Why this exists
You are thinking about paying for a community. Maybe forty dollars a month, maybe four hundred. So you go looking, and what you find is the seller’s own page.
That page sets the price and describes the community. What it cannot show is a record over time: whether the thing was half as big in March, or twice the price, or did not exist at all this time last year.
For a market this size that is a bit odd. So we started reading what the platforms publish about these communities, writing it down every week, and putting the record somewhere you can go and look at it yourself.
What is actually here
Each of those readings is a real page we loaded, and each listing page shows the date every figure was read and links to the page it came from. The figures are read, not estimated; the score is a calculation from those published figures, with its weights shown. None of it is bought from anybody. If a listing does not publish a figure, or we have not read it yet, the page says so rather than guessing.
How to use it
- Look up a community by name. You get its price, its size, its rating where the platform publishes one, and how long we have been reading it.
- Scroll to the history table. One reading tells you where a community is. A run of them tells you which way it is heading, which is usually the more interesting question.
- Check the niche comparison. Being bigger than 90% of trading communities means something. Being bigger than 90% of everything on the internet does not.
- Browse the reports if you want the wider picture: how members are spread out, what communities charge, which ones grew this week.
Three rules we will not break
These cost us some of the more impressive things we could otherwise say, and we would rather have them than the claims.
First: history starts when we started. Every chart here covers the time since we began reading a particular community, not since that community opened. If we first saw something in August, it may well have been running for three years before that. We have no idea. Nobody was watching, so the record says nothing about it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Second: a size figure is a ceiling, and only a ceiling. Where you see one, it is the published monthly price times the published member count. Which quietly assumes that every single member pays full sticker price every single month, forever. That never happens anywhere. It ignores free members, trials, discounts, refunds, platform fees and tax. It is the absolute most a community could possibly bill, which is a very different thing from what it does bill, and you should never read it as the second.
Third: if we cannot check it, you do not see it. Social accounts show up only where we actually read the account. Where a platform blocks automated reading we hold the handle and do not display it, because a link we cannot verify is a claim we cannot stand behind, and one wrong link is worth more damage than a hundred right ones are worth credit.
What this is not
- Not a judgement of quality. We do not join, test or judge the quality of these communities, and we do not tell you what to join. Where a page is called a review, it reviews the published numbers only. The score some listing pages carry is calculated from published figures, with each weight shown, not from anyone's opinion of the community.
- Not an income report. No figure here says what anybody earns, and the ceiling above is not a sideways way of saying it.
- Not complete. Neither platform publishes a full list of what it hosts, so we measure our coverage and tell you what it is instead of claiming we have everything.
Think we got something wrong?
We probably did, somewhere. These figures are read by software and software misreads pages. Every page has a corrections link. Send us the thing you think is wrong, we check it against the source we took it from, and we publish what happened either way, including the times we looked and decided we were right. If it is your community, you can also claim the listing and put your own words on it.