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.
| LaunchPass | Memberful | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $29 | From $49 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | 14 days | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | 3.5% 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 |
Charge for access to a Discord or Slack group
LaunchPass puts a paywall in front of a chat community you already run, and hands out and removes the roles as people pay and lapse. It connects to Discord, Slack and Telegram, and the money arrives through your own Stripe account. It manages access rather than hosting anything, so the community stays where your members already are.
Our note
Sensible if your community is already somewhere and already wanted. Compare it against DoorFee if the community is on Discord, since DoorFee sells the membership as well as gating it, and against Circle or Skool if you were half thinking of moving anyway.
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.