Communities
Job board software for online communities
Every community of any size eventually faces the monetisation question, and most of the answers make the community worse. Ads dilute it, sponsorships strain it, paid tiers split it. A job board is the rare option members actively want, because the thing being sold is the same thing they came for.
From $79/month · 14-day free trial · No setup feesIt also solves a problem the community already has. Somebody is posting roles in the #jobs channel today, unstructured, unsearchable, and gone in a day. A board is that channel with a memory.
How the money works
Sell access, priced against the alternative
The buyer is a company that wants to hire from your community and currently cannot, or can only do it by joining and posting into a channel where it will be ignored. What they are paying for is a legitimate route in, and the price should be set against what they pay a recruiter, not against what they pay Indeed.
Single listings are the entry product and the least interesting one. The recurring revenue is the employer subscription: a company that hires from your niche continuously pays monthly for standing access rather than per role, which is both more money and less selling.
The third line, and the one specific to communities, is the candidate side. A community whose members are the ones being hired can charge on that side instead, usually for early access to listings or for a profile that employers can search. That works best where members are in demand and worst where they are not, so test it before building on it.
The question that decides it
“Will my members feel like I am selling them?”
They will if the board is bolted onto the community as an advertising surface. They will not if the board is a member benefit that employers pay to reach, which is the same arrangement with the incentives pointed differently.
Two things make the difference in practice. First, moderation: every posting is approved before it appears, and the community knows that a role on the board has been checked by a human who is one of them. Second, member-first access: listings appear to members before they are public, so being in the community is worth something concrete.
The failure mode to avoid is volume. A board with four carefully chosen roles a week reads as curation. The same board with four hundred imported roles a week reads as a scraper, and members will treat it accordingly.
A board of this shape
Indie Hackers
A long-running community that has worked through most of the monetisation options in public, including this one. The lesson worth taking is about placement rather than product: where community-adjacent revenue is surfaced, and how much of the community surface it is allowed to occupy, decides whether members experience it as a service or as an intrusion. Indie Hackers Opens indiehackers.com in a new tab
Look at Indie Hackers
Named as a reference point, not as a Kardow customer. It does not run on Kardow and we
have no relationship with it.
What maps to your workflow
The parts of Kardow that do this job
01
Approval on every posting
Nothing appears without review. For a community board this is not an admin feature, it is the product: members trust the board because someone they know decides what goes on it. 02
Member accounts and gated listings
Listings can be member-only, or public after a member-first window. Accounts can be restricted so only approved members apply, which is what makes access worth paying for on the employer side. 03
Employer subscriptions, not just single posts
Recurring plans, posting bundles and packages are built in, so a company that hires from your community every month is billed monthly rather than sold to every month. 04
Embed it where the community already is
The board embeds into an existing site or community page with one script tag, including the application flow, so members do not have to learn a new destination. 05
A board that looks like the community
Your domain and your branding, with the platform name removed on Pro and above. A community board carrying someone else's logo undermines the exact thing it is trading on. The honest limit
Where Kardow is the wrong answer here
There is no Slack or Discord integration. Roles do not post themselves into your channel and members do not authenticate with their community account. Both are reachable through the API and webhooks, but they are things you build rather than switch on, and for a community where the whole membership lives in Slack that is a real gap. Not sure which side you are on? Ask us.
Questions
What people ask before they build one.
- How big does a community need to be for this to work?
- Smaller than most people assume, if it is specific. A few thousand members who all do the same specialised job supports a board with real pricing, because there is no other route to those people. Tens of thousands of general members does not, because an employer can reach them through ordinary channels. Specificity beats size here by a wide margin.
- Should the job board be free for members to post?
- Usually yes for individual members, and no for the companies they work at. Members posting the odd role builds inventory and goodwill; a company posting ten roles a month is a customer. The distinction is easy to draw with account types and easy to defend to the community, because it is the same principle the community already runs on.
- Can we import jobs to fill the board at the start?
- Yes, and it is worth thinking carefully about whether you should. Imports solve the empty-board problem, which is real, and they are how a new board gets enough inventory to be worth visiting. But a community board trades on curation, and a wall of imported listings reads as noise. The pattern that works is a small, tightly filtered import for a specific set of companies your members already care about, rather than everything in the niche.
Build it and see whether it works
Every plan includes a 14-day trial and there is no setup fee, so the cost of finding out is one month. Kardow starts at $79 a month. Closest to this one
All use cases Newsletters Jobs in every issue, and a second thing to sell to the sponsors you already have. Accelerators A cross-cohort hiring board that keeps working after demo day, when the companies need it most. Associations A career centre as a member benefit, with member and non-member pricing and invoices your finance team will accept.