Skool's New Close Doors, Free Trial Lock, and Premium Upgrade Button, Explained

Every Tuesday, the Skool team ships new features and explains them on their Skool News show. This episode covered three that quietly change how you run and monetize a community: a proper way to pause your group, the ability to lock content behind a free trial, and a much more obvious upgrade button inside premium groups. Here is what each one does, why it matters, and how to use it, in plain English.

Watch the full episode ("Free Trial + Freemium Improvements") on Skool News. All credit to the Skool team.

1. Temporarily close your doors

There is now a clean way to pause your community. In Settings, under Pricing, there is a "Close doors" toggle. Flip it and new members can no longer join or request membership, while your existing members keep full access. The group is simply pulled out of discovery for as long as it is closed. From the outside, the join button just changes to "Closed" and cannot be clicked. Open the doors again and you are back exactly where you were, with no penalty.

This matters because of the messy workarounds people used before. Some switched a paid group to free and then never approved anyone, so membership requests piled up. Others set a fake sky-high price like $10,000 to scare people off. Both quietly wreck your group. If people keep visiting your about page and never join, Skool's algorithm reads that as "this group is bad" and pushes it to the bottom of discovery and search. Closing the doors properly avoids all of that: you pause cleanly, your ranking keeps calculating, and nothing gets damaged.

2. Free trial locked content

If you offer a free trial on a paid group, you no longer have to give trial members everything. You can now lock specific content behind the trial. At the course level, a trial member sees "End trial to unlock [course name]" instead of the content. You can also go deeper and lock individual modules or pages inside a course, almost like a drip. When they hit a locked item, they see one button: "Upgrade now." Because their card is already on file, it is a single click to charge and unlock, no re-entering details.

Skool also gated DMs for trials. Trial members can message admins, and admins can message them, but trial members cannot DM other members. This closes a real hole where spammers abused free trials to DM people and then cancelled. Together, these changes are designed to reduce freeloading and push trial conversions up, and likely let creators shorten the trial from the usual seven days.

3. The premium upgrade button, now inside the group

For premium groups (a free tier plus paid tiers), the biggest problem was simple: people on the free tier often had no idea a paid tier even existed. Creators were stuffing links in the sidebar to make it obvious. Now Skool does it for you. A free member sees a large, prominent "Upgrade" button, with the settings button tucked right beneath it. If there is no upgrade available, the button simply becomes "Settings," so it only ever shows when there is something to upgrade to. Click it and you go straight to the plans page, which shows your current tier and the paid options.

Combined with premium now showing the plans page during signup, Skool is hitting the upgrade from both sides: when someone joins, and continually while they are inside. The knock-on effect is worth understanding: a more efficient premium group earns a better efficiency score, and a better efficiency score means Growth Boost pushes it harder, which means more traffic and more money.

What else was on the roadmap

The team also flagged what is coming: an efficiency score you can actually see (so you know if Growth Boost is working and what to fix), continued Growth Boost optimization, global fast payouts, and multi-language support. If you want the deeper explanation of Growth Boost and the efficiency score, that is worth its own read.

Quick answers

Can you pause a Skool community without deleting it?

Yes. In Settings, under Pricing, use "Close doors." New members cannot join and the group is hidden from discovery, but existing members keep access and your stats are not penalized. Reopen any time.

Does setting a very high price hide my Skool group?

It stops joins, but it hurts you. Visitors who see the price and do not buy signal to Skool's algorithm that your group is low quality, which pushes you down in discovery and search. Use "Close doors" instead.

How does Skool free trial locked content work?

You can lock an entire course, or specific modules and pages inside a course, so free-trial members cannot access them. They see "End trial to unlock" and can upgrade in one click. Trial members can also DM admins but not other members.

Why does my premium group have a big upgrade button now?

Skool added a prominent in-group upgrade button so free-tier members clearly see that a paid tier exists. It only appears when an upgrade is available and links straight to the plans page.