Table of Contents
- The short version
- Community Keywords: Skool's discovery tags (April 2026)
- Hobby plan upgrades: affiliate program + custom URL (April 2026)
- Discovery page + member source tracking (early 2026)
- Native video hosting (rolled out 2025–2026)
- Skool Calls: native live calls (rolled out 2025–2026)
- Flexible monetisation models
- Close Doors, locked trials, and a louder upgrade button (July 2026)
- Reviews: star ratings on every community (August 2026)
- Languages: Skool goes multilingual (August 2026)
- What hasn't changed in 2026
- How to stay ahead of Skool updates
- The bottom line
- FAQ
- How often does Skool release new features?
- Did Skool raise prices in 2026?
- What's the difference between Skool's Hobby and Pro plans now?
- Is the Skool Discovery page a real source of members?
- Does Skool have a free plan in 2026?
- Where does Skool announce new features?
- Want more tools, tactics, and leverage?
Do not index
Markdown Draft
Latest (11 August 2026): every Skool community now has star ratings. In Skool News #69, Skool shipped Reviews, the feature it had been teasing as its "secret project" since July. Paying members are automatically prompted to leave a star review on day 31 of membership, and reviews appear publicly on the community About page. Three rules matter: only paying members can review (no free tier, no free trial), each member gets one editable review, and soliciting reviews earns you a red banner declaring them incentivised, because Skool monitors posts and DMs for it. Reviewer tenure is shown and turns green past 90 days, since most churn happens in the first 90. Net effect: your conversion rate is now visibly tied to your first 30 days, and owners have no lever except community quality. Full breakdown: how the Skool reviews feature works.
Also new (5 August 2026): Skool now speaks five languages. In Skool News #68, Skool shipped full language support — the entire interface (menus, settings, About pages, sign-up, and even the credit-card checkout) is now available in Spanish and German across desktop and mobile. One week later, in #69, Skool added French and Portuguese, with Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Turkish and Dutch queued next. Skool auto-detects a visitor's language from their browser on first visit, so a Spanish- or German-speaking prospect sees your About page and checkout in their own language automatically. The one current gap: system email templates aren't translated yet. This strips friction at the exact moment members sign up and pay — a big deal for anyone building for a non-English audience. Full guide: how to change your Skool language.
Earlier (21 July 2026): three new monetisation features shipped. In Skool News #66, Skool rolled out Close Doors (live now) — a clean way to temporarily pause new signups without hurting your Discovery ranking — plus free trial locked content (lock courses, modules or pages behind a one-click upgrade, and stop trial members DMing other members) and a prominent in-app upgrade button for free members of premium groups. On the roadmap: the Growth Boost efficiency score is now in active development, global fast payouts is in its final stages, and languages is reportedly around two weeks out. Full how-to on the first one: how to close your Skool community to new members without hurting your ranking.
Previously (14 July 2026): the NEW Skool Games are live. Announced in Skool News #65 — the revamped Games have shipped with new MRR-growth leaderboards (previewed in #64 and delivered on the promised mid-July timeline). Rankings are driven by new monthly recurring revenue added during the window, with the usual guardrails: only new-member MRR counts, capped at $100/month per member, annual subscriptions counted ÷12. In the same episode: freemium signup now shows plan options during the join flow (a quiet but meaningful conversion improvement for paid communities), and the roadmap still lists languages/currencies, payouts improvements, free-trial locked content and the Growth Boost efficiency score. Deep dive: Skool Games — what it is, how it works, and how to win.
Skool ships quietly. There's no flashy changelog, no press releases — most updates get announced inside Skool's own communities and spread by word of mouth. That's great if you live on the platform, and useless if you're trying to decide whether Skool is worth your money this year.
This page fixes that. It's a running roundup of every Skool platform update in 2026 that actually matters — what shipped, why it matters, and what to do about it. If you're still on the fence about the platform, you can start a free 14-day Skool trial here and test everything below for yourself.
The short version
If you only read one paragraph: in 2026 Skool has doubled down on two things — discovery (helping members find your community without you doing the marketing) and plan parity (giving Hobby plan owners almost everything Pro owners get). Both changes make it cheaper and easier to start a community today than it was a year ago.
Here's the update timeline at a glance:
Update | When | Who it affects | Impact |
Reviews (star ratings on every community) | August 2026 | All owners and prospective members | Very high — public trust signal tied to your first 30 days |
Language support (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese live) | August 2026 | Non-English owners & audiences | High — native sign-up & checkout, less friction |
Close Doors (pause new signups, keep your ranking) | July 2026 | All owners | Medium — clean alternative to ranking-killing hacks |
Free trial locked content + trial DM gating | July 2026 | Paid communities with trials | High — better trial conversion, less freeloading |
Premium: prominent in-app upgrade button | July 2026 | Premium/freemium owners | Medium-high — recovers missed upgrades |
Community Keywords (11 discovery tags) | April 2026 | All owners | High — free internal search traffic |
Hobby plan: affiliate program + custom URL | April 2026 | Hobby owners | High — removes the main upgrade pressure |
Discovery page + member source tracking | Early 2026 | All owners | High — Skool becomes a growth channel |
Native video hosting with captions & chapters | Rolled out 2025–2026 | All owners | Medium-high — kills the Loom/Vimeo bill |
Skool Calls (native live calls) | Rolled out 2025–2026 | All owners | Medium-high — kills the Zoom bill |
Flexible monetisation models (freemium, tiers, one-time) | Ongoing 2026 | Paid communities | Medium — more ways to package offers |
Let's go through each one properly.
