Search for membership portals and you get a dozen lists of fifteen products, ranked mostly by which vendor pays best. They compare the same surface features in the same order, and almost none of them say the thing that actually decides this: a membership portal has three jobs, most products are strong at one of them, and the one you need to be strongest is a function of what you are selling rather than of what scores well in a table.
The three jobs
Every product in this category is some mix of these. Reading a comparison is easier once you know which mix you are looking at.
- Collect money on a schedule. Recurring billing, renewals, failed cards, upgrades, cancellations, and the dunning email nobody enjoys writing. Association-flavoured tools tend to be strongest here, because dues and renewals are their origin.
- Lock the content. Members who are current get in, members who are not do not. The important question is where the lock lives, which almost no comparison asks about. See below.
- Be worth coming back to. Discussion, events, new material, a reason to open the tab on a Tuesday. This is the job that decides whether people renew, and it is the one that gets the least space in a feature table because it is hardest to reduce to a tick.
The question nobody in a roundup asks: where is the lock?
There are two ways to gate content, they look identical in a demo, and only one of them is a lock.
The first hides the item in the interface. The lesson does not appear in the menu, the download is not listed, and as far as the member can see it is not there. The file, though, is still sitting at a URL, and that URL works for anybody who has it. One member who shares a link in a group chat has given away the thing you are charging for, and you will not find out.
The second checks entitlement on the server, every time the file is requested. The video, the transcript, the attachments and the body are all refused unless that particular member is allowed them. There is no URL to pass around, because the URL does not work for anyone else.
What the pricing pages leave out
Three costs are routinely absent from the page that is supposed to tell you the cost.
- The cut of member payments. Several platforms take a percentage of everything your members pay you, on top of the monthly plan, and several do not print it on the pricing page at all. It is usually in the help centre. Because it scales with your revenue, it is the number that matters most and it is the one hardest to find.
- What is an add-on. Email to your members is frequently priced separately and by list size, which means the cost of telling people you published something grows with the audience you built. Extra admin seats are often metered too.
- Whether the free plan is free after you earn. Of the 16 platforms we track prices for, 11 record no free plan at all, and some that do open free start charging a percentage the moment money moves. A free plan that stops being free at your first sale is a trial with better marketing.
The arithmetic that decides flat against percentage
This is the whole cost comparison, and it fits in one line. A flat monthly plan and a percentage of member payments cost the same at exactly one revenue figure. Below it the percentage is cheaper, unless the flat plan is free at your size, which removes the crossover altogether. Above it the percentage is more expensive, and it keeps getting worse, because the fee grows with precisely the thing you are working to grow.
Against a $99 a month flat plan, a 10% cut breaks even at about $990 a month in member payments. At twice that revenue the percentage costs twice the flat plan. At ten times it costs ten times, for the same software. Work out where you expect to be in a year rather than where you are this week. If the platform owns the payment relationship rather than you, switching later can mean asking every member to re-enter a card.
Which shape do you need?
- Dues, renewals and a directory. A club, association or professional body. Job one dominates. Look at the membership-management tools, which handle renewals, lapsed states and member records properly, and accept that the community half will be thin.
- A course library people subscribe to. Job two dominates, so the lock question above is the one to press on, and drip release matters more than it sounds like it will.
- A community with content in it. Job three dominates, and it is the most common shape for coaches and creators. The risk here is buying a course platform with a discussion tab bolted beside the lessons, which is not the same product as somewhere people talk.
A short checklist before you pay for a year
- What percentage of member payments does it take, and where is that written down?
- Does a locked file refuse a direct link, or is it only hidden from the menu?
- Whose payment processor is it? If members ever move, do they re-enter a card?
- Can you export your member and contact lists in full, today, without asking?
- Is emailing your own members included, or priced by list size?
- Does the free plan stay free once money moves?
Questions coaches ask
What is a membership portal?
A membership portal is the logged-in area where the people who pay you get what they paid for. In practice it has to do three jobs at once: take money on a recurring schedule, lock content to the people whose payments are current, and give those people somewhere worth returning to. A tool that does only the first is a payment processor, and one that does only the third is a forum.
What is the difference between a membership portal and a membership site?
Nothing meaningful, and the two phrases are used interchangeably by the products themselves. Portal is the older term and tends to appear around associations, clubs and organisations that also manage dues and renewals; membership site is more common among creators and coaches. Look at what a product actually does rather than which of the two words it uses.
How much should a membership portal cost?
There are two shapes, and the sticker price does not tell you which is cheaper. Flat-fee platforms charge a monthly plan and nothing on what your members pay. Percentage platforms charge less, or nothing, up front and take a cut of every payment. The two cross over at one revenue figure: against a $99 flat plan, a 10% cut costs the same at about $990 a month in member payments, and above that the percentage is the more expensive product for ever. Check whether the flat plan is FREE at your size first, though, because that removes the crossover rather than moving it: ours is $0 and 0% up to 100 members, so there is no revenue below which a percentage beats it.
Do I need a separate tool for courses and community?
Increasingly not, and running two is where most of the hidden cost lives. Two tools means two logins for your members, two bills, two member lists that drift apart, and the job of working out who cancelled where. If your membership is content plus conversation, which most are, a product that does both natively is worth more than a slightly better version of either half.
Can I move a membership portal to a different platform later?
You can, but two things decide how painful it is, and neither appears on a pricing page. The first is whether the payment relationship is yours: if members subscribe through your own Stripe account, they move with you, and if they subscribe through the platform's, you are asking every member to re-enter a card. The second is whether you can export your member and contact lists in full. Check both before you commit, not after.
Does Drry charge a fee on member payments?
No. Members subscribe through your own Stripe account, so only Stripe's ordinary processing fee applies and the rest is yours, on every plan including the free one. The free plan runs to 100 members with no card; Creator is $29 a month and adds a custom domain and white label, and Growth is $99 a month and adds multiple membership levels.