CommunityOS
Everything Skool does — on payment rails that work in India. UPI, autopay, GST invoices and WhatsApp, built in rather than bolted on.
A paid-community platform with the courses, feed, chat, gamification and live calls you would expect, and the parts the American platforms skip: rupee pricing, UPI autopay mandates, GST invoicing, and WhatsApp treated as a sales channel rather than a link in a bio.
- Who it's for
- Creators and coaches selling a paid community or course in rupees — especially ones with an international slice paying in dollars, pounds or euros.
- Who it isn't for
- Not for a US-only creator. Skool is cheaper and already works for you; the reason to move is the payment rail, not the feed.
- What it replaces
- Skool at $99 a month, plus a payment gateway bolted on the side, plus a separate WhatsApp tool, plus invoices your accountant assembles by hand.
The member experience — feed, classroom, chat, leaderboard — sits behind a login by design. These parts are open to anyone, and they are the live platform, not screenshots.
A recorded walkthrough of the owner side — building a paid community, taking a UPI payment, paying an affiliate — is being filmed. It will appear here when it exists, and not before.
What it’s like
without it.
A creator in India selling a course has one realistic option: an American platform that charges their students in dollars through a card processor, cannot take UPI, does not issue a GST invoice, and treats WhatsApp — the channel their entire audience actually lives in — as something you link to.
The result is a checkout a large share of Indian buyers abandon, an accountant who cannot file from it, and the one marketing channel that works bolted on from outside.
The product surface itself is well understood; Skool defined it. What was missing was the plumbing underneath — and the plumbing is most of the work.
What’s different the day you start using it.
Your students pay the way they actually pay
UPI, cards and netbanking, plus UPI Autopay mandates so a renewal renews itself instead of needing to be sold again. A student in London sees the price in pounds on the same page a student in Indore sees rupees. No US card processor sitting in the middle of an Indian sale.
Your accountant can file from it
GST-inclusive pricing with sequential per-financial-year invoice numbering, and international sales marked as exports rather than quietly taxed as domestic. This is the unglamorous thing that decides whether a platform is usable in India at all, and it is the first thing a serious creator's CA asks about.
WhatsApp is a sales channel, not a link in your bio
An ad click opens a chat; a conversational flow qualifies the person, answers the objection they actually raised, and sends them to join; the purchase is attributed back to the ad that started it. Built directly on Meta's Cloud API with no reseller in between, so there is no per-message markup.
The community keeps working while you sleep
A when-this-then-that builder runs on the platform's own event stream: someone joins, finishes a course or passes a quiz, and the system tags them, grants a tier, sends a direct message or emails them. You stop being the process that has to notice.
Everything in the box.
Every line below is built and running. Nothing here is a roadmap item wearing a tick.
Courses & assessment
- Courses with sections and chapters, video, article and quiz content
- Four drip modes — none, by completion, by date, or by enrolment — enforced in the database, so a locked lesson's content cannot be fetched, not merely hidden
- Auto-graded quizzes whose correct answers never travel to the browser
- PDF certificates issued the moment a member hits 100%, with a public verification page for anyone they show it to
- An AI course builder that turns transcripts, links or a PDF into a draft course for review
The community
- A single feed sliced by categories, with rich text, images, polls, @mentions and video embeds
- One-to-one DMs and per-category chat rooms over realtime
- Nine-level gamification, points for likes, daily streaks and 7-day / 30-day / all-time leaderboards
- Events with server-side recurrence, RSVPs, reminders and calendar files
- Native live calls with replays, and web push with no third-party notification vendor
- Search across posts, comments, courses, chapter titles and events that re-checks access on every single row
Money
- Paid tiers through Razorpay — cards, UPI and netbanking
- UPI Autopay mandates for recurring renewals, opt-in at checkout
- Four currencies — rupees, dollars, pounds and euros — with the right one shown by visitor location
- GST-inclusive pricing with sequential per-financial-year invoice numbering
- An affiliate programme: commission on net, a referrer linked to a member for life, and payout batches that cannot double-pay
- A dispute-evidence vault behind private storage and short-lived signed links
Growth & automation
- A when-this-then-that automations builder over the platform's own event stream — nine actions including email, tier grants, points, tags and signed webhooks
- Broadcasts with audience targeting, resumable batch sending and one-click unsubscribe
- A WhatsApp sales bot on Meta's Cloud API directly, with a drag-to-reorder conversational flow builder
- A member-facing AI copilot that answers only from content that member is already allowed to see, with citations
- A one-afternoon importer for creators switching from Skool
Invite-only, and onboarded by hand
Communities are created by invitation rather than sign-up, and every new creator is set up on a call — branding, tiers, join settings and pricing done with you rather than left as homework you never do. Pricing is agreed on that call; there is no public plan table, deliberately, because the first creators are being chosen as carefully as they are choosing me.