Community Keywords: Skool's discovery tags (April 2026)
The biggest practical update of the year so far. Community owners can now add up to 11 keywords to their community's settings, and Skool uses those keywords to surface your community in its internal search and Discovery page.
Why this matters: Skool's Discovery page is effectively a search engine for communities, and most owners haven't optimised for it yet. Eleven well-chosen keywords are the difference between being found by people actively looking for your topic and being invisible.
How to use it well:
- Spend your first 5 slots on what people actually type — "fitness coaching", "day trading", "guitar lessons" — not clever brand language.
- Use the remaining slots for adjacent terms your ideal member might browse: related skills, tools, and outcomes.
- Check your member sources (more on that below) after 2–4 weeks and swap out keywords that aren't pulling anyone in.
We've published a full walkthrough in our guide to setting your Skool community keywords.
Hobby plan upgrades: affiliate program + custom URL (April 2026)
In April, Skool gave the $9/month Hobby plan two things that used to be reserved for higher spend: the affiliate program and a custom URL. As of mid-2026, the feature lists on both plans are identical — unlimited members, courses, videos and live calls on both.
That means the only real difference between Hobby and Pro is now the transaction fee: 10% on Hobby versus 2.9% on Pro. The maths is simple — once your community earns roughly $1,250+/month, Pro's lower fee pays for the price difference. Until then, Hobby is the rational choice.
This is a genuinely big deal for new community builders. A year ago, the entry cost question was complicated. Today it's: start at $9, upgrade when revenue makes it obvious. You can read the full breakdown in our Skool pricing guide.
Discovery page + member source tracking (early 2026)
Skool's Discovery update turned the platform from a retention tool into a growth channel. Two parts:
- The Discovery page lets potential members browse communities by category and topic — meaning Skool itself now sends you members, the way YouTube sends channels viewers.
- Member source tracking shows you where each new member came from: Skool search, the trending page, or an external link.
The second part is quietly the more useful one. For the first time you can see whether your growth is coming from inside Skool or from your own marketing — and double down on whichever is working. If Discovery is sending you members, invest in your keywords and community description. If external links are doing the work, invest in your content.
We covered the strategy implications in How Skool's Discovery update changes community growth.
If you want to test how discoverable your niche is, the fastest way is to create a community on a free trial, set your 11 keywords, and watch the member sources for two weeks.
Native video hosting (rolled out 2025–2026)
You can now upload videos directly into Skool — both in Classroom lessons and community posts — instead of embedding from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom. Skool auto-generates English captions and supports chapters for longer lessons.
Why it matters:
- One less subscription. Vimeo or Wistia hosting was a real cost for course creators ($20–$100+/month).
- No leaky embeds. YouTube embeds show related videos and pull members off-platform; native video keeps them inside your community.
- Cleaner member experience. Captions and chapters make longer course content far more usable.
For course-heavy communities this single feature can offset the entire cost of the platform.
Skool Calls: native live calls (rolled out 2025–2026)
Skool Calls lets you host live calls directly inside Skool — when you create a calendar event, you can set the location to Skool Call instead of pasting a Zoom link. Members click one button and they're in, already logged into the community where the recording and discussion will live.
The practical wins: no Zoom subscription, no broken links, higher attendance (members are already on the platform), and recordings that stay attached to your community instead of living in a cloud folder nobody opens. We did a full comparison in Skool Call vs Zoom.
Flexible monetisation models
Through 2025 and into 2026, Skool has steadily expanded how you can charge: free communities, monthly subscriptions, freemium (free tier + paid upgrade), pricing tiers, and one-time payments. The days of "Skool = one monthly subscription price" are over.
What to do with this: match the model to your niche's buying behaviour. Coaching audiences are used to subscriptions. Course audiences often prefer one-time purchases. Freemium works when your free layer genuinely demonstrates value. Our guide to free vs paid Skool communities covers what converts best.
Close Doors, locked trials, and a louder upgrade button (July 2026)
Skool's July update batch is all about squeezing more revenue out of the members you already attract.
Close Doors is a new toggle in Settings → Pricing that temporarily locks your community to new members while existing members carry on untouched. Your group is unlisted from Discovery while closed, but — crucially — your rank and stats keep calculating in the background, so there's no penalty. It replaces the two hacks owners used to rely on (flipping to free and ignoring requests, or setting a fake high price), both of which quietly tanked Discovery ranking by feeding the algorithm terrible signals. We wrote a full guide on this: how to close your Skool community without hurting your ranking.
