Payment Guide: Paid Memberships

NOTE: Creators building a paid membership today should see the Payment Guide on  Selling Content Bundles instead.

You can now use bundles set to "Make Membership" to offer memberships for your customers. The below article describes a legacy feature that is less flexible than bundle memberships.

Do you want to create a membership program with Heights Platform? If you want to charge students to sign up and enroll in your program before they are able to see any part of your program, our paid enrollment settings allow you to create a membership site with minimal configuration. 

Does your program meet the following criteria? 

1. You want to create a private membership site. 
2. You don't plan on offering any kind of free content.
3. You want to charge your students to sign up with any combination of a one-time, installment plan, or subscription plan fee. 
4. You want students to always purchase membership access as a baseline before being able to purchase anything else, with the option to sell add-ons/cross-sells or release new content to members in the future.
5. You will only have a single membership program.

If this doesn't sound like what you are looking for, see the rest of our Payment Guide on Selling Individual Products, and Selling Content Bundles.

If the above sounds like your business model, our paid enrollment settings make it very easy to configure payment for your site. Simply go to the "Program Pricing" tab of your Payment Settings page, select the "Charge a simple paid membership with optional add-ons and no free content" option, and choose one or more payment plan options (one-time, installment, and subscription).

Any course, project or discussion board content you publish in your program will automatically be included in your student's memberships. Any courses you set to "sold separately", and any digital products will be purchasable by your students as add-ons. 

Limitations of Paid Membership Versus Other Payment Settings:

1. No ability to offer free courses
2. No ability to have multiple separate programs to enroll in (every student must purchase the base membership to create an account and before they are able to purchase anything else)
3. Related to the above - no ability to sell a "mini-course" or cheaper product before your main membership (since every student must purchase the base membership in order to access your site)

Changing Pricing After Launch

If you start offering your content for free and later switch to charge for program enrollment, your existing students will continue to have access for free. Similarly, if you are already using paid enrollment settings described above, and if you raise or lower your pricing, these changes will only impact new signups. See Changing Subscription Pricing for more.

NOTE: There is one exception to the above rule. Free courses or courses included with enrollment are not "granted" to a student. Meaning that if you later change an individual course that was included to be "sold separately", then your existing students will no longer have access to this course. We recommend that you first grant this course to your students if you want them to continue to be able to access it after selling it separately to future students. See Granting and Revoking Content Access.