What is the difference between a membership and a course?

A course is a finished thing. You make it once, sell it many times, and when someone has worked through it, they are done and so are you. A membership is ongoing access, charged every month or every year, and it carries an obligation the course does not: it has to keep being worth paying for. That difference is the whole of it. Everything hard about memberships comes from the word next month.

How much does it cost to run a membership site in 2026?

On the main platforms, a plan that takes no cut of your members' payments runs about $69 to $84 a month billed annually - Teachable Builder at $69, Podia Shaker at $84, both checked in July 2026. Every one of them prices in US dollars, so the pound figure on your card depends on the exchange rate and your card's conversion charge. Cheaper plans exist but they are not really cheaper: Teachable Starter takes 7.5 per cent of every payment your members make, Podia Mover takes 5 per cent. With Bernard, memberships come inside the £600 a year courses add-on on top of the £200 site, so £800 a year, in pounds, with no cut of anything.

How many members do I need for a membership to be worth it?

Nobody can honestly give you a number, because it depends on your price, your costs and how much work the membership takes. What you can do is the arithmetic before you build anything: your monthly price, times the number of people from your existing audience you genuinely believe would pay, minus what the upkeep is worth of your time. If the answer is not clearly better than selling the same material as a one-off course, do not build the membership.

Why do most memberships fail?

Three reasons, usually. The content treadmill: the fee buys a promise of something new, forever, and that promise falls due every month whether or not you have the time. Churn: unlike a course, membership income leaks, so every month starts with a hole to fill before you have grown at all. And a list too small to sustain it: only a fraction of any audience will pay a recurring fee, so a membership launched to a very small list starts below the number it needed.

Do I need a community for my membership?

Often the community is the reason people stay, more than the content. But an empty room is worse than no room at all: a visitor who sees a quiet forum reads it as a club nobody wanted to join. If you are not going to be in there answering people yourself, most weeks, do not open one.

Can I run a paid membership from my own website instead of a membership platform?

Yes, and there is a good argument for it. On a membership platform, your members' subscriptions live in the platform's system, so leaving means asking every member to enter their card again. With Bernard, the subscriptions sit in your own Stripe account from the first day, so the billing is yours whatever happens next.

Report · 29 July 2026

Running a paid membership - what it really takes, and when not to

A membership sounds like the answer to the problem every small business has, which is that income restarts at zero every month. Sell a course once and you have had a good month. Sign up sixty people at eight pounds and you have the beginnings of a good year.

That is true, and it is why people keep starting them. The part that is left out is that a membership is not a product you make. It is a promise you renew, every month, in public, whether or not the week went well. Most of the memberships that quietly close did not fail because the platform was wrong. They failed because nobody worked out, in advance, what they had just agreed to do forever.

So this piece starts where it should start.

When not to run one

If you have not sold anything to these people yet. A membership asks for the hardest yes in selling: an open-ended one. If nobody has paid you for a one-off thing, do not begin with the recurring one. Sell a course, or a workshop, or a print. See who buys. Those buyers are your membership.

If the thing you are teaching has an end. Some knowledge finishes. If someone can learn what you teach in six weeks and then genuinely be done, they will be, and a monthly fee just delays them leaving. That is a course wearing a subscription's coat, and it will churn hard.

If you do not want to be in the room. The single most reliable thing about a membership is that the members want you. Not your archive. If the honest plan is to record everything once and let it run, you are describing a library, and a library is a one-off sale.

If your list is very small. Only a fraction of any audience will pay a recurring fee, and that fraction is not a number anybody can tell you in advance. What you can do is take the number of people who would open an email from you tomorrow, be brutal about how many of them would pay every month, multiply by your price, and look at the answer next to the hours it would take. If it is close, it is a no. A membership is the most expensive thing you can run in time, and time is what a small business is short of.

None of that is a reason not to build one eventually. It is a reason to build it second.

What a membership actually is

The line between a course and a membership is not the content. It is the obligation.

