BuddyNext - community engine for WordPress

Recipe: Launch a Paid Community

Free & Pro

Goal: turn your community into a paid membership, where people subscribe to unlock spaces and content. You'll need: BuddyNext Pro, and a Stripe account. Time: about 30-45 minutes for a first plan.

This recipe stitches together the separate pieces - plans, payments, gating, renewals, and a moderation baseline - into one order of operations. Each step links to the full guide for that piece; come here for the sequence, go there for the detail.

Before you start

  • Install and activate BuddyNext Pro on top of the free plugin.
  • Have a Stripe account ready (test mode is fine while you set up).
  • Decide, roughly, what a paying member gets that a free member does not - one or two gated spaces, or premium posts, is plenty to launch with.

Steps

  1. Create your first plan. Give it a name, a price, and a billing period (monthly or yearly), and describe the perks. Start with a single plan; you can add tiers later. Full guide: Membership Plans.

  2. Connect Stripe. Enter your Stripe keys, confirm the gateway status badge turns green, and add the webhook in Stripe so access stays in sync when payments succeed, fail, or refund. Full guide: Stripe Payments (Steps 1-2). For other gateways or tax, see Payment Gateways and Coupons and Tax.

  3. Gate a space to the plan. Pick the space paying members unlock and require your plan to enter it. Non-members see an invitation to subscribe instead of the feed. Full guide: Gated Spaces. To paywall individual posts instead of a whole space, see Content Protection.

  4. Turn on renewal reminders. Email members before a subscription renews or when a payment fails, so access does not lapse by surprise. Full guide: Renewal Reminders.

  5. Set a moderation baseline. Before you invite anyone, make sure the report button and review queue are working, so a paying community stays healthy from day one. Full guide: Moderation Queue.

What your members see

Members browse your plans, subscribe through hosted Stripe checkout, and manage their own subscription from Settings > Membership - upgrade, cancel, or view payment history and invoices. See Membership Plans ("How it works, for members") and Account Settings.

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