Memberful is a popular service for paid user subscriptions. They have an official plugin for WordPress as well as for Discourse:
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Curious if anyone has used the Memberful plugin and what your feedback is? I have a community in WP and looking to add Discourse with the option of creating paid membership tiers.
I’m curious what decision you made here. I’ve just started to look into this for my own forum.
Still considering this. I anticipate spending a bit more time looking at it in the next week or so. I imagine I will have more questions or insights then and will share.
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I’ve been using it to manage about 700 paying members and it has worked very well. Let me know if you have any specific questions, if you plan to do a trial period, a free tier or have lifetime members I have some learning I can share. I only wish the reporting was improved so I could see how much income I have coming over the next year, it’s somewhat of a surprise each week when I get the report of what I’ve made.
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Memberful seems like the easiest payment gateway with Stripe, but I am leaning towards Membermouse due to the 1-click upsell functionality.
Can you share what you’ve done for lifetime members, David?
I have the following plans set up in Memberful:
- Free (can only access one area of our forum)
- 30 day trial (can access everything except our member discount section)
- Full Membership - Monthly
- Full Membership - Yearly
- Full Membership - 3 Years
- Lifetime
Memberful has the option to purchase a lifetime subscription, but I don’t offer this option. The lifetime members I have are grandfathered in from an older version of the site which I added manually.
Each memberful plan can have a discourse group tied to it, which allows me to limit access to areas of the discourse site based upon which plan they are on. For example, this area of the site is only accessible to paying members or those on the 30 day trial, but not to paying members. I use the Category Lockdown plugin for this in addition to the discourse category security, here is what this category looks like:
I also have this integrated with ConvertKit for sending out emails when a member signs up, or 20 days into the 30 day trial if they have not signed up yet to try and upsell them, which takes them to this page where they will be asked to put in their CC info and viola they are upgraded and everything syncs with discourse. The key to this is the trial plan has to be cheaper than the other plans, so I have the trial set to $4.98/month, whereas the actual monthly is 4.99/month, so far it hasn’t confused anyone.
Overall I have been very happy with memberful, it’s pretty flexible and works smoothly. The customer support is exceptional, they have really bent over backward to help me even when I have made stupid mistakes and they had move members around on the backend.
The only negatives have been the cost, of course, $25/month is cheap, but the 4.9% fee is pretty crazy as I’m already paying about $100/month and I hope to grow the site quite a bit more. Their reporting is not exceptional right now, it’s okay but I would like to see more of the features that membermouse has along with some forecasting so I know how much money will be coming in next month.
Since I’m not a programmer and wouldn’t know how to fix the integrations with membermouse when they go awry, I will probably stick with memberful since they handle all the integration beautifully. As the site grows I may look into these other options as cost start to balloon with memberful. Hope this helps, happy to help with other questions!
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Thanks for the detailed reply. Memberful’s fees are bogus for sure. But better than some of the other membership plugins devs have made for Discourse (I saw one that was 7%! 
).
I want to pay a monthly fee for a tool, not a monthly fee plus a percentage of revenue.
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Thanks for your review David.
I’ve been testing this solution and so far the mandatory SSO having all the login functions go through Memberful is a big no-no. I would like people to be allowed to login and register as usual (like using google or Facebook login for example).
I think I’ll try the Procourse plugin and see if it can give us what we need.
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It would be nice to have other login options, but it hasn’t proven to be a problem on my site. I like that Memberful is supported by a solid company (it would seem), and seeing that the discourse league site is down I would be a little concerned about using Procourse into the future. It is open source but I don’t want to pay a developer to keep it going.
How does the integration with ConvertKit works?
Thanks @davidkingham for your detailed post.
I looked at Memberful a couple of years ago. My conclusion at that time was not to proceed because the only way of becoming a member was directly through their individual subscription process.
In our situation, We need to also give access to members of teams whose membership is paid for by companies who are our clients. Having gone back to Memberful’s site because of your post, it seems that they now have “group subscriptions” and “external payments”.
On their pricing page they state “Only available for group subscriptions, external payments is a setting to allow specific subscriptions to be manually paid through external means (wire transfer, cheque, etc). They are not subject to our regular transaction fee, but there is a $.20 monthly charge for each externally paid seat in use.
Coupled with the higher subscription rate, this seems an entirely reasonable fee for the provision of their service.
Thanks again for taking the time to post about your experience. If I proceed with Memberful, will it be OK to ask you a couple more questions?
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Sure thing, I will certainly help if I can!
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Awesome details @davidkingham.
Can you tell how you created the Free Memberful plan please? I’m trying to and there’s a minimum charge of £0.60.
Thanks!
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In Memberful go to Settings > Plans > Allow new members to sign up on your website for free.
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@davidkingham I’m considering jumping from Patreon to Memberful + Stripe. This would allow me to post my premium content on my WP site, and my Discourse site is on a subdomain at my WP site. So, all content in 1 area, which in theory should make a better user experience and help create more subscribers over the long run.
My question is, what was the process for you setting things up? Looks like SSO would be needed to in some fashion. Are your users created in WP and pushed to Discourse or the other way? Is there a delay there I should be prepared for?
I’m not a developer by any means so trying to see what I’d need to do in order to facilitate this switch on my side.
Hey Ross, it’s very simple to set up, just a few SSO setting to put into discourse, then setting up a page on WP where people can sign up, I just used some buttons with memberful links. The new member is created in memberful which in turn creates a user in wordpress and discourse. Memberful can assign users to groups on discourse based upon which plan they sign up for so you can restrict categories, and of course the same for wordpress. I’m quite happy with it and their customer service is fantastic too.
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Thank you, David. That is music to my ears! I’ll be sure to reach out should I have any issues along the way!
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@davidkingham One question: What about existing members? If they have already registered as part of my current discourse community, how should I handle that?