Who Actually Owns Your Community Platform (And Why It Decides Your Next Price Increase)

Memberful sells itself on one word: ownership. Your domain, your Stripe, your list. Memberful is a wholly owned subsidiary of Patreon, and has been since August 2018.

Teachable has 100,000-plus creators. It's been owned by Hotmart, a company in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, since March 2020. That isn't on Teachable's pricing page, its homepage, or its sign-up flow. It's on a blog post from 2020.

Disciple charges $7,188 a year for a branded community app. The company that founded it, Disciple Media Ltd, went into administration in April 2024 and was dissolved in April 2025. The platform now runs under a different company controlled by a former director. None of that is on Disciple's website. It's on Companies House.

This week I added two fields to every listing on this site: who owns the platform, and the one-sentence story of how it got there. Thirty-nine platforms, checked against the company's own announcements, investor releases, SEC filings and the UK company register. No Wikipedia, no Crunchbase, no listicles.

Here's what fell out.

The spread

You can now filter the directory by that column. I'd suggest doing it before you filter by price, for reasons that take the rest of this piece to explain.

Finding 1: the founder-led platforms are the cheap ones, and it isn't a coincidence

Line up the entry prices of the founder-led group. Systeme.io: free, 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails. Skool: $9. SchoolMaker: $29. Stan Store: $29. Podia: $42. Simplero: $70, with "no VC investors, no exit strategy" written on its about page. ClickFunnels: $97, and 0% on sales.

Now the investor-backed group. Circle: $89, no free plan, and email is another $99. Kajabi: $179. Heartbeat: $49 plus 5% of sales. Bettermode: $199 with a nine-times jump to the next tier. Patreon: 10% of everything, up from 5% and 8% on the plans it closed to new creators in August 2025.

Here's the thing. A founder who owns the company gets to decide that $9 is enough. A company that raised $550 million at a $2 billion valuation (Kajabi, May 2021) has to grow into that number, and the fastest way to grow revenue from an existing customer base is to raise prices and cap features. That's not villainy. It's arithmetic. The round sets the target and the pricing page is where the target shows up.

Podia says it out loud: "not trying to be the next billion-dollar company." Simplero says it too. When a platform volunteers that it isn't for sale, it's telling you something about the next five years of its pricing page.

The exception that tests the rule: Discourse is investor-backed (First Round, then a $20 million Series A from Pace Capital in 2021) and still offers a free hosted plan with unlimited members. The difference is that Discourse is open source. If they squeezed too hard, you'd self-host. The investors know it. The pricing reflects it.

Finding 2: when ownership changes, the community feature is the first thing that stops moving

Four platforms on this site had an ownership event in the last few years. Look at what happened to the community in each.

Teachable (Hotmart, 2020): the help centre now says investment in the Community feature is paused. No new features, no bug fixes, new schools can't create one. The homepage still advertises it.

BuddyBoss (Awesome Motive, July 2024): to be fair, they shipped an email digest in September 2026, so this one is still being built. But the about page doesn't mention the acquisition, and the plan names changed with "introductory" prices that double on renewal.

LearnDash (Liquid Web, 2021; StellarWP brand retired 2026): learndash.com no longer exists as a storefront. Pricing redirects to liquidweb.com, support to docs.nexcess.com, and the plugin is sold as a $350-a-year bundle with an events plugin, a donations plugin and a theme you didn't ask for. The product is fine. The front door moved to a different building.

Nas.com (Khosla Ventures led a $27 million round in April 2026): the company that was Nas.io, the free Skool-shaped community tool, now describes itself as an AI marketing platform for small businesses. The community features still exist. They're no longer what the company is built around, and I've said so on the listing.

The pattern: new owner, new priorities, and the community tab is the part that doesn't make the next quarter's number. If you're choosing a platform because of its community features specifically, a recent acquisition is a yellow flag, not a green one.

Finding 3: the "own your audience" platforms are owned by someone else

This is the one that made me laugh.

Memberful's pitch is that you own the relationship: your Stripe, your domain, your export with thirty columns. True. And the company is a Patreon subsidiary, which means the paywall layer you chose to avoid Patreon's 10% is run by Patreon.

Teachable's pitch is that you own your course business, not a marketplace. True. It belongs to a Brazilian company most of its customers have never heard of.

BuddyBoss's pitch is that you own the install and the data on your own WordPress. True, and the strongest ownership claim on the site. The company that makes it is one of a dozen brands under Awesome Motive, whose founder also holds a stake in MemberPress, whose founder sits on BuddyBoss's advisory board. And MemberPress's company, Caseproof, has since bought MemberMouse, WishList Member and AccessAlly. The WordPress membership world is one dinner table. I've written that story up on its own, because it deserves it: Take the Country Whole.