Free trial locked content lets you gate specific courses, modules, or even individual pages from free-trial members. When a trial member hits locked content, they see an "end trial to unlock" prompt and can upgrade in one click (their card is already on file). Skool is also gating trial DMs — trial members can message admins but not other members — to cut down on spammers who abused free trials. Expect higher trial-to-paid conversion and less freeloading.
A prominent upgrade button solves a real problem with freemium groups: free-tier members frequently didn't know a paid tier existed. Premium groups now show a large, obvious upgrade button (desktop sidebar, mobile top) to free members whenever an upgrade is available, taking them straight to the plans page.
On the roadmap, the efficiency score for Growth Boost is now being built (it'll tell owners whether Growth Boost is working for their group and what to fix), global fast payouts is in its final stages, and languages — long requested — shipped in August 2026 (English, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese live, with Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Turkish and Dutch next; see how to change your Skool language). The mystery "secret project" also resolved in August: it was Reviews. Payment methods and currencies remain further out.
Reviews: star ratings on every community (August 2026)
The biggest update of the year, and the one that changes owner behaviour most. Skool now attaches a public star rating to every community, displayed on the About page where prospective members decide whether to join.
The mechanics are deliberately owner-proof:
- Skool does the asking. Paying members get an automatic prompt on day 31 of membership. Owners cannot trigger, time or target it.
- Paying members only. Free tier and free trial members cannot leave reviews, which makes both fake positives and review bombing expensive.
- One review each, editable later but not duplicated.
- Tenure is visible, turning green past the 90 day mark, because most churn happens in the first 90 days. A review from someone who stayed reads differently to one from a day 31 member.
- Soliciting is penalised. Skool monitors community posts and DMs. Ask for reviews, or offer anything in exchange, and Skool attaches a red banner to your reviews stating they were incentivised.
That last point is the one to internalise, because it reverses standard practice on every other review platform. The only reliable way to improve your rating is to improve the member experience in the first 30 to 90 days. We've written the full guide: how the Skool reviews feature works and what owners should do about it.
Languages: Skool goes multilingual (August 2026)
Skool shipped full interface translation in August, and moved fast. Spanish and German landed on 5 August in Skool News #68; French and Portuguese followed a week later in #69. Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Turkish and Dutch are queued.
The translation is complete rather than cosmetic: menus, settings, About pages, the sign-up form and the credit card checkout, on desktop and mobile. Skool auto-detects a visitor's language from their browser on first visit, and remembers a manual override. The one remaining gap is system email templates, which are still English only.
For anyone building for a non-English audience, this removes friction at the exact moment money changes hands. Full walkthrough: how to change your Skool language.
What hasn't changed in 2026
For balance — because not everything is new:
- Pricing is stable. Hobby $9/month, Pro $99/month, 14-day free trial on both, two months free on annual billing. No price increases in 2026 so far.
- The core design philosophy is the same. One feed, one classroom, one calendar, gamification. Skool still deliberately refuses to become a Kajabi-style everything-platform.
- No native email marketing. You still need an external email tool — we explain the best setup in Does Skool have email marketing?
How to stay ahead of Skool updates
Three practical tips:
- Join Skool's own communities. Feature updates are announced in Skool's official groups before anywhere else.
- Watch your settings pages. Skool ships quietly — new options often just appear in community settings without an announcement.
- Bookmark this page. We update this roundup as new features ship, with analysis on what each means for community owners.
The bottom line
The 2026 update pattern is clear: Skool is making it cheaper to start (Hobby plan parity), easier to grow (Discovery + keywords), and more self-contained (native video + calls). Every update this year has reduced the number of external tools and dollars a community owner needs.
If you've been waiting for the platform to mature before committing, this is what maturity looks like. Start your free 14-day Skool trial here — test the keywords feature, run a Skool Call, upload a video, and see how much of your current tool stack it replaces.
FAQ
How often does Skool release new features?
There's no fixed cadence, but in practice updates land every month or two, announced inside Skool's official communities. Bigger features (like Discovery and native video) tend to roll out gradually rather than launching all at once.
Did Skool raise prices in 2026?
No. As of mid-2026 pricing is unchanged: Hobby at $9/month with a 10% transaction fee, Pro at $99/month with a 2.9% fee. Both include a 14-day free trial and two months free on annual billing.
What's the difference between Skool's Hobby and Pro plans now?
After the April 2026 update, the feature sets are identical — unlimited members, courses, videos, live calls, custom URL and affiliate program on both. The only difference is the transaction fee: 10% on Hobby vs 2.9% on Pro.
Is the Skool Discovery page a real source of members?
It can be, especially in established niches people actively search for. Use all 11 community keywords, write a clear description, and check your member source data after a few weeks to see what Discovery is sending you.
Does Skool have a free plan in 2026?
No free plan — but both paid plans have a 14-day free trial with no charge upfront, which is enough time to set up a community and validate interest before paying anything.
Where does Skool announce new features?
Inside its own official Skool communities. There's no public changelog, which is exactly why we maintain this roundup — bookmark it and check back.
🚀 Want this mapped out for your niche? The free Skool Launch Planner turns your topic into a complete launch plan — positioning, pricing, outreach scripts and a 7-day roadmap to your first 20 members. About 2 minutes, no signup needed.
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