Memberful
The membership billing layer for a community you host somewhere else
Memberful is a white label membership and subscription platform, owned by Patreon since 2018, that handles checkout, recurring billing, and access control for independent creators and publishers, then automatically grants and revokes entitlements in the places their audience actually gathers: Discord server roles, Discourse forum groups, WordPress content, private podcast feeds, and email tools; it costs $49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction fee on Stripe payments you receive into your own account, with unlimited members on every plan.
Overview
Memberful is not a community platform in the sense that Circle or Skool are. It does not host discussion. What it does is answer the question every creator running a free Discord eventually asks: how do I charge for this without turning my community into a spreadsheet of who paid and who did not. Memberful sits in front of your existing community as the paywall, the checkout, and the entitlement engine, and its Discord and Discourse integrations do the actual work of adding, tiering, and removing people automatically.
It was founded in 2013 by Drew Strojny, and Patreon acquired it in August 2018 along with the entire seven person team, specifically to have a white label answer for creators who did not want their audience to live on patreon.com. That positioning has held. Where Patreon puts your membership on Patreon's domain inside Patreon's discovery ecosystem and takes 10 percent, Memberful puts it on your domain under your brand, pays into your own Stripe account, and takes 4.9 percent.
The Discord integration is the specific reason this product belongs in a community platforms comparison. Memberful assigns server roles based on which plan a member holds, sends the invite immediately after checkout, and removes roles or removes the member outright when a subscription lapses, all without a bot you have to maintain. The Discourse integration does the equivalent for forum groups. If your community already exists and works, this is the cheapest honest way to put a payment in front of it.
The cost structure is the thing to model carefully. $49 a month plus 4.9 percent to Memberful, on top of roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents to Stripe, means about 7.8 percent plus 30 cents of every charge before you count the subscription. That is cheaper than Patreon's 10 percent plus processing, but considerably more expensive than Podia or Teachable at zero platform fee, and the gap widens as you grow. At $50,000 a month in member revenue, Memberful costs roughly $4,250 where Podia costs roughly $1,900.
Best for
Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform.
Not the right fit for
- Anyone who does not already have somewhere for the community to live. Memberful hosts no discussion at all, so buying it without a Discord, a Discourse, or a WordPress site gets you a checkout and nothing to sell.
- High volume membership businesses. At 4.9 percent plus Stripe on top, a business doing $50,000 a month pays roughly $4,250, against about $1,900 on Podia or Teachable, which is a $28,000 a year difference for the same members.
- Creators who want courses. There is no course builder, no lesson structure, no progress tracking, and no certificates; Memberful sells access, not curriculum.
- Teams that want one vendor. This is deliberately a component, so you are also running and paying for Discord or Discourse, a podcast host, a website, and an email tool.
- Buyers who need published pricing above the Standard plan. Everything past $49 a month is an Enterprise conversation with no numbers on the page.
How it works
- 1
You sign up free and build the membership before paying anything. Memberful does not charge until you go live and start accepting payments, which is a genuinely fair trial model rather than a countdown clock.
- 2
You connect your own Stripe account. This is the structural difference from most platforms here: money goes into your Stripe, under your merchant relationship, and Memberful collects its 4.9 percent rather than sitting between you and your customers as the merchant of record.
- 3
You define plans. Monthly, annual, and custom billing periods, one time purchases, free and paid trials, group plans for teams buying multiple seats, gift memberships, coupons, and retention discounts are all native. Checkout supports Apple Pay and Google Pay and is translated into fifteen languages with global tax collection.
- 4
You connect the places your community actually lives. Discord assigns server roles per plan and revokes them on lapse. Discourse maps plans onto forum groups. WordPress gates posts and pages through a plugin. Your podcast host gets an unlisted RSS feed per member for a private show. Mailchimp and Kit receive the member list.
- 5
You put the paywall on your own site. Dynamic paywalls, landing pages, a newsletter builder, custom domains, and custom themes mean the member facing experience is yours, not a vendor's, which is the entire reason Patreon bought this company.
