Circle

Hosted community and courses

PaidRealtime, comments & collabcircle.so

What it is

Hosted community platform bundling discussion spaces, live streaming and events, courses, member directories and paid memberships behind your own branding and domain. Native payments let you sell subscriptions or course access directly, and branded mobile apps are available. Fully managed, with no self-hosting option.

Why it earns a slot

The turnkey way to put a paid subscriber community, live events and a course behind one login. For a content site monetising membership, Circle collapses forum, streaming and billing into a single vendor and a single bill.

Know before you commit

No free tier, a $89/mo floor, and a 2% cut of every transaction on the entry plan stacked on top of Stripe fees. You are renting your community — content and member relationships live inside Circle with limited export.

Field notes

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Pricing snapshot

Professional $89/mo (3 admin seats, 2% transaction fee, 200 GB); Business $199/mo (5 seats, 1% fee, 500 GB); Circle Plus custom (unlimited seats, 0.5% fee, 1 TB). Unlimited members on every plan. 14-day trial, no permanent free plan

Snapshots move fast — verify at checkout, and post a field note if it changed.

Drop into your Lovable chat

Evaluate Circle (https://circle.so) for this project, then use it only if it fits what we are already building.
Context: Hosted community and courses. Hosted community platform bundling discussion spaces, live streaming and events, courses, member directories and paid memberships behind your own branding and domain. Native payments let you sell subscriptions or course access directly, and branded mobile apps are available. Fully managed, with no self-hosting option.
Reviewer notes (general, not written for this codebase): The turnkey way to put a paid subscriber community, live events and a course behind one login. For a content site monetising membership, Circle collapses forum, streaming and billing into a single vendor and a single bill.
Watch out for: No free tier, a $89/mo floor, and a 2% cut of every transaction on the entry plan stacked on top of Stripe fees. You are renting your community — content and member relationships live inside Circle with limited export.
Pricing: Professional $89/mo (3 admin seats, 2% transaction fee, 200 GB); Business $199/mo (5 seats, 1% fee, 500 GB); Circle Plus custom (unlimited seats, 0.5% fee, 1 TB). Unlimited members on every plan. 14-day trial, no permanent free plan
Rules: treat the notes above as background only. Do not assume a theme, style, layout or feature that is not already in this project — inspect the existing code first and ask me before changing visual direction.

/api/public/tools/circle

Neighbourhood

How Circle sits against the rest of the atlas — swaps, companions and the tools builders actually save alongside it.

Instead of thisGiscus PartyKit Socket.IO Yjs Ably Agora Chatwoot Crisp Cusdis

Named in the wiringStream

Also in Realtime, comments & collab

Ably

ably.com

Realtime messaging platform

Free tier + paidRealtime, comments & collab

Free: 6M messages/mo, 200 concurrent connections, 200 channels, 500 msg/sec. Standard $29/mo plus usage (10k connections, 10k channels); Pro $399/mo plus usage (50k). Usage: $2.50 per million messages, $1.00 per million connection-minutes, $0.25/GiB transfer

Open dossier

Agora

agora.io

Metered RTC voice and video API

Free tier + paidRealtime, comments & collab

Free monthly: 10,000 combined RTC minutes, 1M signaling messages, 500 chat users, 300 conversational AI minutes. RTC $0.59 per 1,000 minutes; recording $0.99 per 1,000; speech-to-text $16.99 per 1,000; real-time translation $8.99 per 1,000 per language. Analytics add-on from $449/mo

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Chatwoot

chatwoot.com

Open-source support inbox + chat

Free tier + paidRealtime, comments & collab

Self-host free under the MIT licence. Cloud Hacker $0 (2 agents, 500 conversations/mo, live chat only, 30-day retention); Startups $19/agent/mo annual; Business $39/agent/mo; Enterprise $99/agent/mo. Extra Captain AI credits $20 per 1,000

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Crisp

crisp.chat

Live chat and shared inbox

Free tier + paidRealtime, comments & collab

Free: 2 seats, 100 customer profiles, no AI credits. Mini $45/mo per workspace (4 seats, 5,000 profiles, $5 AI credits); Essentials $95/mo (10 seats, 50,000 profiles, $25 credits); Plus $295/mo (20+ seats, 200,000 profiles). Extra seats $10/mo

Open dossier