Membership site on WordPress
Before you pick anything, it is worth knowing that "membership site" names two different products. One sells content behind a paywall. The other sells access to a community. They need different software, and buying the wrong one is the most common way this goes wrong.
Both run on your own WordPress, which is the part that matters for cost: no per-member billing, no cut of what you charge, and the members in a database you hold.
Work out which one first
Answer this and the tool choice makes itself. Get it wrong and you spend a month fighting software that was built for the other job.
What are your members paying for?
Access to material
People pay to read, watch or download something. Articles behind a paywall, a video library, a course that drips out weekly, files only members can get.
Not us MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro
A content-protection plugin. MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro are built for exactly this, and Learnomy if what you are selling is structured courses.
Access to a place
People pay to be somewhere, with other people. A feed worth opening, rooms for the topics that matter, members who know each other, conversation that keeps going without you.
This is us BuddyNext
This is BuddyNext. The community is the free part; charging for access to it is Pro.
A lot of real membership sites are both, and that is fine. Run a content plugin for the paywall and BuddyNext for the community, and bridge the membership grant so one purchase does both. The membership plugin page goes into how the grant hand-off works.
What it costs to run
This is the whole case for building on WordPress rather than renting. Hosted platforms are genuinely quicker to start, and they price by success.
If it is the community you are selling
The community itself is the free BuddyNext core, so you are putting a price on something that already works rather than buying a paywall with an empty room behind it.
Courses are a different job again, and they belong to Learnomy in the same family: Learnomy charges for what people learn, BuddyNext charges for where they belong.
Questions
It depends which of the two kinds you are building. If you are selling content, a content-protection plugin on WordPress is the direct answer, and MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro are the usual choices. If you are selling access to a community, you want a community platform with plans attached, which is what BuddyNext is. Plenty of real membership sites are both, in which case run both and let each do its own job.
On WordPress you are paying for software and hosting rather than a per-member subscription. BuddyNext's community core is free, Pro is $149 a year or $399 once, and hosting for a small community is a few dollars a month. A content-protection plugin is a separate annual licence on top if you need one. The contrast with hosted platforms is that none of these numbers move when your membership grows.
WordPress core does not include one, but the plugin ecosystem covers both kinds well. For protecting content there are several mature options. For charging for access to a community, BuddyNext runs the community itself and adds plans, gated spaces and gateways on Pro.
For community memberships, yes: the BuddyNext core is free and GPL, with the feed, spaces, profiles, messaging and moderation all in it, and no licence key. Charging money for access is a Pro feature. For content protection specifically the well-known plugins are commercial, so expect a licence there.
Yes, and that is the main reason people self-host. A WordPress membership site runs on your own hosting, so the cost is the server rather than the headcount. A community of five hundred and a community of five thousand cost you the same in software.
You need to be comfortable installing a WordPress plugin. If you already have a WordPress site, you have done the hard part. Moving from BuddyPress or BuddyBoss is covered by the free importer, which brings members, groups, activity and history across.
The free core runs a real membership community. Put a price on it once people are turning up.
What a community platform has to do, and what changes once you host it yourself.
What a social network plugin has to include before it can replace a stack of add-ons.
The build itself: the steps involved and what it actually costs to run.
Building the site around the community, including the parts that are not the plugin.
Charging for access to the community itself, and where that differs from gating content.