Pricing a community-only membership

Pricing a membership full of courses and downloads is hard enough, but at least you can point to something: a library, a set of lessons, a pile of templates. A community-only membership has none of that. What members pay for is access to other people: their answers, their experience, their encouragement and the relationships that form between them.

That makes the price harder to set and harder to explain. Owners often go too low, because a forum or group chat feels like something that should be free, or too high, because they have seen expensive private networks and assumed the same would work for them. The right price comes from understanding what your particular group of people is worth to each other, and what it costs you to keep that group healthy.

What people really pay for in a community

Nobody pays for a discussion board. They pay for what happens there. In a paid community, the value usually comes from some combination of:

• Answers from people who know. A question posted at lunchtime and answered by three experienced peers by the evening.
• Peers in the same situation. People who understand problems that friends and family do not.
• Accountability. Regular check-ins, goals shared out loud and people who notice when you go quiet.
• Opportunities. Referrals, collaborations, job leads and introductions.
• Curation and trust. Knowing that everyone in the room has been vetted, and that the conversation will not be drowned in spam or self-promotion.
• Belonging. Being part of something with its own habits, which is where rituals and traditions earn their keep.

Before setting a price, rank these for your community. A professional network where members win work through referrals can charge far more than a hobby group that mainly offers friendly encouragement, even if both have the same number of members.

Compare with what people do instead

The fairest benchmark for a community is not another community. It is the other ways your members currently get the same things:

• Attending a conference or trade event to meet peers once a year.
• Paying for a mastermind group or a place on a coaching program.
• Hiring an adviser for occasional questions.
• Joining a local networking group with a membership fee and a monthly meal.
• Muddling through alone and making expensive mistakes.

Consider a hypothetical private community for owners of small, independent veterinary practices, run by Anjali. Her members’ alternatives are an annual conference, costing several hundred dollars once travel is included, or phoning a consultant for each thorny staffing or pricing question. Against those, $49 a month for a vetted room of fellow practice owners who answer questions every day is easy to justify. A hobby community for people restoring vintage sewing machines has cheaper alternatives, such as free groups and videos, so its price has to rest more on curation, friendliness and expert hosting.

Price for the hosting, not just the software

A community without a host tends to go quiet. Someone has to welcome newcomers, start conversations, answer when nobody else does and deal with problems. Whether that person is you or someone you pay, their time is the main cost of a community-only membership, and your price has to cover it.

Here is an illustration with round, made-up figures. Say you plan to pay a part-time community host $1,500 a month and spend $300 a month on software and other costs. That is $1,800 a month before you pay yourself anything.

• At $15 a month, you need 120 members just to cover costs.
• At $30 a month, you need 60.
• At $49 a month, you need about 37.

Working through this sum often shows that a low price is not the safe option. It commits you to growing a large community quickly, before it can support the hosting it needs.

Solve the empty-room problem at launch

A community is worth less when it is small, because there are fewer people to learn from. That creates a pricing puzzle: the first members get the least value, yet you need them to join before anyone else will.

Common solutions include:

1. A founding rate for the first group, clearly labeled and time-limited, with a promise that their rate is kept while they stay.
2. Heavy hosting early on, with more live sessions and more personal introductions, so the room feels busy even when it is small.
3. Starting with an existing group, such as past clients or course graduates, who already know each other.

Raise the price for new members as the community grows and its value becomes visible. That is honest: a larger, livelier community genuinely is worth more.

Describe people, not features

How you describe the community shapes what people will pay. Compare two versions of the same sales page line:

Before: “Access to our private forum, member directory and monthly video call.”

After: “Join 140 independent practice owners who answer each other’s staffing, pricing and client questions every day. Most questions get a reply from someone who has faced the same problem within a few hours.”

The second version names who is in the room and what they do for each other. Only make claims you can back up, and update the numbers as the community grows. Short member stories, such as how a referral or a single piece of advice paid for a year’s membership, do more than any feature list.

Your next steps

1. Rank the six sources of community value for your members and name the top two.
2. List the real alternatives your members use today and roughly what they cost.
3. Estimate your monthly hosting and running costs, and work out how many members you need at each possible price.
4. Choose a founding rate and a plan for raising the price as the community grows.
5. Rewrite your sales page to describe the people and what they do for each other.
6. Ask your first members, after a few months, what the community has saved or earned them.