- 6
You run it from the dashboard: growth metrics, churn, retention discounts, cancellation surveys, a referral program, member custom fields, and the API and webhooks for anything the native integrations do not cover.
Feature breakdown
24 features in 4 modulesCommunity access control
The reason to buy it: entitlements that follow a subscription into someone else's community software.- Discord role assignment
- Memberful assigns Discord server roles based on which plan a member holds, so a $5 tier and a $25 tier land in different channels automatically, with no bot for you to build or maintain.
- Automatic Discord invite at checkout
- New members receive their server invite immediately after payment, which removes the manual invite step that kills conversion on hand rolled setups.
- Automatic revocation on lapse
- When a subscription fails or cancels, roles are removed and, depending on your settings, the member is removed from the server entirely. This is the single most tedious job in a paid Discord and Memberful does it silently.
- Discourse group mapping
- Plans map onto Discourse groups, so a paid forum category opens and closes with the subscription without a moderator touching anything.
- WordPress content gating
- An official plugin paywalls posts, pages, and categories by plan, which is how most independent publishers use Memberful.
- Private podcast feeds
- Memberful does not host audio but generates an unlisted, per member RSS feed against your existing podcast host, so members listen in their normal podcast app and the feed dies when the subscription does.
Checkout and subscriptions
A serious billing product, which is what you are actually paying 4.9 percent for.- Your own Stripe account
- Payments settle into your Stripe under your merchant relationship rather than the vendor's, which means your subscription data is portable in a way it is not on almost any other platform in this category.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay
- Wallet checkout on mobile, which measurably improves conversion for impulse memberships.
- Free and paid trials
- Trial periods on any plan, so a paid Discord can offer seven days before charging.
- Group plans
- One buyer purchasing multiple seats and distributing them, which is how a company sponsors its team into a professional community.
- Gift memberships
- Purchasable as a gift with a redemption flow, a small feature that matters disproportionately for publisher memberships.
- Coupons, discounts, and custom fields
- Standard promotional mechanics plus custom data collected at signup, which feeds segmentation downstream.
- Global tax collection
- Tax handled at checkout across jurisdictions, with the checkout itself translated into fifteen languages.
- Flexible billing periods
- Monthly, annual, and custom intervals, plus one time purchases, on the same member record.
Retention and growth
The dashboard is aimed at churn, not at engagement.- Growth metrics
- Recurring revenue, new members, churn, and lifetime value reporting, which is more subscription analytics than any community platform here ships.
- Retention discounts
- Offer a reduced rate at the moment someone clicks cancel, which is a proven and slightly cynical mechanic that most creator tools do not automate.
- Cancellation surveys
- Capture why people leave at the point of leaving, rather than guessing from an export three months later.
- Referral program
- Members refer members with tracking built in, no third party affiliate tool required.
- Dunning and card updates
- Failed payment retries and card update prompts, handled automatically, which is where a meaningful share of involuntary churn is recovered.
Your own front end
White label by design, which is the whole reason Patreon bought it.- Custom domain
- The checkout and member account area serve from your domain, so the payment experience does not advertise a third party.
- Dynamic paywalls
- Show different content, prompts, or offers depending on whether the visitor is anonymous, free, or on a particular paid plan.
- Website and newsletter builder
- Landing pages and a newsletter tool included, for creators who do not already have a site, though it is not a substitute for a real CMS.
- Custom themes
- The member facing pages are themeable in your own design rather than a vendor template with a logo swap.
- API and webhooks
- A documented API plus webhooks and OAuth single sign on against your own application, which is how larger publishers wire Memberful into a custom site.
Use cases
4 documentedPodcaster with a free Discord who wants to charge
Two thousand people in a Discord, an ad supported show, and no way to sell a supporter tier without manually inviting and removing people every month.
Memberful sells a $7 monthly plan on the podcast's own site, invites buyers into Discord automatically with a supporter role, generates a private ad free RSS feed per member, and strips the role when the card fails.
