Can I sell the community itself?
Guide 1 puts a price on part of the room and keeps the door open. This one is the other decision: making the room itself the thing somebody buys. Pick the shape before you build anything, because the shape decides what a stranger sees.
Updated 16 September 2026
Open my community
Pick the shape before you build anything
Community, then Membership. The screen asks one question at the top: what kind of community is this? Five answers, each with a line saying what a member meets.
This is the decision the rest of the guide hangs on, and it is the one people make last. Paid and Pay once put a wall at the front door. Tiers builds a ladder. Free with a paid tier keeps the door open, which is Guide 1 rather than this one.
Five shapes. Each line says what a member actually meets.
Open my membership settingsBuild the ladder, cheapest first
Pick Tiers and the screen turns into your plans, cheapest first. Add a plan, name it, price it, and say what opens at that level.
The rule underneath is worth knowing before you design the ladder: each course and each event opens at the LOWEST plan you choose, and everyone above it gets in too. So you are not assigning things to plans one by one, you are setting a floor and letting the ladder do the rest.
Two or three rungs is plenty. Five is a pricing page nobody reads.
Your plans, cheapest first, and what opens at each one.
Read this before you save, because it can cost you members
The moment you pick a paid shape, the screen asks what happens to the people already inside, and it counts them for you.
"They keep their access. Nothing changes for anyone already here. Only new members pay." That one is marked Recommended, and it is recommended for a reason.
The other says "Everyone must subscribe", and then tells you exactly what that means with the real number: they lose access as soon as you save, until they pay. People who joined something free and were locked out of it overnight do not come back, and they tell other people.
The count is real. Read this line twice before you choose the second option.
Decide the trial
It arrives at 7 days, and the line underneath says what that means: days before the first payment. Set 0 for no trial.
This is the number worth thinking about rather than accepting. A trial on a community is not the same as a trial on software: they are deciding whether the room is worth being in, and that takes more than an afternoon. If you are unsure, leave it at seven.
Seven days, and the sentence that says what happens on day eight.
Look at it as a stranger, then publish
Preview shows you what somebody sees before they pay, which is the only view that matters and the one you never otherwise see. Your own account is a member of everything.
Stripe has to be connected by the time you publish, and until you publish you are in test mode: you can walk your own signup as often as you like and nothing charges anyone. Publishing is the only moment it becomes real.
Preview is the stranger view. Save, then publish, then it is real.
Connect Stripe
A paywall across the front door costs you the thing that makes a community findable. Strangers stop being able to look inside and decide they want in, so every new member now has to arrive already convinced. That is a harder job, and it is why Guide 1 exists as the other option.
And a membership is a promise about next month, not a transaction. If you would not back yourself to keep it for a year, sell a course or a seminar instead: Pay once is on the same screen and it owes nobody anything afterwards.
Can I just tell Claude to do it?
Related articles
Can I just tell Claude to do it?
Everything in these guides is a screen you can click. This is the other way in: connect your own Claude to your account and describe what you want instead of building it.
How do I make money from the community I already have?
You do not have to close the door to charge. Keep your community free to join, and put the thing worth paying for behind a tier, so the room still brings people in while it starts earning.
How do I run a community when I have no time?
Most of it already runs without you. This is what is switched on, what you can hand over, and the fifteen minutes twice a week that actually need a person.