The $500/Month Membership Isn't Rare. It's One in Nine.

Ask most membership operators if they could charge $500 a month, and the answer comes fast: no, that’s for masterminds and high-ticket coaches, not us.

In our thirteen years working with the top membership sites in the world, that instinct is wrong more often than it’s right. About one in nine of the plans we’ve seen price at $500 a month or more. That’s not a handful of outliers propping up an average — it’s a real, populated tier.

The barbell, recalibrated

The pricing barbell still has two real ends: a high-volume tier under $20 a month, and a premium tier at $500 or more. What’s changed is which end operators get wrong.

Only around a third of the plans we’ve seen land under $20 a month — thinner than the “price low, win on volume” instinct assumes. The premium end, the one everyone treats as reserved for a handful of unicorns, holds about one in nine.

Why the premium end gets underpriced

The cheap tier feels safe because it’s a small, easy decision. Nobody has to think hard about a sub-$20 charge, so it’s the default operators reach for without testing anything higher. The premium tier feels risky for the opposite reason: it’s a big, visible ask, and it’s easy to imagine everyone saying no.

But “easy to imagine” isn’t the same as “true.” One in nine of the plans we’ve seen already made that ask, and it worked. The premium tier isn’t a fantasy reserved for a lucky few. It’s a normal, populated outcome for a business that builds the offer to match it.

Pick an end, on purpose

Both ends of the barbell are real. What doesn’t work is assuming you already know which one is realistic for your business without testing it. If you’ve never tried pricing above $100 a month, the thirty-four/eleven split says you might be leaving the bigger tier on the table by default, not by choice.