A course is finished. You make it, it is done, and every future sale is the same work paying out again. If you never touch it, it still works. A membership is the opposite shape: the fee is not for what exists, it is for what keeps arriving, and it falls due again the moment it is paid. You are not selling a thing. You are selling next month.

This is why memberships built out of an archive tend to fade. The first month is easy, because the archive is new to the member and looks like value. By month four they have seen it, and what they are now paying for is whatever you have added since. If the answer is not much, they leave, politely, and you never hear why.

What members expect for the fee

Not a great deal, in fairness, but it is specific.

Something new, at a rhythm. Not a lot. A rhythm. One thing a month that arrives when it says it will beats four things in January and silence until June. The rhythm is the product.

Somewhere to talk, and someone answering. Members stay for the other people, and for you. A room where the host replies within a day or two is worth more to renewals than any amount of extra content. A room where nobody replies is a liability, because it is visible proof the club is quiet.

To be able to leave without a fight. Nothing loses a business more goodwill than a cancel button that hides. Let people go easily, keep their access until the end of what they paid for, and a decent number of them come back. Make it hard and they charge it back and tell people.

No unpleasant surprises about money. Members forget they are paying you. That is normal and it is not sinister, but it means an unannounced price rise or a silently renewed year turns into a complaint. Say what will happen and when.

What it costs to run, in 2026

Here is the whole bill, set out the way Bernard sets out a quote.

Two things to know before the numbers. First, every one of the main platforms prices in US dollars. Not one publishes a pound price, so what leaves your bank depends on the exchange rate on the day and whatever your card adds for converting it. Second, and more important: the cheap plan is not cheap, it is commission.

Teachable's Starter plan is $29 a month billed annually, which reads well until you get to the 7.5 per cent it takes from every payment your members make. Podia's Mover plan is $42 a month billed annually, and takes 5 per cent. Circle takes 2 per cent on its Professional plan. Patreon takes 10 per cent of what you earn there, and Substack takes 10 per cent of paid subscriptions. Skool is $9 a month plus 10 per cent of sales, or $99 a month and 2.9 per cent. Kajabi's own plans do not take a percentage if you use Kajabi's payments, but add 5 per cent on Basic if you use your own payment provider.

A percentage is a fine deal when you are small and a bad one the moment it works. Say a club of a hundred members paying eight pounds a month: that is £800 a month, and 7.5 per cent of it is £60 a month, £720 a year, taken out of the thing you built. The percentage grows exactly as your success does, which is the opposite of how a tool should behave.

So the only honest comparison is the band that takes nothing per payment.

The yearly bill	Teachable Builder	Podia Shaker	Bernard
The plan, billed annually	$69 a month, $828 a year	$84 a month, $1,008 a year	£600 courses add-on
The website it sits on	included	included	£200 a year
Cut of every member payment	none	none	none
Priced in	US dollars	US dollars	pounds
What you actually pay, each year	$828	$1,008	£800

Community-only tools sit alongside rather than inside this: Circle starts at $89 a month, about £840 a year at the time of writing, for the community and nothing else. That is roughly what the whole of the above costs, which tells you how expensive a room full of people is to build well.

Card processing sits on top of all of them, including Bernard, because that is the bank's fee and not the platform's. Nobody escapes it and anyone claiming to is counting something else.

The three things that kill a membership

The treadmill. You have promised something new, forever, to people who are paying attention. In a good month that is a pleasure. In a month with a family crisis or a large commission it is a debt. The businesses whose memberships last are the ones who promised less at the start than they thought they could manage, not more.

Churn. This is the one people do not see coming, because a course does not have it. Membership income leaks: every month a few people leave, so every month begins below where the last one ended, and your first job is refilling before you have grown at all. A good deal of that leaking is not even a decision. It is expired cards. Which is why a failed payment should start a grace period and a couple of polite reminders, not a locked door.

A list too small to carry it. The arithmetic in the first section, ignored. A membership launched to a very small audience opens with a handful of members, which is dispiriting for you and, worse, visibly quiet for them. Quiet rooms empty.

