Industry Membership sites
MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, custom builds. Multi-tier pricing, drip content, member dashboards, group accounts. Full data ownership and zero per-student tax. We have shipped 40-plus production membership sites.
Why this industry
Kajabi, Mighty Networks, Podia, and Teachable charge per student or per member. The math works at 500 members. It hurts at 5,000. It demands a rebuild at 50,000. Self-hosted membership sites on WordPress have a flat infrastructure cost. The crossover point is usually past mid-six-figure annual revenue and every dollar past it is yours.
We have shipped membership engines on WordPress since 2018 and run our own community plus product business on the same stack. The patterns we use today are the ones we wish we had used on the first project. The savings compound from the first month after launch.
What we work with
01
You outgrew Kajabi, Mighty, or Podia and the per-student fees no longer make sense. You want full ownership of the platform, the data, and the customer relationship.
Annual savings that pay back the rebuild in the first year.
02
Your hosted platform throttles you, charges per seat, or limits customization. You need a platform that does not get more expensive as you succeed.
A flat-cost platform that scales linearly, not exponentially.
03
Free tier, paid tier, premium tier, lifetime pricing, group accounts, family accounts, corporate accounts. The pricing logic that hosted platforms force you to simplify.
Pricing models that match the business, not the platform constraint.
04
Newsletter plus courses plus community plus coaching calls plus product sales, all on one platform. The full stack that hosted platforms force across three subscriptions.
A creator stack with one login, one billing, one analytics view.
What we build
01
Multi-tier pricing, drip content, member-only forums, member directories, content access rules. We have shipped 40-plus production membership sites on these stacks.
Membership engines that survive a 10,000-member ramp without performance issues.
02
Personalized landing pages, course progress, certificates, account billing, content history, recommendations. The member experience that hosted platforms generic-out.
Dashboards that lift member retention 15 to 30 percent.
03
Content released by date, by member tenure, by course progress, by completed action. Drip schedules that match the program design, not the plugin defaults.
Drip schedules that 100-plus cohort weeks run without manual touch.
04
Subscriptions, trials, dunning, proration, refund flows, tax, gift memberships, group billing. We have shipped Stripe billing in 12-plus membership sites and we know the dark corners.
Billing that does not generate refund tickets every Monday morning.
05
Member migration, content migration, payment history, SEO redirect maps. We have run six platform migrations and we keep the email list, the SEO, and the trust signals intact.
Migrations that retain 90-plus percent of paying members.
06
BuddyPress for community, LearnDash for courses, WooCommerce for one-off product sales, all on one login. Integrated correctly so the member journey is one experience.
A unified member experience without 30 plugin reconciliations a year.
40+
production membership sites shipped since 2018
Coaches, course creators, multi-tier operators, creator economy at scale.
Common questions
Two reasons. First, the math. Per-student or per-member fees compound. At 5,000 members the bill is uncomfortable. At 50,000 it pays for the entire rebuild. Second, the platform constraints. Custom checkout, custom member dashboards, custom integrations are usually impossible or limited. WordPress with the right plugins removes both ceilings.
Six to ten weeks for a content-heavy site. Discovery is two weeks, build is three to five, content and member migration runs in parallel, and a soft-launch QA week closes it. We migrate during a low-churn window so members do not feel the swap.
Email password reset on the new platform is the only friction. We coordinate the cutover with a member email explaining the upgrade. Existing course progress, certificates, and content access carry over. Payment subscriptions migrate to the new Stripe account without re-entering cards.
Yes, with proper engineering. The default WordPress hosting will not. We architect around object cache, database tuning, edge caching for marketing pages, and proper session handling. We have shipped membership sites past 100,000 active members.
Circle and Skool are great for chat and threads. They are not great for paid courses, drip content, certificates, or product sales. If your business is mostly community, stay on Circle or Skool. If it is membership plus courses plus product sales, WordPress is usually the right answer.
Migrations from Kajabi or Mighty are scoped per project. Custom membership builds are scope-dependent. Multi-tier platforms with community plus LMS are scoped after discovery. Discovery call is free and we send a fixed-price quote within 48 hours.
Building a membership site?
Discovery call is free. NDA on request. Migration audit available before the contract.
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