Editorial policy

Check the Course is a dated record of what paid online communities on Skool and Whop publish about themselves: their price and their member count, read at least once a week and kept as a history. We don’t join, test or judge the quality of the communities we list. Where a page is called a review, it reviews the published numbers only, and a listing appearing here, at any position, isn’t a recommendation to join it.

Every figure is read from a page the community or seller made public. We don’t log in, we don’t buy access, and we only read pages that the platform’s own robots.txt file allows. We read Skool’s directory pages and Whop’s web pages no faster than one every 20 seconds, Skool community pages no faster than one every 15 seconds, and public channel pages for follower counts no faster than one every 10 seconds, all from one ordinary connection. Whop’s public product API is read at a short fixed interval. We don’t use proxies or any other way of disguising who is asking.

Each listing page shows the date every figure was read and links to the page it came from. We keep a fingerprinted copy of every page we read, so any published figure can be traced to the exact page it was taken from on the day. The methodology page sets out the detail.

• What a business takes in. Where a listing publishes a monthly price and a member count, a listing page may show the two multiplied together as a ceiling: the most it could bill if every member paid the list price. Beside the figure the page says: This is not revenue, earnings or income. It never appears in a ranked table of named businesses.
• Arithmetic we can’t stand behind. We don’t calculate that ceiling when the price is above $2,000 a month or the result would be above $250,000 a month. The published price still appears.
• Free members as money. A free product’s members are its reach. They’re never multiplied by anything.
• Guesses dressed as facts. A price we couldn’t read is recorded as unknown, never as free. A date we didn’t observe is never shown as a founding date: our history starts when we began reading a listing.
• Verdicts. We describe what changed (“net members down 18% over 12 weeks”), not what it means about the people running it. A fall in members is a net change, not a cancellation rate.
• Downloads of the data. There is no export. A figure should travel with the page that explains it.

Every ranked page is ordered by one figure each business publishes about itself, almost always its member count, and the page names the figure. The order is computed, not chosen. There’s no field anywhere in this system for a paid or manual position, and nobody can pay to be placed, moved or removed.

Some listing pages also show a score. It’s calculated from figures the community publishes about itself, with each weight shown, and it plays no part in any ranked order. It isn’t anyone’s opinion of the community and it isn’t a recommendation. It appears only for listings in the upper part of their platform, so a listing without one hasn’t been given a low score. How the score is calculated.

Some listing pages carry a short description in our own words. It’s written only from sources we collected and kept: the listing itself, and pages the seller links to or that are verifiably theirs. Each sentence is footnoted to the source it rests on, with the date we read it. Before a description is published, automated checks confirm that every name and number in it appears in a quoted source. A listing with nothing to go on beyond its own listing text gets no description rather than a padded one.

Listings classified under gambling, adult content, trading and crypto, property investing, credit and funding, tax and legal structures, or health carry a fixed notice on their page. The wording is the same for every listing in the category, so it says nothing about any one of them in particular. Nothing on this site is financial, legal or medical advice.

Some links out of this site may be affiliate links, and we may be paid a commission if someone joins after following one. It never changes the order of a ranking or any figure. The affiliate disclosure explains it in full.

Alexander Burnett founded the site and is its editor, responsible for everything published on it. Alan Phillips advises the project. Pages generated from the data carry the site’s name rather than a person’s. A named byline appears only on something that person wrote.

If something on a page is wrong, the corrections page is the fastest route, or email checkthecourse@gmail.com. We aim to respond within 7 days. A correction changes the page. It doesn’t rewrite the history: an earlier reading stays in the record with its date, because what a listing published on a given day is itself a fact. How we handle personal data, and how to ask for it to be removed, is in the privacy policy.