The writing is the easy part to explain. The paid side isn’t. Put it on a newsletter platform and it’s quick to start, but the publication lives on their platform and a share of every subscription goes with it. Put it on your own site and you’re suddenly the person configuring paywalls, tiers and renewal emails instead of writing the next piece.
A publication’s product is its rhythm: new work keeps arriving, and the free pieces exist to prove the writing is worth paying to keep reading. So the setup is fiddly in a particular way. Which pieces stay free? What does a subscriber get that a free reader doesn’t? Is there a higher tier for the readers who want to back the work?
And once it’s running, the quiet failures cost more than the setup did. A renewal reminder gets switched off somewhere along the way and nobody notices until the renewals don’t come in. A tier stops converting. When you’re the only person running it, those are the things that slip.
MemberPress.ai builds the paid side of your publication on your own WordPress site, from a conversation, and you approve that setup up front, in one step. The reader tiers go live as they’re created, so you won’t see them first; the signup pages and a course arrive as drafts for you to review. What it sets up:
Keep writing and sending the way you do now. MemberPress.ai handles who’s paid and whether they renew.
Substack and Patreon make going paid genuinely quick. Substack takes care of the newsletter, the paywall and the app, and it can put your writing in front of new readers through its own discovery. Patreon adds memberships, tiers, video, chat and exportable email lists. Both say you own your subscriber list.
The trade-off is that both keep a share of what you earn, plus payment processing, and the publication lives on their platform. MemberPress.ai runs on a WordPress site you own, with your payment gateway and your reader list staying yours.
AI-generated illustrative persona, not a real customer
Publisher · A paid investing newsletter
Tariq publishes a paid investing newsletter with a high-ticket annual tier. His site was already working, so this wasn’t a rescue. Somewhere along the way his renewal reminders had been switched off, and renewals were slipping away without him seeing it.
View the full profile→No. Keep your email tool and your writing routine. MemberPress.ai sets up and runs the paid side: the tiers and renewals.
Yes. MemberPress’s access rules, which you set, decide what each tier can read, and the free preview tier exists so new readers can sample the writing before they pay.
It reads your own members and revenue and flags what’s quietly costing you money, like a renewal reminder that’s been switched off, with a fix you approve. You get answers about your own publication, not generic advice.
Yes. On any plan, connect Claude, ChatGPT or another AI assistant to your site’s own endpoint and run the site from there; ChatGPT needs a one-time setting on your site before it can sign in. Connecting Claude or ChatGPT to your MemberPress.ai account for the advisor is on the paid plan. The same approvals apply either way.
Connect your site, tell it what you publish, and approve the setup; the tiers go live as they’re created. Then get back to the next piece.
The paid front door, the tiers and the renewals for your community, on a site you own.
Turn what you already teach into a real course, on a site you own.