For community builders

The community is real. The money side is still a spreadsheet and a rented platform.

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.

Where paid communities stall

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.

What it sets up

Describe your community. It builds the paid side around it.

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:

  • Three membership levels to start from. A free level for visitors, a paid member level, and an annual founding level for the members who want to back the community rather than get more out of it. What each level can open is yours to set, with MemberPress’s access rules.
  • A way in for every tier. Setup drafts MemberPress’s own join, checkout, login and account pages for you to publish. Connect Stripe or PayPal in MemberPress’s payment settings and the paid tiers can take money.
  • Renewals someone is watching. Once members start joining, it reads your own members and revenue and flags what you’d miss running it alone, like a renewal reminder that’s been switched off, with a one-click fix you approve.

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.

The alternative you’re weighing

Circle, Mighty or Skool, or a site you own

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.

A community builder weighing the platforms

Illustrated portrait of Nadia Okafor

Nadia Okafor

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→

Questions community builders ask

Does MemberPress.ai host the discussion?

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.

Can I keep a free tier so new people can look around?

Yes. The starting setup has a free level for exactly that, and you decide which pages it can open.

What stops it changing my site without me?

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.

I already have members paying somewhere else. Do I start from scratch?

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.

Give your community a front door you own

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.

More on who MemberPress.ai is for