Membership sites that grow recurring revenue.

Membership and subscription businesses are quietly the best business model on the internet. Predictable monthly revenue, higher customer lifetime value, deeper engagement, and a community that becomes its own marketing engine. The catch is that membership sites are technically more complex than brochure sites or even most ecommerce — recurring billing, gated content, member portals, community features, course delivery, dunning, and a thousand edge cases around upgrades, downgrades and cancellations.

What we build

Content membership: gated articles, video, downloads behind monthly or annual subscription. Built on MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro with Stripe Subscriptions. Course-led membership: structured lessons, video, quizzes, certificates via LearnDash, LifterLMS or Tutor LMS, often combined with a community layer. Community-first membership: forums, member directory, events, direct messaging via BuddyBoss or integrated Circle/Discourse. SaaS-style membership: tiered plans, usage-based billing, custom app behind authentication — closer to a SaaS product than a content site.

Platform recommendations

For most UK SMB membership businesses, WordPress + MemberPress + Stripe + BuddyBoss covers 80% of use cases at moderate cost and high flexibility. Hosted platforms (Kajabi, Skool, Whop, Memberstack) get you live faster but have ongoing fees that scale with revenue and limited customisation. Bespoke React/TanStack + Stripe makes sense when you've outgrown WordPress or need app-like experiences. We'll honestly recommend the right one for your scale, technical capability and roadmap.

The hard parts

Recurring billing edge cases (failed payments, card updates, dunning, cancellation flows, pauses, refunds), content access logic (what does a Silver member see vs Gold?), member onboarding (welcome sequence, first-lesson nudges, retention emails), churn analysis (which members are about to cancel and why), community moderation tools, and tax (UK VAT MOSS, US sales tax if you sell across borders). We've handled all of these on previous projects and know where the pitfalls are before you find them.

Stripe integration done properly

Stripe Subscriptions handles the core billing, but the membership plugin's connector is rarely enough on its own. We add proper webhook handling for events the plugin misses, customer portal links so members can self-serve, smart retry logic for failed payments (which alone typically recovers 5–15% of lost revenue), tax calculation via Stripe Tax where appropriate, and analytics dashboards so you can see MRR, churn, LTV and ARPU without exporting CSVs.

Onboarding and retention

Most membership sites lose 30–50% of members in the first 60 days because onboarding is weak. We build proper onboarding sequences (email, in-app), first-week engagement nudges, "stuck" detection (member hasn't completed a lesson in 14 days), and a cancellation flow that surfaces pause/downgrade options before "cancel". These details routinely double LTV.

Pricing

Standard WordPress membership (content + Stripe + basic community): £3,500–£8,000. Membership + LMS + community: £8,000–£18,000. Bespoke membership platform: £18,000–£60,000+. Migrations from Kajabi/Teachable/Mighty Networks: £2,500–£10,000. Care plans from £150/month covering maintenance, billing edge cases and quarterly content tweaks.