A gated membership community with tiered Stripe billing, content access control, and 900 founding members.
The client had an engaged audience and a proven paid community. They'd been running it on Kajabi. When the member count hit 900 and the Kajabi limitations became structural, they came to us to build the real platform. 10 weeks to launch.
Kajabi limiting the membership experience they could deliver to 900 paying members
The client ran a paid community for marketing professionals — monthly membership, access to educational content, weekly live sessions, and a discussion forum. 900 members, 3 membership tiers, and a content library of 200+ resources. Kajabi did the job well enough until the client wanted to introduce features it doesn't support: a member directory where members could filter by specialization and contact each other, peer review on submitted work samples, and a referral program that gave existing members a revenue share on referred signups.
Every third-party solution for the referral program was a SaaS tool that added another monthly cost and didn't integrate cleanly with Kajabi's member data. The peer review workflow wasn't buildable in Kajabi at all. The member directory was possible but required significant custom JavaScript injection to work.
The migration trigger: the client's annual Kajabi renewal at $199/month was coming up. They'd calculated the cost of building custom vs. staying on Kajabi and decided to own the platform.
Custom membership platform with tiered access, Stripe billing, live sessions, and community forum — fully branded and owned
Stack: Next.js 14, Convex, Clerk, Stripe Billing, Stripe Customer Portal, Resend, Mux (video hosting), Vercel.
Content access control: Three membership tiers (Community, Professional, Elite) with content access gates enforced at the API layer using Clerk session claims. Tier is stored as a Stripe subscription metadata field and synced to Clerk metadata on every billing event.
Video content: Mux for video hosting with signed playback URLs generated server-side. Members can't share or download video URLs — each URL is valid for the session only.
Community forum: Threaded discussion forum built on Convex. Real-time thread updates via Convex live queries. Upvoting, commenting, and member tagging. Content moderation admin panel.
Member directory: Searchable member directory with specialization, location, and experience level. Contact request workflow for member-to-member networking. Directory visibility opt-in/opt-out settings.
Referral program: Custom referral link generation. Referral tracking tied to Stripe's customer metadata. Automatic commission calculation and payout via Stripe Connect for members with active referrals.
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 with tiered access, Stripe billing, live sessions, and community forum — fully branded and owned
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.
Results
- 900 members migrated with zero data loss on launch day
- Kajabi ($199/month) eliminated
- Referral program generated 47 new member signups in first 60 days
Related engagements.
Questions, answered.
Kajabi exports member data as CSV. All members were imported to the new platform via a migration script. Members received an email with a password reset link to set their credentials on the new platform. Content access was preserved based on their Stripe subscription tier.
All course content (video, PDFs, quizzes) was migrated to the new platform. Videos were re-uploaded to Mux. PDFs were moved to Vercel Blob storage. The quiz data was migrated to Convex.
Custom membership platform: from $30k. Fixed-price.
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.