If you’re ready to take your membership to the next level by fostering an even deeper connection with your fans while earning recurring income, keep reading to learn how to enable paid memberships.
Offering paid memberships gives your most loyal fans the option to unlock exclusive content and benefits by paying for a recurring subscription. Your paid members’ billing schedule depends on the model that you select, and Patreon lets you choose the one that works best for your business.
To learn more about the different billing models, please check out our guide here: How Patreon billing works.
Why offer a paid membership?
On top of being able to offer premium access and benefits, paid memberships enable you to strengthen your relationship with your fans with community engagement tools. You can build deeper, authentic connections that live outside of social media and power your business over the long term.
Paid memberships also set you up with recurring income, so you can continue to do what you love to do. Features such as special offers and free trials will also be available to help nurture and grow your creative business.
Learn more about how membership supports a thriving creative business by checking out this article: Why membership matters for creators and creative businesses.
How to get started?
To enable paid memberships, you will need to build a tier and set a price for your membership. You also have the ability to create multiple tiers tailored to your liking at price points you choose. Follow the steps below to start.
How to make a tier:
While logged in to your creator account, go through the following:
- If you aren’t already on your page, click the My page button from the left sidebar navigation
- Click the Page controls or “...” button on your page, then select the Edit Tiers link from the menu
- Click the Add tier button to make your first custom tier. Use one of our templated tiers to help you get started, or start from scratch
- Customize your tier! Give your tier a price, title, benefits, and description of what members can expect
You can read more in detail about tiers and benefits by visiting the How to set up your tiers and benefits help center article.
Where to track your growth?
You can track how your paid membership is growing with powerful member insights. This is where you can review and analyze data to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and design your paid offerings to convert fans into paid members.
Insights
Your Membership page is your hub for checking on the health of your memberships and includes all the information you need to understand how your membership is growing. It includes a comprehensive breakdown of your current membership count, new paid members, downgrades, upgrades, and cancellations.
Earnings dashboard
This dashboard summarizes the income associated with your creator page and shows a breakdown of the flow of your funds. This includes net earnings, fees, refunds, and payments that have declined and is organized by the time transactions occur.
We created this detailed guide on how to best utilize your Insights and Earnings dashboards to understand your income through paid memberships.
FAQ
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It’s free to share your work and connect directly with your community on Patreon, whether you already have a paid membership or not. If you introduce paid memberships, Patreon will keep 8 or 12% of membership earnings, depending on your pricing plan, plus fees and applicable taxes.
Learn more about what paid membership fees you can expect as a creator. - You can create as many tiers as you would like to create varying levels of membership, though we do recommend having a concise selection to keep your offerings focused.
We’ve also created a guide with great tips on how to structure your membership and price your benefits as you’re getting started. - Yes, you have the ability to limit the number of paid members joining each tier.
You can learn how to add tier limits by visiting Can I limit the number of members in my tier? - Just like you, your paid offerings will evolve as you grow your creative business, so you can always reprice and redesign your tiers.
When you are ready, follow these 5 Simple Steps to Delete and Reprice Your Tiers. - Yes, you can. If you no longer want to offer a specific tier, you can find instructions on how to delete your tier in this section: deleting a tier.
- When a fan turns into a paid member, you are shown their name, email address, tier, and membership amount in your Relationship manager. You can also find additional information about each individual membership, such as join date, membership status, payment history, and much more.
You can find more details about how to utilize filters and information in our guide to How to use your Relationship manager.