Independent publisher paywalling WordPress
A WordPress news site needs a metered paywall, recurring billing, gift subscriptions, and a members only forum, without handing 10 percent to Patreon or moving to Substack.
The WordPress plugin gates articles by plan, Discourse groups open for paying members, gift memberships and group plans cover the corporate buyers, and revenue settles into the publisher's own Stripe account.
Professional community running on Discourse
A well established forum with a healthy free tier wants a paid inner circle, and rebuilding the whole community on Circle would destroy years of indexed discussion.
Memberful maps paid plans onto Discourse groups so the private categories open and close automatically, and the public forum keeps its search rankings intact because nothing moved.
Newsletter writer adding a members only community
The list is on Kit, the newsletter is the product, and the community should be a benefit rather than a second platform to run.
Memberful handles the paid tier, syncs paying members to Kit for segmentation, and drops them into a Discord server with the right role, with the writer keeping their own Stripe and their own domain throughout.
Pricing
from $49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction feeA single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $49 per month, plus 4.9 percent of transactions |
The only published price. Everything on the feature list is included; there is no feature gating below Enterprise. |
| Enterprise | Custom quoted by sales |
The only route to a lower percentage, and the only sales gated part of the product. |
Billing notes
- Prices reviewed in August 2026. Memberful simplified to a single $49 plan plus 4.9 percent, replacing an older three tier structure that included a free plan at a higher percentage.
- The 4.9 percent is on top of Stripe's own fee, not instead of it. Budget roughly 7.8 percent plus 30 cents per charge in the United States, before the subscription.
- Model it. At $5,000 a month in member revenue with 100 transactions, you pay $245 to Memberful plus roughly $175 to Stripe plus $49 subscription, about $469, or 9.4 percent of revenue. At $50,000 a month with 1,000 transactions, you pay $2,450 plus roughly $1,750 plus $49, about $4,249, or 8.5 percent. Unlike platforms with a flat fee, the cost barely improves with scale.
- That makes Memberful roughly half the price of Patreon at 10 percent plus processing, and roughly twice the price of Podia or Teachable at 0 percent plus processing, at any volume.
- The trial is genuinely free rather than time limited: you build the whole membership and are only charged once you go live and take money.
- There are no member seat limits, no admin seat limits, and no feature gating on the Standard plan, which is the cleanest price list in this category.
- Because payments settle into your own Stripe account, leaving Memberful does not automatically mean asking members to re-enter card details, which is a real and underrated saving that most competitors cannot match.
Value assessment: Memberful is excellent value at small scale and poor value at large scale, and you should decide which one you are. A podcaster doing $2,000 a month gets a genuinely well built billing system, automatic Discord entitlements, private podcast feeds, gift and group plans, retention discounts, and their own Stripe account for about $150 all in, which is fair. The same creator at $50,000 a month is handing over roughly $51,000 a year in fees for software that hosts nothing, when Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat $84 to $189 a month. The counterargument is real but narrow: nothing else automates Discord and Discourse entitlements this cleanly, nothing else keeps your Stripe relationship intact, and if your community is already thriving somewhere free, Memberful is the only product here that does not ask you to move it. Buy it as plumbing, negotiate Enterprise pricing the moment you pass roughly $20,000 a month, and never buy it expecting a community product.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- The Discord integration is the best in this category: roles assigned by plan, invites sent at checkout, and access revoked automatically on lapse, with no bot to maintain.
- Discourse group mapping means an existing, search indexed forum can grow a paid tier without migrating and losing its rankings, which no all in one platform can offer.
- Payments settle into your own Stripe account, so your subscription data and merchant relationship stay yours and leaving does not force every member to re-enter a card.
- Genuinely white label. Custom domain, custom themes, and dynamic paywalls mean the vendor is invisible to members, which is why Patreon bought it as its non Patreon.com answer.
