Create a Plan

Memberful's plans allow you to offer members-only benefits. You can create a single plan or multiple plans with different terms and benefits for members.

In this article, you're going to learn how to design your plan: Set the price, billing frequency, and subscription length, and then share a purchase link with your audience so that they can sign up!

In this help doc:

• Name and price your plan.
• Choose the billing frequency and subscription length.
• Create plan.

Optional settings:

• Disable taxes.
• Enable free or paid trials.
• Enable group subscriptions.
• Enable upgrades and downgrades.
• Include Downloads and Podcasts.
• Set Discourse Group.
• Configure redirect settings.
• Enable address and phone number collection.

Name and price your Plan

To create a plan, navigate to the Plans tab from your Memberful dashboard and click New Plan.

Name your plan and set the price ($1.00 minimum).

• Enable Let Members choose what to pay if you’d like members to have the option to pay you more than the set price (optional). Learn more about this setting.

• Enable Charge a different price for renewals and set a renewal price if you’d like to charge a different amount for renewals (optional).

Choose the billing frequency and subscription length

• Select a billing frequency: one-time payment, monthly, every 3 months, every 6 months, yearly, custom weekly, or custom monthly.
• Select a subscription length: renews indefinitely until a member cancels or fixed number of payments.

Keep in mind that once a member has completed the last payment of a subscription with a fixed number of payments, the subscription will not expire—essentially giving them lifetime access.

For plans that renew indefinitely, the default setting is for the plan to renew automatically until the member cancels their subscription. You can disable this setting so that the default behavior is for the plan to not renew after the initial payment. Members will need to manually enable auto-renew if they want to stay subscribed.

You can also enable the Renew on a specific day setting if you’d like all members to renew on a specific day, month, etc. (optional). Otherwise, plans will renew on the anniversary of the purchase date.

• If you select Monthly, choose a renewal day (1st - 31st).
• If you select Yearly, choose a renewal month (1-12) and day (1st - 31st).
• If you select Quarterly, choose the renewal months (e.g. January, April, July, October) and renewal day (1st - 31st).

Keep in mind that we don’t pro-rate charges for plans that renew on a specific date. For example, if your plan is set to renew on the 10th each month, and your member signs up on the 8th, they be charged the full price on the 8th and then again on the 10th.

Disable taxes

If you have tax collection enabled, you can disable tax collection for your plan. If taxes are disabled globally there will be no switches present on your Plan and Download forms.

Enable free or paid trials

Enable a free trial with or without a credit card and choose the trial length. We don't support trials for plans that renew on a specific date.

Or enable a paid trial and choose the trial length and trial price.

If you decide to change the trial length after members sign up, the change will only apply to new members.

Enable group subscriptions

Group subscriptions contain multiple memberships purchased and managed by a group manager. They are a great solution for companies, groups, or schools that have a single point of contact, but are purchasing access for multiple people. Group subscriptions are only available for Memberful customers on the Premium plan. Learn more about selling group subscriptions.

Enable upgrades and downgrades

If have more than one plan, and you’d like your members to be able to upgrade, downgrade, or crossgrade between your plans, add your plan to a Plan Group. Being in a Plan Group means your members can switch between plans in the same group. Learn how to set up Plan Groups.

Include Downloads and Podcasts

If you have created Downloads or private podcasts with Memberful, you can include them with your plan.

Set Discourse Group

If you’ve integrated Memberful with Discourse, you'll see a new option when editing a plan. When you set a Discourse Group, we'll automatically add and sync active (paying) plan subscribers to that Discourse Group. If a member's subscription expires, they will be removed from the Discourse Group.

Configure redirect settings

By default, we will redirect your member back to the page they were on when they made the purchase. For example, if they purchase the plan from a gated article, we will redirect them to the full article after the order is complete.

You may instead choose to enable The global redirect URL setting and redirect to a specific page after any successful order.

If you’d like to redirect your members to a different page (like a plan-specific welcome page), you can choose a URL specific to the plan you’re creating.

If you’ve included other benefits like access to a private podcast or Discord server with your plan, you also have the option to override the default redirect settings and show a page with buttons to access those benefits after checkout.

Enable address and phone number collection

If you require a mailing address and / or phone number, you can enable the related setting.

Create plan

By default, any new plan you create will be marked as Available for purchase. If you disable this setting, existing members won’t be impacted but new members will not be able to purchase this plan.

After you fill in your settings, click Save Plan. Once you do, you’ll see a full Plan Summary so you can review your settings at a glance and access your Plan and Gift purchase links.

Keep in mind that once you have one member subscribed to a plan, you can't edit the billing frequency and subscription length. Contact us if you need to make any changes to these settings.

Related help docs:

• Create a Plan Group.
• Add a Plan purchase link to your site.