MemberPress

Where I'm coming from

I ran a business on MemberPress, so this one's first person. We picked it over EzyGold for two reasons: it was much easier to set up, and we needed a two-tier affiliate program. At the time MemberPress didn't have two tiers. Blair Williams, the founder, built it for us as custom code. We paid for it, he shipped it, and some time later the feature turned up in the product for everyone. We'd funded a roadmap item because we needed it that week. I don't say that as a complaint. It tells you what kind of company it was: small enough that the founder wrote your feature, and honest enough that it became the plugin's.

The version I used felt thinner than what I'd come from. Reporting was there, but simple. And it was WordPress, which is my standing objection to the whole category, not to MemberPress: nobody runs a site with one membership plugin and nothing else. You have twelve, one of them is bad, and when something breaks you spend an afternoon finding out which. For a business, I've always preferred not carrying that risk.

So read this listing as the view of someone who liked the product and left the platform. We checked memberpress.com and its docs on November 2, 2026, and the product I find there is a lot bigger than the one I used.

Pricing: watch the renewal and the 4.9%

The fine print says it plainly: "Special introductory pricing, all annual renewals are at full price." So Launch is really $399 a year, Growth $699, Scale $999, with half off the first year. Same pattern as BuddyBoss, same parent ecosystem, same thing to notice before you budget year two. There's a 14-day money-back guarantee and no trial.

The 4.9% is the other number. On Launch, MemberPress takes 4.9% of every Stripe transaction on top of Stripe's fee. The docs say so under the Stripe gateway. At $500 a month in sales that's $24.50 a month, so Growth pays for itself around $300 a month in revenue even in year one. If you're selling anything, start at Growth. Our fee field shows 4.9 because that's the cheapest plan.

Our price field shows $16.63 because that's $199.50 divided by twelve; it doubles at renewal.

The gateway question, answered

When I used it, I wasn't sure it allowed more than one gateway, and I remember the pain of a PayPal buyer who had to be handled outside the system. Today the docs say you can connect "only one or multiple (even all)" gateways at once and choose which gateways each membership offers. Stripe on every plan (with Apple Pay, Google Pay, direct debit, Cash App and buy-now-pay-later through it), PayPal, Square and offline payments from Growth, Authorize.net on Scale. The problem I had is solved, with one catch: on Launch it's Stripe only, with the 4.9%.

The community: ClubCircles

This is the part that didn't exist when I was a customer and the reason MemberPress is on this site at all. ClubSuite is three add-ons:

ClubCircles (Growth and up): Circles are discussion groups with posts, media, comments and membership-based access. You decide which membership levels can join, create or moderate Circles, so "paid members get the private Circle" is a rule, not a workaround. Circles appear in a searchable directory. Members can create their own if you let them.

ClubDirectory (Growth and up): member profiles and a searchable directory. ClubCircles requires it.

ClubConnect (Scale only): real-time chat rooms and private messages, with file attachments, emoji reactions, @mentions and markdown. Rooms are created automatically for Circles and for CoachKit cohorts.

So a Growth customer gets groups and profiles; a Scale customer gets groups, profiles and chat. There's no gamification anywhere in it (GamiPress and myCred are listed as third-party integrations), and no events calendar. Notifications are per-event emails that members toggle per Circle; no digest.

Put against BuddyBoss, which is the other way to get a social layer on WordPress: BuddyBoss is deeper and older, MemberPress's is integrated with the paywall from the start. Put against Skool: it's a forum with groups, not a feed with levels.

Courses, coaching, affiliates

Courses are built in on every plan, with quizzes, assignments and certificates from Growth and a gradebook on Scale. There's a migrator for LearnDash courses specifically, and a documented CSV route for everything else. CoachKit (Growth and up) runs coaching programs with cohorts, habits and client tracking; that's the piece MemberPress calls "the industry's only membership + coaching plugin."

Easy Affiliate is Caseproof's separate affiliate plugin, and it's included free on Scale. Here's the part that closed a loop for me: two-tier commissions are now the Commission Levels add-on, with a dashboard page where an affiliate sees the affiliates they referred and their sales. The thing we paid Blair to write is a checkbox.

The branded app

MemberPress AppKit: a white-label iOS and Android app with push notifications, in-app purchases through Apple and Google, offline content and managed store publishing, for $1,199 a year on top of your plan. It's the only branded app on this site with a public price under $3,000 that isn't a monthly SaaS tier, and it's still more than most people's plugin budget.

Email

Reminder emails for expiring subscriptions and abandoned sign-ups, and that's the native email. No broadcasts, no sequences. The list goes to Mailchimp on Launch, or ActiveCampaign, Kit, Drip, MailPoet and others on Growth, natively. Our email field says "none" for marketing; the ESP sync is native.

Getting members in and out

In: the MemberPress Importer takes CSVs of members, subscriptions, transactions, memberships, rules and coupons, with strict column formats the docs spell out (UTF-8 or it fails). It's a real import, not a support ticket.

Out: the Members page exports a CSV, filtered by membership and status, and the Transactions and Subscriptions pages export too. It's WordPress, so a full backup takes everything including Circles and courses.

Courses in: LearnDash migrator built in; WP All Export plus the Importer for the rest.

Where it fits

MemberPress is for someone who's decided to be on WordPress and wants the paywall, courses, coaching, community and affiliates from one vendor, with the trade-off that it's five add-ons, two renewal prices and a plugin stack you maintain. If you're starting from zero and the community is the product, Skool or Circle will have you live in an hour. If you own your site and your list and you're done renting, this is the most complete WordPress option on the site.

Known limitation

Launch takes 4.9% of Stripe sales and is Stripe only. Introductory prices ($199.50 / $349.50 / $499.50) double at renewal ($399 / $699 / $999). Community needs Growth; direct messaging needs Scale; the branded app is $1,199 a year extra. No gamification, no events, no digest, no broadcast email. And it's WordPress: you maintain the stack.

Sources we checked

• Pricing (November 2, 2026): https://memberpress.com/plans/pricing/
• Choosing your gateways (multiple gateways; 4.9% on Launch Stripe): https://memberpress.com/docs/choosing-your-gateways/
• ClubCircles installation and setup: https://memberpress.com/docs/memberpress-clubcircles-installation-and-setup/
• Creating and managing Circles: https://memberpress.com/docs/creating-circles-with-memberpress/
• Member experience with Circles (notifications): https://memberpress.com/docs/member-experience-with-memberpress-circles/
• ClubConnect installation and setup: https://memberpress.com/docs/memberpress-clubconnect-installation-and-setup/
• Migrating or importing MemberPress data: https://memberpress.com/docs/memberpress-data/
• Using the Members page (export): https://memberpress.com/docs/using-the-members-page/
• Importing courses from another plugin: https://memberpress.com/docs/how-to-import-courses-and-lessons-from-another-course-plugin/
• Known third-party integrations (GamiPress, myCred): https://memberpress.com/docs/known-third-party-integrations/
• MemberPress AppKit: https://memberpress.com/mobile-app/
• Easy Affiliate second-tier referrals (Commission Levels add-on): https://easyaffiliate.com/docs/how-to-see-second-tier-affiliates-referrals/
• Ownership: MemberMouse joins Caseproof (2023): https://memberpress.com/blog/membermouse-joins-caseproof/ ; WishList joins Caseproof (May 2023): https://wptavern.com/caseproof-acquires-wishlist-member ; AccessAlly joins Caseproof (April 30, 2024): https://accessally.com/blog/accessally-is-joining-the-caseproof-family-of-products/