- The billing feature set is deeper than any community platform here: group plans, gifts, trials, custom billing intervals, retention discounts, cancellation surveys, dunning, and a referral program.
- One published price with unlimited members, no seat limits, and no feature gating, plus a trial that only ends when you start taking money.
- Private podcast feeds generated against your existing host, so a paid audio tier works in normal podcast apps rather than in a proprietary player.
Limitations
- It hosts no community at all. Without Discord, Discourse, or WordPress already in place, there is nothing for the paywall to protect.
- The 4.9 percent fee does not improve with scale on the published plan, so the effective cost stays near 8.5 percent of revenue at any volume unless you negotiate Enterprise.
- No courses, no lessons, no progress tracking, and no certificates, so a course business needs a different product entirely.
- No mobile app of any kind, branded or otherwise; the member experience is the web plus whatever Discord or Discourse provides.
- No events product, no live streaming, and no native discussion, so every engagement feature is somebody else's job.
- Only one published price. Anything beyond $49 a month requires a sales conversation with no numbers on the page.
- Being owned by Patreon means the roadmap serves Patreon's white label strategy, and Memberful has changed slowly since the acquisition.
Head-to-head comparisons
6 alternativesMemberful vs Patreon
from $0 to start, then 10 percent of earnings plus processingSame owner, opposite philosophy. Patreon takes 10 percent plus processing, hosts everything on patreon.com, and gives you access to its discovery ecosystem and a large mobile app your members already have. Memberful takes 4.9 percent, hosts nothing, and puts the whole experience on your domain in your Stripe account. If you need discovery and want zero setup, Patreon. If you already have an audience and a community and want to own the relationship, Memberful, at roughly half the fee.
Full Memberful vs Patreon comparisonMemberful vs Discord
from $0These are complements, not alternatives, and Memberful's Discord integration is the best implementation of that pairing available. Discord hosts the community for free; Memberful charges for it, assigns roles by tier, and removes access when payment fails. The alternative is Discord's own Server Subscriptions, which take 10 percent and lock you into Discord's checkout and its app store fees on mobile. Memberful takes 4.9 percent and keeps the customer relationship yours.
Full Memberful vs Discord comparisonMemberful vs Discourse
from $0 (self-hosted, or the free managed plan), then $100 per month for Pro managed hostingAlso complements. Discourse is the discussion platform with the best moderation, spam tooling, and search indexing in this category, and Memberful supplies the paid tier by mapping plans onto Discourse groups. If you run a public Discourse forum that ranks well and want a paid inner circle without rebuilding on Circle, this pairing preserves everything you have built.
Full Memberful vs Discourse comparisonMemberful vs Circle
from $89 per month (Professional)Circle at $89 hosts the community, the courses, the events, and the billing in one product and takes 2 percent. Memberful at $49 plus 4.9 percent hosts nothing and does the billing better. Circle is cheaper in total at meaningful revenue and far simpler to run. Choose Memberful only when your community already exists somewhere you do not want to leave, which is a genuine and common situation, not a rationalization.
Full Memberful vs Circle comparisonMemberful vs Flarum
from $0 for the software, plus roughly $5 to $20 per month for hostingThe pairing for anyone who wants to own the forum outright and still charge for part of it. Flarum is free, self hosted, MIT licensed, and fully indexed by Google, and Memberful supplies the checkout and recurring billing on top. The catch is that Memberful's native integrations target Discord, Discourse, and WordPress rather than Flarum, so you need an SSO extension in between. Technical operators often skip Memberful entirely here and wire Stripe directly, which costs 2.9 percent instead of 7.8 percent.
Full Memberful vs Flarum comparisonMemberful vs Ghost
from $18/mo billed yearly (Starter, up to 1,000 members); $0 to self-host plus infrastructureGhost is the closest philosophical cousin: open source, own your domain, own your Stripe, no platform fee at all. Ghost is a publishing platform with memberships built in, so if your product is writing, Ghost is cheaper and more complete. Memberful is the better fit when the paid thing is community access across Discord, Discourse, and a podcast rather than a publication.
