Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover memberships & subscriptions and monetization & payments. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Charge for access to a Discord or Slack group
Sell access to a community with no monthly fee
LaunchPass | Whop | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $29 | Free |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free plan, paid tiers | Free |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing (they differ) | Monthly or annual | Usage-based |
| Free trial | 14 days | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
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
Sell access to a community with no monthly fee
Whop sells memberships, courses, software and communities from a storefront that handles the checkout and the access control together, so a paying customer lands inside whatever they bought rather than in an email thread. There is no setup cost and no monthly cost; the money comes off each transaction. Rates differ by how the customer pays, with cards cheapest and instalment financing dearest. The marketplace side brings its own traffic, which is either the reason to be here or noise to ignore depending on what is being sold.
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.
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
|---|
| Their cut | 3.5% of what you earn | Not stated |
|---|
| Runs on | Not stated | Web, iOS, Android |
|---|
| Covers | Community Platforms, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments | Monetization & Payments, Memberships & Subscriptions |
|---|
| 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 |
|---|
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Our note
Push customers towards cards if you can, because the gap between 2.7 percent and the 4 to 5 percent charged on other methods is the largest single lever on what you keep. Compare against Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy on the all-in rate rather than the headline, since all three price differently once payouts and disputes are counted.