Take the Country Whole: How Three Companies Quietly Bought the WordPress Membership Market

Open three pricing pages side by side: memberpress.com, membermouse.com, wishlistmember.com.

Three plans each. Half off the first year. "Regular Price" struck through above the number. A 14-day money-back guarantee. And the same sentence in the fine print on all three, word for word: "Special introductory pricing, all annual renewals are at full price."

Three brands. One template. One owner.

That's the short version of what happened to WordPress membership software between 2021 and 2024, and it's the kind of thing you only see when you line the pages up. I did, because every listing on this site now carries who owns it, and the WordPress column came back with three names where there used to be eight.

The board

Here's who bought what, from the companies' own announcements.

Caseproof is Blair Williams's company, the one that makes MemberPress. Awesome Motive is Syed Balkhi's, the WPBeginner empire. Liquid Web is a hosting company backed by private equity since 2015.

And the two private ones are connected. Every Caseproof acquisition post mentions that the plugin now joins "Syed Balkhi's WPBeginner Growth Fund" or "Growth Accelerator." Blair has called Balkhi "my good friend and investor." MemberPress's founder sits on BuddyBoss's advisory board. So the WordPress membership market isn't three owners. It's closer to two, and they eat together.

In April 2026, Liquid Web went further and retired the StellarWP brand entirely. learndash.com now redirects to liquidweb.com; the plugin is sold as a $350-a-year bundle with an events plugin, a donations plugin and a theme.

Leave Paid Memberships Pro out of it and you've got the whole board.

Take the country whole

Sun Tzu, in the Giles translation: "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact. To shatter and destroy it is not so good."

Every one of these buyers read that chapter. Not one of them shut a product down. Blair said it outright about MemberMouse and again about WishList: the goal is "not to discontinue WishList, or to combine it with another membership plugin." The plugins keep their names, their websites, their support desks.

People read that as generosity. It isn't. It's the whole point of the purchase.

A membership plugin with ten years of customers isn't code. It's ten thousand sites with subscriptions, drip schedules, affiliate ledgers and a decade of member records wired into it, run by people who, in my experience, would rather do almost anything than migrate. I ran a course on WishList Member. Once a multi-course setup is live, switching is a project nobody schedules. The buyer isn't paying for the software. They're paying for the cost of leaving it. (I've written up what that cost actually looks like, platform by platform, in The Import Tax.)

My version of the same idea is Monopoly: you don't tear down the hotels on Park Place. You buy Boardwalk too, keep both, and wait for people to land on them. Slowly you own the whole side of the board, and every renewal is rent.

The pricing template is where you can see it. Three plugins that used to price independently now share a page design and a renewal policy. That's not three product teams converging on the same idea. That's one owner standardizing the till.

What happened to each one after the sale

This is the part that matters if you're choosing one today.

LearnDash is maintained and shipping; version 5.0 added MCP bulk enrolment. But the storefront is gone, the licence is now a bundle you didn't ask for, and MemberDash got folded in. The product is fine. The relationship moved to a hosting company's checkout.

MemberMouse kept its "enterprise" positioning and got the Caseproof pricing page: $149.50, $249.50, $349.50, renewing at $299, $499, $699. Caseproof's own description of it, in the AccessAlly announcement, is "enterprise-grade" for "large-scale membership sites." Which tells you where MemberPress is being pointed: everywhere else.

WishList Member got the identical page, the identical prices, and a positioning line ("known for its vast array of payment integrations") that reads like a reason to keep it rather than a plan to grow it. Its co-founder's goodbye letter said she was taking time "to figure out what I want to do when I grow up." Lovely line. Not a roadmap.

AccessAlly is the one I'd watch. Eighteen months after the sale, its pricing page shows $2,999, $4,499 and $5,999 a year, every button reads "Coming Soon," every button links to nothing, and the old monthly-plans page is a 404. The plugin shipped a release in September. The shop is closed. Whether that's a repricing in progress or a page nobody owns, I can't tell you, and neither can the page.

BuddyBoss is the counter-example, to be fair. Awesome Motive shipped an email digest in September 2026, which is a real feature for a real problem. It also renamed the plans and introduced the half-off-then-double renewal pattern. The about page still doesn't mention the acquisition.

MemberPress, the favourite child, is the one getting everything: ClubCircles community, a directory, real-time DMs, CoachKit, a gradebook, a branded app at $1,199 a year. When one company owns four overlapping membership plugins, one of them is the future and three of them are annuities. You can tell which is which by counting features shipped.

The part I was inside

I'll say this plainly because it's why I trust the pattern.

Years ago we picked MemberPress over EzyGold because it was easier to set up and we needed a two-tier affiliate program. MemberPress didn't have one. Blair wrote it for us as custom code. We paid for it. Some time later, it was in the product for everyone. Today it's the "Commission Levels" add-on for Easy Affiliate, which is included free on MemberPress Scale.

I'm not complaining. We needed it that week, he was willing, and a founder who writes your feature on a Tuesday is the kind of founder you want. But it's also the origin story of a company that now owns four plugins: it grew by listening to exactly what paying customers needed and building it, and then it bought the three companies whose customers it couldn't reach.

I'll also say: I left WordPress for running a business. Not because of MemberPress. Because nobody runs a site with one membership plugin. You run it with twelve, one of them is bad, and when something breaks you lose an afternoon finding which. Consolidation doesn't fix that. If anything, it means that when something breaks, three of your twelve plugins now have the same support desk and the same priorities.

What to do with this

If you're on WordPress, or thinking about it, four things.

Check the renewal before the price. MemberPress, MemberMouse, WishList and BuddyBoss all show a year-one number that doubles. The honest price is the struck-through one.

Pick the favourite child or pick the enterprise one, not the one in the middle. MemberPress is where the features go. MemberMouse is explicitly kept for big sites. WishList is being kept. There's a difference between kept and built.

Treat a recent acquisition as a yellow flag for the community features specifically. Across this whole directory, the community tab is the thing that stops moving first when ownership changes: Teachable paused theirs, LearnDash never had one, AccessAlly's whole storefront is "Coming Soon." BuddyBoss is the exception so far.

And own your export. The one real advantage of all this being WordPress is that your database is yours. MemberPress has a proper CSV importer and exporter. BuddyBoss and LearnDash export everything. Whoever ends up owning the plugin, make sure you can leave with your members on a Friday afternoon. That's the one move Sun Tzu would recognize from your side of the board: know the ground before you camp on it.

Sources

Caseproof acquires MemberMouse, letter from Blair Williams, February 22, 2023: memberpress.com/blog/membermouse-joins-caseproof/. WishList is Joining the Caseproof Family, letter from Tracy Childers, May 2, 2023: wishlistmember.com. WP Tavern on the WishList deal, May 4, 2023, with the "not to discontinue" quote. AccessAlly is Joining the Caseproof Family of Products, April 30, 2024: accessally.com/blog. Welcome BuddyBoss to the WPBeginner family, July 9, 2024: wpbeginner.com. Liquid Web acquires LearnDash, September 20, 2021, and Liquid Web's 2026 "new software" post retiring StellarWP: liquidweb.com. Pricing pages for MemberPress, MemberMouse and WishList Member, checked November 2, 2026. AccessAlly pricing page rendered in a browser, November 2, 2026. The Sun Tzu line is from Lionel Giles's 1910 translation of The Art of War, Chapter III.