Full Memberful vs Ghost comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- A few hours. Connecting Stripe, defining plans, embedding the checkout, and authorizing the Discord or Discourse integration are each a small task, and nothing needs to be designed from scratch because the member facing pages are themeable templates.
- Learning curve
- Low if you already run the community, moderate if you do not, because Memberful assumes you understand your own stack. There is no discussion product to learn, only plans, entitlements, and integrations.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self serve on the Standard plan, and free until you go live and take payment. Enterprise adds implementation and migration support.
- Migration notes
- Moving in is unusually clean because Memberful connects to your existing Stripe account, so an existing Stripe subscriber base can often be adopted without asking anyone to re-enter payment details. Existing members import as CSV and can be matched to plans. Moving out is equally clean by the standards of this category: the subscriptions live in your Stripe, and member and plan data export as CSV. There is no community archive to worry about because Memberful never held one, which is the underappreciated advantage of a component over a platform.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- WebMembers access benefits through your site, Discord, Discourse, WordPress, or their podcast app
- API
- A documented REST API plus webhooks and OAuth single sign on against your own application, which is how larger publishers integrate Memberful into a custom site.
- Compliance
- GDPRPCI DSS handled by StripeGlobal sales tax and VAT collection at checkout
- Data residency
- US hosted; payment data lives in your own Stripe account rather than with Memberful.
- SSO
- OAuth single sign on is offered outward, so your own site or app can authenticate members against Memberful. There is no inbound corporate SSO for administrators on the published plan.
- Security notes
- Card data is handled entirely by Stripe under your own merchant account, so Memberful is never the merchant of record for your business. SSL and high availability backups are included on the Standard plan.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportDedicated support and success management on Enterprise
- Documentation
- A precise, unusually practical help center with step by step setup guides for Discord, Discourse, WordPress, paid podcasts, and the API.
- Community
- No large official user forum; Memberful's audience is publishers and podcasters who mostly talk to support directly.
Company
- Founded
- 2013
- Headquarters
- United States, distributed team
- Ownership
- Owned by Patreon
- Founders
- Drew Strojny
- Employees
- Small team within Patreon; the original seven person team joined in 2018 and Patreon stated it intended to expand it
- Funding
- Bootstrapped as an independent company, then acquired by Patreon on 8 August 2018 for an undisclosed sum. The entire seven person team including founder Drew Strojny joined Patreon as part of the deal.
Funding history
| Round | Amount | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acquisition | Not disclosed | 2018 | Acquired by Patreon in August 2018 to serve as Patreon's white label membership offering for creators who did not want to publish on patreon.com. |
Timeline
- 2013Founded by Drew Strojny as a simple membership and paywall tool for WordPress publishers.
- 2016Adds private podcast RSS feeds, which becomes the feature that anchors it with independent podcasters.
- 2018Acquired by Patreon in August, with the full seven person team joining; positioned as Patreon's white label alternative for creators who want to own the domain.
- 2020Ships the Discord integration, assigning and revoking server roles automatically by membership plan.
- 2022Adds the Discourse integration, mapping plans onto forum groups for publishers running established forums.
- 2024Expands checkout with Apple Pay, Google Pay, fifteen language translations, and global tax collection.
- 2026Simplifies to a single published Standard plan at $49 per month plus 4.9 percent, with unlimited members and no feature gating.
Integrations
- Stripe (your own account)
- Discord
- Discourse
- WordPress (official plugin)
- Mailchimp
- Kit
- Podcast hosts via unlisted per member RSS feeds
- Zapier
- REST API, webhooks, and OAuth single sign on
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Memberful and what job does it do here?
Memberful is a white label membership and billing platform owned by Patreon. In this category its job is course and membership business, specifically the membership half: it does not host discussion at all. It sits in front of a community you already run on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and handles the checkout, the recurring billing, and the automatic granting and revoking of access.
How much does Memberful cost?