Notice that only the first of those three is about content, and none of them is about which platform you chose.

Where Bernard sits, precisely

Bernard added memberships in July 2026, so this is new, and it is worth being exact about what is in it and what is not.

What it does. You describe the club to Bernard: a name, a price, monthly or yearly, and which of your courses it includes. A join page appears on your site as a draft, and goes live when you approve it. People join and pay through your own Stripe account, and Bernard takes nothing from it. Renewals extend access on their own. A failed card gets a grace period and reminders rather than an instant lock-out. Someone who cancels keeps everything until the end of the period they paid for, and nothing is ever clawed back. Members get in by an emailed link rather than a password. Every membership comes with a club room where members post and you reply, plus a discussion thread under each lesson, so questions live where the teaching is. You hear about each post; members get one Monday summary and a quiet week sends nothing. You can remove a post or remove a member. And you can ask Bernard how the club is doing, who has joined, and who is lapsing.

What it does not do. There is no group chat and no member-to-member messaging. Member profiles are a name, nothing more. There is no search across posts and only the one room, not topic areas. A membership has a single tier: no bronze and gold, no free trial, no introductory price. On the teaching side there are no quizzes, no certificates, no marked assignments, no per-student progress tracking, and no drip release that opens a lesson a week. There are no live sessions or webinars. If any of those is the reason your membership works, Bernard is not the right home for it yet, and it is better that you hear that here than after you have moved.

The part worth the most. Because the money runs through your own Stripe account, your members' subscriptions are yours from day one. If you left Bernard tomorrow, they would keep billing, and not one member would have to enter a card again. That is deliberate. A membership should be a reason people stay, not a lock on the door, and it is a poor sort of platform that has to trap a business to keep it.

If you are weighing this up, paste your current address and Bernard will measure up, free, and show you the new place before you decide anything.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between a membership and a course?: A course is a finished thing. You make it once, sell it many times, and when someone has worked through it, they are done and so are you. A membership is ongoing access, charged every month or every year, and it carries an obligation the course does not: it has to keep being worth paying for. That difference is the whole of it. Everything hard about memberships comes from the word next month.
How much does it cost to run a membership site in 2026?: On the main platforms, a plan that takes no cut of your members' payments runs about $69 to $84 a month billed annually - Teachable Builder at $69, Podia Shaker at $84, both checked in July 2026. Every one of them prices in US dollars, so the pound figure on your card depends on the exchange rate and your card's conversion charge. Cheaper plans exist but they are not really cheaper: Teachable Starter takes 7.5 per cent of every payment your members make, Podia Mover takes 5 per cent. With Bernard, memberships come inside the £600 a year courses add-on on top of the £200 site, so £800 a year, in pounds, with no cut of anything.
How many members do I need for a membership to be worth it?: Nobody can honestly give you a number, because it depends on your price, your costs and how much work the membership takes. What you can do is the arithmetic before you build anything: your monthly price, times the number of people from your existing audience you genuinely believe would pay, minus what the upkeep is worth of your time. If the answer is not clearly better than selling the same material as a one-off course, do not build the membership.
Why do most memberships fail?: Three reasons, usually. The content treadmill: the fee buys a promise of something new, forever, and that promise falls due every month whether or not you have the time. Churn: unlike a course, membership income leaks, so every month starts with a hole to fill before you have grown at all. And a list too small to sustain it: only a fraction of any audience will pay a recurring fee, so a membership launched to a very small list starts below the number it needed.
Do I need a community for my membership?: Often the community is the reason people stay, more than the content. But an empty room is worse than no room at all: a visitor who sees a quiet forum reads it as a club nobody wanted to join. If you are not going to be in there answering people yourself, most weeks, do not open one.
Can I run a paid membership from my own website instead of a membership platform?: Yes, and there is a good argument for it. On a membership platform, your members' subscriptions live in the platform's system, so leaving means asking every member to enter their card again. With Bernard, the subscriptions sit in your own Stripe account from the first day, so the billing is yours whatever happens next.