Membership & subscription sites
that behave on renewal day.
Gated content, tiers, renewals and billing logic that behaves the same on month twenty-four.
- — Support spends its week on manual billing corrections
- — You cannot answer why members churned last quarter
- — Gated content leaks or blocks the wrong people
The work should
change the numbers.
Membership products are simple on day one and complicated by day four hundred. Someone upgrades mid-cycle. Someone pauses. A team plan adds a seat, then removes two. A card expires while an annual renewal is pending. Each of these is a business rule, and each one needs a decision before it needs code.
We build the entitlement model first — who can see what, under which state, and what happens at every transition — then build the interface on top of it. That order is why these systems stay maintainable.
Content gating is handled so it is invisible to search engines where it should be and airtight where it must be, which is a distinction plenty of membership plugins get wrong.
What the engagement
actually contains.
Entitlement modelling
Tiers, seats, trials, grace periods and state transitions written down as rules before implementation.
Billing and renewal logic
Proration, upgrades, downgrades, pauses, dunning and cancellation flows that behave predictably.
Content gating
Server-side access control with sensible previews, so paid content stays paid and public content stays indexable.
Member experience
Onboarding, account management, billing history and self-service changes that reduce support load.
Community and course features
Progress tracking, drip release, certificates, comments or forums where the product calls for them.
Retention reporting
Cohort retention, churn reasons and MRR movement visible without exporting anything.
- Membership platform in production
- Documented entitlement and billing rules
- Member self-service account area
- Admin tooling for support and overrides
- Retention and revenue dashboard
- Support runbook for billing edge cases
- Support spends its week on manual billing corrections
- You cannot answer why members churned last quarter
- Gated content leaks or blocks the wrong people
- Adding a new plan means changing code in five places
What usually went wrong
before we were called.
- 01Building the interface before the entitlement rules are written down
- 02Handling proration and pauses in support tickets rather than in code
- 03Gating content so aggressively that nothing is indexable
- 04No self-service payment update page that works on a phone
- Involuntary churn rate
- Trial to paid conversion
- Billing support tickets per hundred members
- Cohort retention at 3 and 12 months
8–14 weeks depending on entitlement complexity
What week one
actually looks like.
Entitlement rules written down as a state table — tiers, seats, trials, pauses, grace periods and every transition between them. It is the least glamorous week and the one that prevents most future support load.
- Current billing data and plan definitions
- Content library and access rules
- A support owner for edge-case decisions
- Billing provider credentials
- Producing course or membership content
- Community moderation
- Email marketing campaign management
- Payment provider fees
Scope boundaries stated up front rather than discovered in a change request.
Four stages, visible throughout.
Diagnose
Analytics, search data, sales conversations and a technical audit read together, so the brief is based on evidence rather than opinion.
Structure
Message hierarchy, page architecture and URL plan agreed before design starts — the decisions that are expensive to change later.
Build
A component system engineered by seniors, with technical SEO, accessibility and performance handled as we go rather than bolted on.
Prove
Staged launch, redirect and coverage monitoring, and conversion measured against the baseline we took before starting.
Membership & subscription sites, answered.
Yes, when it is structured deliberately. We use indexable previews and, where appropriate, paywalled-content structured data so search engines understand the arrangement instead of guessing. Cloaking full content to crawlers is not something we will build.
If your tiers are simple and your content is articles or videos, an established plugin plus careful configuration is usually the right answer. Bespoke work earns its place when entitlements interact with seats, usage, partner access or your own product.
Card-updater services, retry schedules tuned to your billing cycle, pre-dunning email sequences and a self-service payment update page that actually works on mobile. It is unglamorous and it is usually the fastest retention win available.
Payment gateway integration
Stripe, PayPal, Adyen and regional gateways wired in with tax, refunds and edge cases handled.
SaaS & custom software
Product engineering for the system your business runs on and no vendor sells off the shelf.
Web development
Custom, WordPress and Shopify builds for teams who need a site that sells, not just one that exists.
Security hardening & SSL
Hardening, patching, certificates and headers — the unglamorous work that prevents the bad week.
Make membership & subscription sites useful.
Bring us the hard thing. We will bring a point of view, a senior team and a clear next step.