what to ask, what it costs, what it can’t do
This page answers what people actually asked in the first weeks of the hosted service: the questions worth trying, the limits, the price, and where your password goes. If yours is missing, post it in the community and it will end up here.
Not just single numbers. catknows is not a fixed report: your AI reads the raw data behind your account, members, posts, comments, DMs, the Discovery charts, and reasons across all of it at once. That is what sets it apart from every dashboard: you can ask questions no Skool tool has a column for.
First check the connection: ask “Which Skool communities am I in?” A list with your roles and member counts means it works. Then ask something a dashboard cannot answer.
Each of these crosses at least two kinds of data. That is the trick: the AI joins what Skool keeps on separate pages.
It drafts everything: posts, comments, DMs, even full Classroom courses, and it always shows you the exact text first. Nothing goes live until you say yes.
On the hosted service, posts and comments currently come back as a ready-to-paste block that you publish yourself in Skool’s editor. DMs and Classroom publish normally, and the free local version writes everything, over your own connection.
Skool has removed a handful of individual API-written comments from their threads. Not many, and not reliably reproducible, but enough that I would rather pause than have it happen to your community. The pattern that looks most suspicious is repetition on a fixed schedule: a comment posted every two hours for several rounds, rather than a single one.
So: never put catknows on a schedule or in a loop to post for you, on either version. Ask it for one post when you want one post. If you write regularly and want it published directly, the local version does that, over your own connection and at a risk you take knowingly. I cannot tell you the local path is safe, because nobody has systematically tested it, and if repetition is the trigger, a scheduled task would look the same from your machine.
catknows works through your own Skool login. Communities you never joined show only what Skool shows everyone: the About page and the Discovery listing. There is no back door, which is the point.
Transcripts work for videos hosted on Skool itself. Videos embedded from YouTube, Loom or Vimeo have no transcript to fetch.
Answers are cached for up to ten minutes, so a number you changed on Skool a moment ago can lag briefly. Any write clears the cache.
One call returns at most a few hundred rows. When a list was cut short, the result says so instead of pretending it saw everything.
The streamed Skool login is happiest in a desktop browser. Everything after that first connection works anywhere your AI does.
Nothing. Standard is $0: you run the open-source tool on your own machine, and that stays free whatever happens to the rest. The hosted service at catknows.app is also free right now.
Once the community reaches 100 members, the hosted service becomes $7 a month or $77 a year. Everyone who joined before then keeps it free. Forever, not for a year. Joining early is the whole discount.
Nobody pays anything today. The price is announced, not switched on: billing does not exist yet, and nothing will start charging quietly.
$67 a month, and it gets you nothing extra on purpose. You would be paying so that everyone else does not have to.
No. That would defeat the point of having built this.
To Skool, nowhere else. Connecting opens a real browser on the server, streamed to your screen, showing Skool’s own login page. What I keep is the session cookie that login produces, encrypted at rest.
Not your Skool data. It is fetched when you ask, used for the answer, and gone. The server keeps your account email, your encrypted Skool session, and 30 days of technical usage records. The privacy policy lists all of it.
No. Reads happen when you ask. Writes are draft first: the exact text is shown, and nothing is posted, sent or deleted without your explicit yes.
On a server in Nürnberg, Germany, under GDPR, with a signed processing agreement with the hoster. Details are in the privacy policy and the DPA.
Any time. Disconnecting deletes your stored session from the server. Logging out of all devices on Skool kills every session copy anywhere, including mine.
Yes: github.com/nklsschroeer707/catknows. The hosted service runs the code you can read.