There is one published plan: $49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction fee, with unlimited members and no feature gating. An Enterprise tier with volume based pricing is available on request. It is free until you go live and start accepting payments, so you can build the entire membership before spending anything.
What is the real transaction cost on paid memberships?
Memberful takes 4.9 percent and Stripe takes roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on top, so budget about 7.8 percent plus 30 cents per charge. At $5,000 a month in member revenue across 100 transactions, the total including the subscription is about $469, or 9.4 percent. At $50,000 a month across 1,000 transactions, it is about $4,249, or 8.5 percent. The rate barely improves with scale on the published plan, which is why an Enterprise conversation is worth having above roughly $20,000 a month.
How does the Discord integration actually work?
You connect your server, then map each Memberful plan to a Discord role. New members get their invite immediately after checkout and are assigned the role for their tier, so a $5 supporter and a $25 inner circle member see different channels. When a subscription lapses or a card fails, the role is removed and, if you choose, the member is removed from the server entirely. This is the single most tedious job in running a paid Discord and it happens without a bot you have to build.
Are there member or admin seat limits?
No. Members are unlimited on the Standard plan and Memberful does not charge per administrator or gate features by seat count. The pricing lever is entirely the percentage on transactions, which is unusually simple and unusually unforgiving at high volume.
Do I get a custom domain and how white label is it?
Yes, and it is one of the most genuinely white label products in this category. The checkout, member account area, paywalls, landing pages, and newsletter all serve from your own domain with your own themes, and Memberful's brand is not part of the member experience. That was the specific reason Patreon acquired it: creators who did not want their audience living on patreon.com.
Does Memberful help with search discoverability?
Not directly, but it does something better for anyone who already ranks: because it paywalls an existing Discourse forum or WordPress site rather than replacing it, your indexed public content and its search rankings survive untouched. Every all in one platform in this category would require you to migrate that content and lose it. If public, indexed discussion is an acquisition channel for you, Memberful plus Discourse is the combination that preserves it.
What about courses, events, and mobile apps?
None of them exist here. There is no course builder, no lesson structure, no certificates, no events product, no live streaming, and no mobile app branded or otherwise. Memberful sells access to things other software provides. If you need courses, use Thinkific or Teachable; if you need events, use Circle or Zoom alongside it.
Can I get my data out if I leave?
Yes, and better than almost anything else here. Subscriptions live in your own Stripe account rather than the vendor's, so moving platforms does not automatically force every member to re-enter card details, which is the usual hidden cost of leaving. Members, plans, and custom fields export as CSV. There is no community archive at risk because Memberful never stored your discussion in the first place.
Should I just run a free Discord or Slack instead?
You almost certainly should run the free Discord, and Memberful agrees: it expects Discord to be where your community lives. The question is only whether you want to charge for part of it. If the answer is no, you need nothing from Memberful. If the answer is yes, the alternatives are Discord's own Server Subscriptions at 10 percent with Discord owning the customer and app store fees applying on mobile purchases, or a homemade bot that you maintain forever and that breaks when someone's card fails. Memberful's 4.9 percent buys you out of both problems and keeps the member relationship yours.
Editorial verdict
Memberful is the best answer to a specific question and the wrong answer to almost every other one. If your community already lives on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and works, and you want to charge for access without moving anyone or handing 10 percent to Patreon, nothing else does this as cleanly: roles granted at checkout and revoked on lapse, private podcast feeds through your existing host, group plans, gifts, retention discounts, your own domain, and your own Stripe account so the subscriptions remain portable. That last point is worth more than it looks, because every other platform in this category makes leaving expensive by holding your billing relationship hostage. The reservation is the arithmetic. At 4.9 percent plus Stripe with a fee that does not improve as you grow, Memberful costs roughly 8.5 percent of revenue at $50,000 a month, where Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat sum and throw in the community, the courses, and the website. Buy it as plumbing for a community you already love, negotiate Enterprise pricing early, and do not buy it hoping for a community product, because it is not one and does not claim to be.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.