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?
Would love to hear what you learnt @davidkingham too…
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 Ich überlege, von Patreon zu Memberful + Stripe zu wechseln. Das würde mir ermöglichen, meine Premium-Inhalte auf meiner WordPress-Seite zu veröffentlichen, während meine Discourse-Seite auf einer Subdomain meiner WordPress-Seite läuft. So wäre der gesamte Inhalt an einem Ort, was theoretisch zu einer besseren Benutzererfahrung führen und langfristig mehr Abonnenten generieren sollte.
Meine Frage ist: Wie war der Prozess für dich beim Einrichten? Es scheint, als ob SSO in irgendeiner Form erforderlich wäre. Werden deine Benutzer in WordPress erstellt und dann zu Discourse übertragen oder umgekehrt? Gibt es dabei eine Verzögerung, auf die ich mich einstellen sollte?
Ich bin in keiner Weise Entwickler, daher versuche ich herauszufinden, was ich tun müsste, um diesen Wechsel auf meiner Seite zu ermöglichen.
Hey Ross, die Einrichtung ist ganz einfach: Du musst nur ein paar SSO-Einstellungen in Discourse vornehmen und dann eine Seite in WordPress erstellen, auf der sich Nutzer anmelden können. Ich habe dafür einfach einige Buttons mit Memberful-Links verwendet. Der neue Member wird in Memberful erstellt, was wiederum einen Benutzer in WordPress und Discourse anlegt. Memberful kann Benutzer basierend auf dem gewählten Tarif bestimmten Gruppen in Discourse zuordnen, sodass du Kategorien einschränken kannst – und natürlich gilt dasselbe für WordPress. Ich bin sehr zufrieden damit, und ihr Kundenservice ist auch fantastisch.
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Vielen Dank, David. Das sind genau die Worte, die ich hören wollte! Falls ich unterwegs auf Probleme stoße, melde ich mich gerne bei dir!
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@davidkingham Eine Frage: Wie sieht es mit bestehenden Mitgliedern aus? Wenn sie sich bereits als Teil meiner aktuellen Discourse-Community registriert haben, wie sollte ich damit umgehen?