Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover community platforms and memberships & subscriptions. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| DoorFee | Memberful | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $28 | From $49 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | 2.5% of what you earn | 4.9% of what you earn |
| Runs on | Not stated | Web |
| Covers | Community Platforms, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments | Memberships & Subscriptions, Community Platforms, Monetization & Payments |
| Works with | Discord | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
Paid Discord memberships with a sales funnel
DoorFee sells access to a Discord server and gives you the pages and email that sell it, which is the half most access tools leave to you. Payments run through Stripe and roles are granted and revoked automatically. The page builder, affiliate program and coupon codes are what separate it from a bare paywall bot.
Only on this side
Paid memberships bolted onto a site you own
Memberful sells memberships from a site you already run rather than moving your audience to a platform, and it is the tool most WordPress publishers reach for when they start charging. One price covers everything and the money is charged on top as a percentage. Nothing is billed until a first payment comes in, so a launch that never launches costs nothing.
Our note
The 4.9 percent is the number to model, because it is charged on revenue rather than on profit: at $2,000 a month collected it is about double the subscription. Against Ghost, which takes nothing, this wins on flexibility and loses on arithmetic once you are large.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.