Build a membership platform — gated content, recurring revenue, owned audience.
Substack takes 10%. Patreon takes 8-12%. A custom membership platform costs a fixed build fee and 2.9% in Stripe fees. You own the subscriber relationship, the content delivery, and the brand experience.
Creator, publisher, or community builder who pays platform fees to Substack, Patreon, or similar and wants to own their membership infrastructure
Substack charges 10% of subscription revenue. At $10k/month in subscriptions, that's $1,000/month — $12,000/year. A custom platform costs $25-35k to build and $0/month in platform fees. Break-even at $10k/month is 2.5 months.
What you get with a custom membership platform:
- Your domain, your brand — no "powered by Substack"
- Your pricing tiers — any price, any structure, any currency
- Your content types — articles, video, audio, community, courses
- Your subscriber data — full export, full ownership
- Your email list — import/export without platform restrictions
- Algorithmic independence — no feed algorithm controlling your reach
Who switches to custom:
- Newsletter publishers with 5,000+ paid subscribers
- Media companies with premium subscription tiers
- Professional communities with paid membership
- Educators with course + community bundled memberships
Custom membership platform deployed — subscriber management, gated content delivery, billing, and member portal
Subscriber management
sign-up, billing, cancellation, reactivation
Gated content delivery
article, video, podcast behind paywall
Member portal
subscriber dashboard with content library
Email integration
Resend or Postmark for subscriber emails
Tier management
multiple price tiers with different access
Analytics
MRR, churn rate, subscriber growth
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
Custom membership platform deployed — subscriber management, gated content delivery, billing, and member portal
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
Membership platforms have defined subscription and access control flows. Fixed-price from the spec.
Related engagements.
Questions, answered.
Resend or Postmark for transactional emails. Subscriber newsletters via the same or integrated with existing email platform (ConvertKit, Beehiiv). Deliverability is a domain reputation issue, not a code issue.
Yes. Stripe Billing proration handles tier changes. Members upgrade/downgrade in their account settings with immediate or end-of-period effect.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.