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 membership. 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 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
- All you need to get started is the monthly price and tier description — you’ll find these are prefilled with $5 and access to exclusive content and more, which you can keep or edit
- You can click the More options button to add things like a name for your tier and structured benefits; however, these settings are optional and are not required to start getting paid
- Click the Save button to start with paid membership
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. 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 Changing the price of your tiers 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 a tier" for 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 Audience 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.