I'm not saying any of that makes the products worse. Memberful's import is the best on the site. BuddyBoss's export is the only one that includes everything. I'm saying "you own your audience" and "we own the company" are different sentences, and only one of them is on the homepage.

Finding 4: celebrities are the new VCs for founder-led platforms

Skool is founder-led. It's also co-owned by Alex Hormozi since 2024, and The Skool Games, Hormozi's monthly contest for Skool communities, is the engine that made it the default answer to "where do I put my community."

Stan Store is founder-led. Steven Bartlett bought in as co-owner in May 2025 (his "largest deal," per his own announcement) and Gary Vaynerchuk invested in September.

Neither company took a traditional VC round. Both took a megaphone instead. The money's smaller and the distribution is bigger. For a creator picking a platform, the trade-off is the same as with VC but in a different shape: a founder-led company with a celebrity co-owner has a growth target too. It's just measured in YouTube views instead of ARR multiples.

My read: this is better for you than a Tiger Global round, because the incentive is for more people to join cheaply (that's what makes the megaphone work) rather than for existing customers to pay more. But it's not nothing. Hormozi's content is the Skool marketing department. If he moves on, that changes.

Finding 5: there's exactly one platform where you can read the numbers

Thinkific is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (THNC) after a C$160 million IPO in April 2021. Which means it files quarterly. Which means you can see that it reported $61.7 million in annual recurring revenue, renewed a share buyback in November 2025, and announced a reorganization in September 2026 "to focus on growth and free cash flow."

Translate that last one. A public company that says "free cash flow" is telling shareholders it will spend less and charge more. That's not a prediction about Thinkific's pricing page. It's a reading of the only community platform that's legally required to tell you its plans.

Every other platform on this site, you're guessing. Thinkific, you can check.

Finding 6: the giants will never give you an email, and now you know why

Facebook Groups, WhatsApp, YouTube, Slack, Discord: five chat-first platforms, four of them owned by a public company (Meta, Meta, Alphabet, Salesforce) and the fifth (Discord) private and reportedly filing for an IPO.

None of them will ever hand you a member's email address. People read that as a product limitation. It's an ownership decision. A public company's community feature exists to keep users inside the public company's product, where the public company sells ads or seats. Your list is their moat. Asking Meta for your Facebook Group's emails is asking a bank for the keys to the vault because you're a loyal customer.

The practical consequence is the one I keep writing about: collect emails at the door, or own nothing. If you're on any of these five, do it today.

Finding 7: some of this is just hidden, and that's worth knowing on its own

GroupApp publishes no founders, no founding year, no investors. Nothing. The only official fact is a Delaware entity named in the terms of service. Bettermode's blog has been rewritten with the dates stripped out, so the Tribe rebrand can't be dated from an official page; you need an archived snapshot. Kartra's terms quietly changed the contracting entity from Genesis Digital LLC to Kartra Inc., with no announcement.

None of that is sinister by itself. But a platform asking you to move your members in should be able to tell you who's behind it, and when the answer only lives in a terms-of-service footer or a web archive, I've said so on the listing.

What to do with this

Before you pick a platform, do three things that take ten minutes total.

First, filter this directory by the Owned by column. Founder-led if you want the price to hold. Public company if you want to read the filings. Anything with a 2024-or-later ownership event, read the community features with extra skepticism.

Second, check the export field next to the ownership field. The combination that bites is "investor-backed" plus "members CSV only." It means the price is going up and you can't take your posts with you when it does. (The import side is its own mess; I've gone through all 39 help centres in The Import Tax.)

Third, if the platform has had a funding round in the last 18 months, assume the pricing page you're looking at is temporary. Screenshot it. I've started doing that for every listing here, which is why each one carries a last-verified date.

The directory is at membershipstack.com. Every ownership line links to the source it came from, because "trust me" is what the listicles say and that's the thing this site exists to replace.

Sources

Every ownership claim above is sourced on the individual listing. The ones that took the most digging: Disciple's history is at Companies House (company 08075740 and 11650127). Teachable's acquisition is on Teachable's own blog, March 30, 2020. Memberful's is at memberful.com/blog/joining-patreon. BuddyBoss's is on WPBeginner's announcement, July 9, 2024. LearnDash's is in Liquid Web's press releases. The Caseproof acquisitions (MemberMouse, WishList Member, AccessAlly) are on each company's own blog, dated February 22, 2023, May 2, 2023 and April 30, 2024. Thinkific's figures are from investors.thinkific.com. Skool's Hormozi co-ownership is on skool.com/about and acquisition.com. Stan Store's Bartlett deal is on stevenbartlett.com. Nas.com's round is in the company's own release, April 16, 2026.