You can run a membership site on Squarespace, on any website plan, and for a lot of people it is the right answer. What almost no comparison tells you first is the part that decides your bill: Squarespace takes a percentage of what your members pay you, the rate depends on which plan you are on, and it is charged on top of the monthly subscription rather than instead of it.
Disclosure: we make Drry, which sells memberships and takes 0% of them. We have tried to write the Squarespace half the way somebody who likes Squarespace would recognise, because the fee is a strong enough argument on its own.
What do Squarespace member sites include?
The feature is Member Sites, still filed under member areas in places, which is why both names turn up when you search. You put pages, blog posts, course pages, a video library or even a store behind a paywall, and sell access three ways: a free signup that collects an email, a one-time payment for permanent access, or a subscription.
- Courses are first-class. Chapters and lessons in an order, video, text and images, and members see their progress. This is a real course product, not a folder of files.
- The site is the best part. Your own domain, included for the first year on annual billing, and a site that looks entirely yours. Nothing else in this category is as good at the public half.
- Several levels work. You can run more than one membership at different prices with different content behind each, which is more than some dedicated platforms manage.
What is missing from a Squarespace membership site?
The things people reach for a few months in and do not find are a real members' feed, course structure (drip, prerequisites, quizzes), and tiered access beyond simple paid-or-not. None of these are reasons not to start on Squarespace. They are what people ask for a few months in, once the membership is working, and they are worth knowing before you build.
- A members’ feed. Squarespace’s gated-content documentation describes what you publish and they read. No forum, no member-to-member messaging, and nothing they post into. Blog comments are the nearest thing, and they are a conversation attached to your writing.
- Drip, prerequisites and graded quizzes. The help centre’s own answer on quizzes is to build one out of accordion blocks, question in the title, answer in the text below. Timed release and prerequisites are not in the course documentation.
- A private podcast feed. Ruled out rather than missing: the podcasting documentation says a podcast sitting in a member site or behind a paywall cannot be submitted to Apple Podcasts at all.
- Transcripts you did not write. Captions are real and they are YouTube’s or Vimeo’s, turned on for a video you embedded having made them somewhere else. Nothing is transcribed for you.
- Per-member revenue. Commerce reporting shows sales. What each person has paid you over their whole time with you, sitting next to their name, is a membership report rather than a store one.
What is a better alternative for a membership site?
Drry is built around the half Squarespace keeps light: a members’ feed, courses with drip and prerequisites and graded quizzes, guides, audio, events and email, in one branded space. It takes 0% of member payments on every plan including the free one, the free plan holds up to 100 members with no card, paid plans start at $29 a month, and the money lands in your own Stripe account.
The honest limit: it is not a website builder. If you need a portfolio, a brochure site, or a shop for physical goods, Squarespace is better at that and it is not close. A common and sensible split is to keep the Squarespace site as the public shopfront and move only the paid membership, which also moves the percentage.
The full side-by-side, every dimension, is on our Squarespace comparison page.
Questions coaches ask
Can you build a membership site on Squarespace?
Yes, on any website plan, and it is a decent way to do it. The feature is called Member Sites, and the help centre still files it under member areas in places, which is why both names turn up. You put pages, blog posts, course pages, a video library or a store behind a paywall and sell access as a free signup, a one-time payment, or a subscription. Where it costs you is the transaction fee on what members pay, which varies by plan and is charged on top of the monthly subscription.
How much does Squarespace take from a membership?
Squarespace files member sites, courses and memberships under digital products and charges a transaction fee on them. The rate is steepest on the entry plan and reaches zero only on the dearest one. Higher again is an older site still on a legacy plan, without the separate Digital Products plan that selling them used to need and that Squarespace stopped signing anybody up to in July 2026. The current figures, and the date we checked them, are in the box at the top of this page. The fee sits on top of the monthly website plan, and it is taken before payment processing takes its own cut.
Is Squarespace or a dedicated platform better for a membership?
It depends which half of the job is bigger. If the public site is the point and the membership is a gated corner of it, Squarespace is genuinely hard to beat and you should stay. If the membership is the business, the things you reach for next are the ones a website builder does not have: a members' feed, drip and prerequisites, transcripts, per-member revenue. Drry is built around that half and takes 0% of member payments on every plan including the free one, and plenty of people keep the Squarespace site as their shopfront.
Can members talk to each other on a Squarespace membership site?
Not inside the member site. Squarespace's own gated-content documentation describes what you publish and they read, and describes no forum, no member-to-member messaging, and nothing they post into. You can turn comments on under a blog post, which is a conversation attached to your writing rather than a room of their own.
Does Squarespace do drip content, prerequisites, or graded quizzes?
Not as features. Courses have chapters and lessons in an order and members see their progress, which covers a lot of real teaching. But the help centre's own answer on quizzes is to build one out of accordion blocks, with the question as the title and the answer in the text underneath, so nothing is graded and there is no pass mark. Timed release off a join date, and prerequisites that hold a lesson shut until the one before is finished, are not described in the course documentation.