You started it because people kept asking for a place to talk about this one thing, and they came. Now some of them want to back it, and you want to pay for the time it takes. But charging means choosing a platform, pricing tiers, gating the good parts and chasing renewals, and every option you’ve looked at either takes a percentage of each sale on most plans or means building it all yourself.
A community’s value comes from the other members, not from you delivering something downward the way a course or a coaching program does. That makes the paid version hard to shape. What does a free visitor get to see? What does a paying member unlock? Is there a way for the members who love it most to support it at a higher level, without it feeling like a velvet rope?
Each of those is a decision and a setup job: a tier, a price, a page that explains it, a rule about who can open what. The platforms that make it easy do it by hosting the whole community for you, on their terms. The alternative, a site of your own, usually means an evening of plugin settings you never get to.
MemberPress.ai builds the membership side of your community on your own WordPress site, from a conversation. Tell it who the community is for and what members do together, and you approve a starting setup up front, in one step. The tiers go live as they’re created, so you won’t see them first; the pages and a course arrive as drafts you review before you publish them. What it sets up:
MemberPress.ai sets up the tiers and runs who has paid and when they renew. It doesn’t host the conversation itself. Point members to wherever your community already talks.
Most community builders look at Circle, Mighty Networks or Skool, and they’re good at what they do. The community, the courses, events and payments all live in one place, Circle adds phone and desktop apps, and there’s no limit on how many members you have. For a community that’s mostly conversation, that’s a lot handled for you, and they host the conversation itself, which MemberPress.ai doesn’t.
The trade-off is that the community lives on their platform, and most plans add a percentage of each sale to the plan fee, a smaller one on the bigger plans. MemberPress.ai runs on a WordPress site you own: your member list and your payment gateway stay yours, and the site is yours to keep however you grow. Your members keep talking wherever they talk now; MemberPress.ai runs who has paid and when they renew.
AI-generated illustrative persona, not a real customer
Founder · Studio Signal
Nadia runs Studio Signal, a paid community for freelance designers. She was comparing Circle and Skool side by side against building her own on WordPress, and she didn’t want any tool changing her site without her seeing it first.
View the full profile→No. It sets up and runs the paid side: the tiers and renewals. Keep your members talking wherever they talk now, and link to it from the members’ pages.
Yes. The starting setup has a free level for exactly that, and you decide which pages it can open.
Setup runs on one up-front approval, and its tiers go live as they’re created. After that, new tiers and membership changes preview as a dry run you approve first. Anything it writes for you, like a page, lands as an unpublished draft that nobody sees until you publish it. Refunds and subscription changes ask a second time. It works on your own site, on your own login.
Setup doesn’t move members over from another platform. It builds the tiers on your own WordPress site; bringing your existing paying members across is up to you, outside MemberPress.ai.
Connect your site, tell it what your community is about, and approve the setup; the tiers go live as they’re created. Then get back to the part that made people show up: the community.
Reader tiers and renewals that keep running, on a site you own.
Finish the coaching site you already paid for, and get to your first paying client.