Start with what the listing itself has to say
The price and the member count are published by the community and are the two facts most listings publish. Read the price carefully: whether it is monthly or a single payment changes what you are agreeing to far more than the number does.
A member count is the number currently listed as members. It is not how many are active, and it does not say how many pay full price, since trials, discounts and free tiers are invisible from outside. Counts can fall as well as rise, which is why a run of them is worth more than one. A large one tells you many people are listed, which is a different question from whether it suits you.
Then look at movement rather than position
A single reading tells you where something is. A run of readings tells you which way it is going, and that is usually the more interesting question. A community that has been flat for months and one that has doubled since the summer look identical if you only see today.
This is the part that is hard to do yourself, because it requires somebody to have been writing the numbers down before you went looking. That is what this site is. The caveat we repeat everywhere applies here too: our history starts when we began reading a particular community, not when that community opened.
Compare it against its own niche, not against everything
Being bigger than ninety per cent of trading communities means something. Being bigger than ninety per cent of everything on the internet does not, because the comparison set is meaningless. Any figure that puts a community in a percentile should tell you what the percentile is against.
Read a rating and its count together, or not at all
Where a platform publishes ratings, and only Whop does among the two we track, the count matters as much as the score. A perfect rating from three people is close to no information. We never show one without the other, and you should not accept one without the other anywhere else either.
Things you cannot check, and nor can we
- Whether the members are active in the sense of paying or taking part. Skool shows post counts and who is online at the moment you look, which is a partial signal; neither platform publishes more than that.
- How many people left. No platform publishes that either, so a growing member count can hide a lot of churn.
- What anybody actually paid, as against the listed price. Discounts, trials and refunds are invisible from outside.
- Whether the material inside is any good. Nobody here has joined any of these communities, so nothing on this site is a judgement of what they teach.
- Anything about the money behind it. A figure built from price times members is a ceiling: it assumes every member pays full price every month, which never happens anywhere. It is not revenue, not earnings and not income, and no arithmetic here turns it into any of those.
What the figures can and cannot tell you
The checkable facts above will tell you whether a thing is established and what it costs relative to its peers. What you want out of it is the part only you can judge.