The Import Tax: What "Bring Your Members With You" Actually Costs on 39 Platforms

Every pricing page in this category has a line that says something like "migrate your community in minutes." Here's what that line means on a few of them.

On GroupApp, it means you email support a spreadsheet with five columns and their team creates the accounts in phases of 100. Until support has verified your community, you can send five email invites a day.

On Disciple, it means pasting email addresses into an invite box "in batches of 20," with an allowance you can ask support to raise.

On Kartra, it means uploading a CSV, then filling in a questionnaire about where the contacts came from, which URLs collected them, when you last emailed them and whether they're GDPR-compliant, after which Kartra staff review the file "in two business days or less" and can deny it.

On Maven, it means this sentence from the help centre: "We don't currently offer the ability to import students."

None of that is on a pricing page. It's the import tax: the cost of moving the people you already have, paid in time, support tickets and lost members, and invisible until you've already signed up. I went through the help centre of all 39 platforms on this site and recorded what "import your members" actually means on each. Here's the shape of it.

The four tiers of import

Eighteen of 39 give you a real importer. Eight more give you one with a condition you'll find out about on the day. Six route you through a human. Seven can't do it at all, and most of those are the free chat apps everyone starts on, which is its own lesson: the platform that's easiest to join is the one you can never bring anyone into.

Why the tax exists

Three reasons, and only one of them is about you.

The first is spam. A platform that lets anyone upload 20,000 addresses and start emailing them is a platform that gets its sending domain blacklisted. Kartra's questionnaire, Stan Store's opt-in review, GroupApp's five-a-day limit until you're verified: these exist because somebody abused the button before you got there. Annoying, legitimate, and worth knowing about before launch week.

The second is that "members" and "subscriptions" are different things, and the second one is much harder to move. A CSV moves names and emails. It does not move a Stripe subscription, a renewal date, a card on file. Substack says it plainly: you can import paid subscribers, comp them for a period, and they re-enter their card. Heartbeat's Skool switching guide says paying members "need Skool's help," because Skool owns the Stripe relationship and you don't. Memberful is the only platform here whose importer carries plan, price, renewal date and auto-renew settings, which is why it's the best import on the site. WishList Member goes one better on the way out: its export includes encrypted passwords, so members can log into the new site with the old login.

So the import tax is usually paid twice. Once for the people. Once for their payment method, which means every paying member re-entering a card, which means some percentage of them don't. That percentage is the real cost of switching, and no platform will tell you what it is.

The third reason is the ugly one: a platform that makes it hard to bring members in is usually also one that makes it hard to take them out, and a platform that makes both hard is doing it on purpose. Not always. But check the export field next to the import field on any listing here and the pairs tell you a lot. They also line up with who owns the platform more often than you'd like.

The platforms that do it right

Credit where it's due, because the good ones are the standard the others should be held to.

Memberful: sample CSV, a price-reference file with every plan's code, and the import carries plans, renewal dates and auto-renew. Imported members get no emails, not even a welcome, so you control the announcement. Guides for Substack and Stripe specifically.

MemberPress, MemberMouse, WishList Member: all three Caseproof plugins have a real importer with documented columns. MemberMouse's doubles as a bulk editor. WishList's export round-trips passwords. Whatever else I've said about that company this month, they got this right, and they got it right three times.

Thinkific: CSV or XLSX, with bulk enrolment into courses at import. Mighty Networks: up to 100,000 records, sent in batches of 50 with three reminders. LearnWorlds: 10,000 rows per file with tags, passwords and custom fields.

Circle and Skool: both documented, both self-serve. Skool's own help centre tells you to use an external CRM for big lists, which is honest.

And one that surprised me: LearnDash 5.0 added bulk enrolment through MCP, which means an AI tool can enrol users from a CSV. It can't create accounts yet. But it's the first platform here where the import is something you can delegate to software rather than a support desk, and it won't be the last.

The platforms that quietly charge for it

Teachable: bulk import exists, and it's on the $189 Growth plan. On Starter and Builder you add students one at a time or pay for Zapier. That's a $100-a-month difference for a feature every WordPress plugin includes at $150 a year.

Uscreen: the Bulk Invite tool takes a two-column CSV and needs a verified custom email domain first. The plan comparison lists it as Custom-only; the help centre says it's on "Plus" and to email sales if you're not. Either way, it isn't on the $49 or $149 plans.

Stan Store: 5,000 manually imported contacts, per store, forever. Every row needs a first or last name or it won't import. Imported contacts get an opt-in email before you can mail them, and Stan reviews the list.

Disciple: at $7,188 a year, you'd expect an upload. You get an invite box and "batches of 20."

None of these are deal-breakers on their own. They're the kind of thing you want to know on the day you choose, not the day you move.

What to do before you move

Four things, in order.

Read the import article in the help centre before you sign up, not after. Search for "import" and "CSV." If the result is a migration guide that tells you to email support, that's your answer. The listings here link to the exact article on every platform where one exists.

Count your paying members separately from your free ones. The free ones move with a CSV. The paying ones move with a card re-entry, and you'll lose some. Budget for it. Comp them a month on the new platform and say so in the email; Substack and Memberful both build that step in.

Export before you import. Whatever you're leaving, pull the full member list first, and if the old platform includes passwords or subscription data in the export, take that too. The listing's export field tells you what you'll get.

And if you're on Discord, Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp or Slack: the import tax on those is infinite, because the list was never yours. The only fix is the one I keep writing about. Collect emails at the door, starting today, so that when you leave, you have something to import.

Sources

Every import claim above comes from the platform's own help centre and is linked from the member import field on its listing. The ones quoted directly: GroupApp's managed migration article; Disciple's "How to Invite Members to Your Community"; Kartra's "Importing contacts in bulk" and "Contact import approval"; Maven's "Your Student CRM"; Substack's "How do I import my mailing list from another platform?"; Heartbeat's Skool switching guide; Memberful's "Import members via CSV"; WishList Member's "Export Members" and "Import Members"; Teachable's "Add and Manage Students" (Growth plan note); Uscreen's "Self-Service Migration Options"; Stan Store's "How to Import Your Existing Email List into Stan"; LearnDash's "User Management" (MCP bulk enrolment). All checked between October 16 and November 2, 2026.