- In production today, running my own community
- Everything included — courses, live calls, the WhatsApp bot, affiliates and automations
- Switching from Skool: a members CSV and a pasted course outline become a live community in an afternoon
- Your branding throughout — logo, cover and brand colour
The stack,
without mystique.
Standard, boring technology your next developer will recognise. That’s the point — nothing here is a proprietary runtime you’d be locked into.
- Framework
- Next.js 14.2 App Router, TypeScript strict
- Data
- Supabase — Postgres + Auth
- Migrations
- 65, applied in order
- Authorization
- Row-level security — the only boundary
- Payments
- Razorpay — cards, UPI, netbanking and UPI Autopay mandates, in ₹, $, £ and €
- Messaging
- Meta WhatsApp Cloud API, direct — no reseller
- AI
- Claude — Haiku for the copilot, Opus for course drafting
- Live video
- Daily, with per-community minute caps
What you’re trusting when you use it.
Anyone can list features. These are the calls that decide whether the thing survives contact with real customers and real money — explained without jargon, because you should be able to judge them without being an engineer.
- 01
The database decides who can see what — not the application
Authorization lives in Postgres row-level security, and the app's own permission checks exist only to hide buttons. If a page forgot a check tomorrow, the query would still return nothing. Every tenant read is gated on the caller's own membership, so guessing an id gets you an empty result rather than somebody else's data.
- 02
The authorization bug that a passing test suite could not see
A helper answering “what is this person's role here?” returned nothing at all for a non-member — and in Postgres, a permission check written as “if not allowed, refuse” treats nothing as false and lets the request through. Eighteen functions were affected. I found it by auditing all 161 database functions from three independent angles, confirmed it live — a stranger could promote themselves to owner of a community they had never joined — and closed it by making every check total.
- 03
The attack suite that reported zero breaches over a live escalation
That suite had been reporting “32 attacks blocked, 0 breaches” the entire time the hole above was open, because every role it impersonated held a membership somewhere — and the bug only opened for someone holding none. I added the missing role. It now runs 59 attacks, and the pass condition is the breach count rather than a total, precisely because a hard-coded total is part of how the first one survived.
- 04
A linter for exactly one class of bug
To stop that pattern ever returning, a custom linter parses every migration, resolves each database function to its final definition, and fails the build if a permission check is written in the shape that fails open. It runs on every push. Writing a bespoke linter for a single bug class is unusual; it is proportionate when the bug is silent privilege escalation.
- 05
Getting paid twice is worse than getting paid once
Payment fulfilment is idempotent and keyed on the gateway's order reference, so the webhook and the thank-you page can both fire, a retried webhook can fire a third time, and the member is still granted access exactly once and the ledger written exactly once. Prices are always recomputed on the server — the browser is never asked what something costs. A refund reverses the affiliate's commission in the same transaction.
- 06
Sanitise when you read, not when you write
Post bodies are a column members can write to, so a hostile client can push raw HTML straight past any server-side cleaning on the way in. The real defence is re-sanitising at every path that reads a body back out. Getting this backwards is the most common way a community platform ends up hosting somebody else's script.
- 07
Every milestone is adversarially reviewed before it ships
Each feature goes through a review pass whose only job is to break it; findings are then independently verified, and the ones that survive are fixed before launch. It has caught a live production bug that had silently stopped paid course buyers being enrolled, a WhatsApp attribution leak that would have credited the wrong community's ad, and a refund path that reversed an affiliate's entire commission over a partial refund.
- 4
- currencies — ₹, $, £, €
- 65
- database migrations
- 59
- scripted attacks blocked, 0 breaches
- 1
- afternoon to move a Skool community across
CommunityOS is in production and runs my own community. No other creator is paying for it yet — the first ones are being onboarded by hand, on purpose.
Want one of these for your business?
CommunityOStook the shape it did because of one specific business problem. Tell me yours and I’ll tell you what it would take — and if CommunityOS is already most of the answer, running on it beats rebuilding it.
Thirty minutes, screen-shared: the creator side — tiers and pricing, the course builder, the automations that fire on a join, affiliate payouts and the earnings ledger.