You started it because people kept asking for a place to talk about this one thing, and they came. Now some of them want to back it, and you want to pay for the time it takes. But charging means choosing a platform, pricing tiers, gating the good parts and chasing renewals, and every option you’ve looked at either takes a percentage of each sale on most plans or means building it all yourself.
Paid communities stall on two jobs: deciding what members pay for, and then setting it up. A community’s value comes from the other members, not from you delivering something downward the way a course or a coaching program does. That makes the paid version hard to shape. What does a free visitor get to see? What does a paying member unlock? Is there a way for the members who love it most to support it at a higher level, without it feeling like a velvet rope?
Each of those is a decision and a setup job: a tier, a price, a page that explains it, a rule about who can open what. The platforms that make it easy do it by hosting the whole community for you, on their terms. The alternative, a site of your own, usually means an evening of plugin settings you never get to.
MemberPress.ai builds the membership side of your community on your own WordPress site, from a conversation. Tell it who the community is for and what members do together, and it adds a starting setup to your site as drafts. That covers the tiers and pages, which stay drafts until you publish them. What it sets up:
A free level for visitors, a paid member level, and an annual founding level for the members who want to back the community rather than get more out of it. What each level can open is yours to set, with MemberPress’s access rules.
Setup drafts MemberPress’s own join, checkout, login and account pages for you to publish. Connect Stripe or PayPal in MemberPress’s payment settings and the paid tiers can take money.
Once members start joining, it reads your own members and revenue and flags what you’d miss running it alone, like a renewal reminder that’s been switched off, and tells you what to change.
MemberPress.ai sets up the tiers and runs who has paid and when they renew. It doesn’t host the conversation itself. Point members to wherever your community already talks.
A free level, a paid level and a founding level, with the join and checkout pages drafted. Opal tells you what’s left before anyone can pay.
You connect your own Stripe or PayPal in MemberPress, so whatever members chip in reaches you directly.
Publish the tiers and tell the people who already show up. The first one who wants to support the community joins a paid tier on your site.
Then Opal keeps an eye on renewals from your own numbers, so you can keep running the community instead of chasing payments.
Choose a site you own if you want to keep your member list, your payment gateway and the site itself as the community grows. Most community builders look at Circle, Mighty Networks or Skool, and they’re good at what they do. The community, the courses, events and payments all live in one place, Circle adds phone and desktop apps, and there’s no limit on how many members you have. For a community that’s mostly conversation, that’s a lot handled for you, and they host the conversation itself, which MemberPress.ai doesn’t.
The trade-off is that the community lives on their platform, and most plans add a percentage of each sale to the plan fee, a smaller one on the bigger plans. MemberPress.ai runs on a WordPress site you own: your member list and your payment gateway stay yours, and the site is yours to keep however you grow. Your members keep talking wherever they talk now; MemberPress.ai runs who has paid and when they renew.
Founder · Studio Signal
Nadia runs Studio Signal, a paid community for freelance designers. She was comparing Circle and Skool side by side against building her own on WordPress, and she didn’t want any tool changing her site without her seeing it first.
Nadia has no interview of her own; this is Hana Tanaka, a member of a leadership cohort, the closest thing to a peer community in the interviews we have.
Watch Hana's interview (video)
Hi, I'm Opal from MemberPress.ai, the AI that builds and runs your membership site.
Today I'm with Hana, the very first member of Kwame's leadership cohort.
Hi, I'm Hana Tanaka.
I manage a small team and I joined Kwame's 12-week program.
And what was day one like?
Easy.
I paid, I got my login, and the first module was waiting.
Kwame's welcome was already up in the members area.
And how does it fit into your week?
I do a lesson on my lunch break and I check in with the cohort on Fridays.
My membership lives in one place.
That's what it looks like when a coach's site is up and running.
Helping coaches get there is what MemberPress.ai is for.
Tell him I said hi.
No. It sets up and runs the paid side: the tiers and renewals. Keep your members talking wherever they talk now, and link to it from the members’ pages.
Yes. The starting setup has a free level for exactly that, and you decide which pages it can open.
Setup adds its tiers as drafts, and they stay drafts until you publish them. After that, new tiers and membership changes preview as a dry run. Anything it writes for you, like a page, lands as an unpublished draft that nobody sees until you publish it. Refunds and subscription changes ask a second time. It works on your own site, on your own login.
Setup doesn’t move members over from another platform. It builds the tiers on your own WordPress site; bringing your existing paying members across is up to you, outside MemberPress.ai.
Connect your site and tell it what your community is about, once. Connect your own Stripe or PayPal, and the first member who wants to back it can pay. Then Opal keeps an eye on renewals while you run the community.
Dues, renewal season and the board’s questions, on a site the association owns.
Read more →A course, its exam and a renewal that bills on time, on a site the program owns.
Read more →Finish the coaching site you already paid for, and get to your first paying client.
Read more →Reader tiers and renewals that keep running, on a site you own.
Read more →Turn what you already teach into a real course, on a site you own.
Read more →