay before you know the answer to the only question that matters: will the community sustain itself? Communities fail in a specific pattern — a strong launch, six to ten weeks of genuine activity, then a slow collapse into a broadcast channel with one person posting. If that happens on monthly billing you stop paying. If it happens in month three of an annual contract you have bought nine months of a forum nobody reads, and the sunk cost quietly turns into an argument for keeping it.
Our recommendation for institutional buyers is unambiguous: run the 14-day trial with no card, then buy monthly, then commit annually at your first renewal once you have three or four months of engagement data. The discount you forgo in that period is small relative to the risk it retires — and if the community does thrive, the annual saving is still there in month five. The only case for committing annually up front is a community that already exists elsewhere and is being migrated rather than created, because migrated communities carry their engagement with them.
Do not buy Circle if any of these describe you
Do not buy Circle if nobody owns the community. This is the single most reliable predictor of wasted spend. Circle is not expensive, but it is a platform that requires someone to seed discussion, welcome new members and run events. If the plan is that it will be somebody’s job “alongside their existing role” and no hours have been allocated, the $1,068 a year is the smallest part of what you are about to waste.
Do not buy Professional if SSO is a hard requirement. The entry tier is genuinely limiting for institutional use in exactly this respect. If your IT review will not approve a platform without federated login and centrally managed deprovisioning, start the Circle Plus conversation immediately rather than buying $89 a month and hoping to upgrade your way out of a governance objection.
Do not buy Circle if you only need broadcast. If what you actually want is to push announcements out to a list, a mailing list and a scheduling tool will do it for less — see our social media scheduler comparison if the requirement is really outbound reach. Circle earns its price on many-to-many conversation and on selling memberships or courses; it is poor value as a one-way channel.
Do not buy Business first. Very few institutional buyers should start at $199 a month. Buy the admin seats when you have named the people who need them and the fee reduction when your processed volume crosses the break-even above. If you are still weighing Circle against the alternatives, our Circle vs Skool vs Mighty Networks comparison is the more useful page to read before you commit budget.
Test the cost model before you commit budget
The 14-day trial needs no card and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so a department can validate the per-member figures on this page against its own engagement data before anything reaches a finance committee.
From $89/mo · 14-day free trial
See current Circle pricing Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link
Frequently asked questions
How much is Circle pricing per month?
Professional is $89 a month with a 2% transaction fee, Business is $199 a month with a 1% fee, and Circle Plus is custom-priced with a 0.5% fee. All three include courses and unlimited members. These figures were verified from the vendor pricing page on 18 August 2026.
Is Circle.so pricing charged per member?
No. Every paid tier carries unlimited members, so adding 500 people to a community does not change the subscription. What scales with growth is the transaction fee on any money you take through the platform, and the number of admins and moderators you need to run the place — those are the constraints that push organisations up a tier, not headcount.
What is the real Circle cost per member?
At 100 members, Professional works out at $0.89 per member per month or $10.68 a year. At 500 members it is roughly $0.18 a month and $2.14 a year; at 2,000 members, about four cents a month and $0.53 a year. Those are subscription-only figures — add transaction fees and payment processor fees if you sell memberships or courses through Circle.
Which tier do I need for SSO and a white-label app?
Both belong to the custom-priced Circle Plus tier rather than the published plans, and the branded mobile app is a substantial step up in cost. Because Circle does not publish a figure for that tier, we will not estimate one — get the scope and price in writing during the sales conversation, particularly if your information security review has federated login as a hard requirement.
When do Circle transaction fees stop applying?
They only apply to money that moves through Circle. A free community pays no transaction fee at all, and if you continue collecting membership subscriptions through your existing finance system or membership CRM and use Circle purely as the place people gather, the percentage never triggers. Many societies end up in this position because their finance office will not accept card payments landing in a platform it does not control.
At what point does Business become cheaper than Professional?
The upgrade costs $110 a month, or $1,320 a year, and reduces the transaction fee by one percentage point. One percent of $132,000 is $1,320, so on fee savings alone Business justifies itself at roughly $132,000 a year of payments processed through Circle. Below that threshold you are buying the extra admin and moderator seats, which can still be the right decision.
Should we pay annually to get the discount?
Not at the start. Annual billing is priced below monthly, but it asks you to commit before you know whether the community sustains itself, and communities most often fail in the first two or three months. Run the 14-day no-card trial, buy monthly, and switch to annual at your first renewal once you have real engagement data — unless you are migrating an existing community, which carries its engagement with it.
