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 through a recurring membership.
To learn more about the different billing models, please check out our guide here: How membership 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.
How to get started with paid
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 the price points you choose. Follow the steps below to start.
- While logged in, visit the Membership tab
- If you don't have any tiers yet, click on the Get started button
- You need to define the tier amount, which is the monthly price members will be charged
- You can add a name for your tier, description, structured benefits, and a cover image, but these settings are optional, and they are not required to start getting paid
- Click the Save button
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?
Membership Insights
You can track paid members' growth with powerful Membership insights. This is your hub to review and analyze data, understand your audience, and design your paid offerings to convert fans into paid members. It includes a comprehensive breakdown of your current membership count, new paid members, downgrades, upgrades, and cancellations.
Earnings Insights
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 declined payments, and is organized by the time transactions occur. We created a detailed guide on how to best utilize your Earnings Insight to understand your income through paid memberships.
FAQ
- 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 Creator fees you can expect. - 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 for setting up or optimizing your membership tiers 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 Limit member spots in your tier -
Just like you, your paid offerings will evolve as you grow your creative business, so you can always reprice and redesign your tiers. Adjusting the prices is possible even if you already have active members on those tiers:
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If you're using Subscription billing and want to adjust your tier prices by up to $20:
- You can easily update the price from your Membership tab. Learn more about How to adjust your membership tier prices and how it impacts your existing members
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For price increases over $20, or if you're not using Subscription billing:
- We suggest creating a new tier and asking your members to join. Learn more about Best practices for increasing your tier prices
You won't be able to change the price of a tier that has a Free trial enabled just yet. This will be coming soon.
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If you're using Subscription billing and want to adjust your tier prices by up to $20:
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Yes, you can, but it's important to consider the impact on your members. If you delete a tier with existing members, those members will continue to be charged the same amount but won't have access to tiered content.
In this scenario, it's advisable to Unpublish the tier instead, and only delete it when members have had the chance to cancel or switch tiers.
Unpublished tiers are hidden from your Patreon tier options, so no new members can join while existing members experience no change. Even after unpublishing, you can still post specifically for unpublished tiers, encouraging a switch to a new tier. Please refer to this section, Unpublish the tier, for a step-by-step guide.
If there are no existing members on that tier, you can go ahead and delete it. For step-by-step instructions on how to do this, refer to the Deleting a tier section.
- 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.