Membership pricing guide & calculator

How to read your number

The calculator shows five prices for your industry. Typical is the median monthly price paying communities charge. The middle half charge between the 25th and 75th percentile, and the ends of the strip are the bottom and top tenth. They come from the offers those communities actually sell, grouped by the industry we classified them into, and they stay provisional until we swap in settled Stripe figures.

The marker on the strip is your time floor. Take your hourly rate, multiply it by the hours a week you give the community, and spread that across the paying members you expect. That is the monthly price at which the membership pays you what your other work does. A life coach who bills the ICF average of $234 a session¹ and gives a community five hours a week needs about $220 a month from each of 23 members just to break even on time. A consultant at the Bureau of Labor Statistics median of about $49 an hour² needs about a fifth of that.

Read the two together. If the floor sits inside the range, price at or above it. If it sits above the high end for your industry, a membership at those hours won't pay you, and a group program, a cohort or a VIP day will. The calculator tells you which input pushed it there. Try the sliders and watch what moves it.

The rest of this page is our pricing guide. It draws on the experts who have taught pricing in our tutorial series and on community builders who have priced, repriced and raised prices on Heartbeat.

Start from your revenue goal, not a price

Most community builders pick a price that feels right and hope enough people turn up. Do it the other way round. Write down what the community needs to earn in the next twelve months, divide by twelve, take out roughly 20% for tax if you are in the US, and you have a monthly target. Then work out how many members each price needs.

Calculations above do not account for Heartbeat or Stripe fees.

Can you find 103 people who will pay $49? Maybe. Can you find 17 who will pay $297 and feel they got their money's worth? Also maybe. Those are two very different businesses to run, so pick the price first and let it decide how you deliver.

Doc Williams, founder of Brand Factory, has built communities for ESPN, VaynerMedia and the NBA Summer League, and he teaches this in four steps. First, set three revenue goals (good, better and best) so you can start before you hit the dream number. Second, talk to your members to find out what they need. Under 30 people, get on one-to-one calls, record them with consent, and listen for the problems they describe and the words they use. Those words become your sales page. Third, sell painkillers. A vitamin is nice to have. A painkiller solves an urgent problem. Painkillers get paid for, and vitamins get cancelled. Fourth, make the ask. This is where most people stall, and fear of hearing no is why they underprice by 40%.

Doc's way of finding the price is blunt. Pick a price and sell it. Every time you sell it again, try a higher number. When people start saying no, you've found your price, and you found it from buyers instead of a spreadsheet.

The four pricing categories

Communities are different products, so they need different prices. Lisa Princic, a business strategist who has worked with hundreds of membership owners over 16 years, sorts them into four categories, each with its own delivery model and its own maths.

Micro, under $15 a month

The cheapest tier is the hardest to do well. It works when you already have a large audience, usually 5,000 to 10,000 followers around one topic or 2,000 engaged newsletter subscribers, and the product is content people use on their own time. The maths needs volume: 30 members at $15 is $450 a month for what is probably $2,000 of effort. Because each member pays so little, you keep adding more to justify the price, and the work outgrows the income. What works looks like this: a creator with a 10,000-subscriber newsletter launches a $12 companion community, spends two or three hours a week on it, and reaches 400 members.

Low ticket, $15 to $97

Most builders land here, and for good reason. A monthly workshop, a couple of courses or a resource library, group calls every two or three weeks, and discussion around one topic. At $49 with 100 members you have $4,900 a month and a group you can manage. One threshold matters: under $25 a month you are in micro territory whatever you call it, because people forget they are paying you at all.

Alejandro Bernardo Diaz at NoCodeHackers started by selling a €5 Airtable tutorial to 300 Twitter followers, then €120 standalone courses. Next he tried a subscription, and it flopped: only five people finished more than two courses. He switched to a €349 six-week cohort and sold 50 seats in two days. Revenue went from about €100K to about €350K in two years. He found a narrow niche, kept testing the price upward, and stopped when it matched what he delivered.

High ticket, $100 to $500

More communities should start here, or move here. High ticket is for a community that gets members from A to B: direct access to you, a structured program or cohort, a small hand-picked group. The price is real money, and that helps. People think before they pay, and once they've paid, they show up. Most coaching communities hover around $150 and deliver something worth $400 to $500. They just haven't built the confidence to charge it yet.

Kat Weaver at Power to Pitch runs programs from $2,000 to $15,000 that help founders raise capital. She started at $99 with two members. She now has over 400 active members and more than $1M in lifetime sales, and her founders have raised more than $55M between them. Her rule: people who pay, pay attention. She once gave away $10,000 of coaching for free, and 20% of the people showed up.

Premium, $500 and up

This is the mastermind tier: a small group, deep access and high commitment. At this level you do hands-on work with and for members. Ten people at $500 a month is $60,000 a year from a group that fits on one call. Emily Claire Hughes at The 10K Email Club charges $1,500 a month for a done-with-you email marketing membership: members draft, her team edits. Her first launch at $199 got zero signups. She relaunched at $1,500, dropped $10,000 a month of client work to go all in, and reached about 18 members and roughly $160K a year.

The mistake across all four categories is delivering premium work at a micro price. Weekly live calls, personal feedback and hand-picked introductions for $19 a month is a charity with a signup form.

Why charging more gets you more members

Higher-priced communities make more per member. They usually also attract members who commit, stay longer and take part more than members of cheaper ones. Your price tells people how serious you are and whether the room is for committed people or browsers.

During one of Doc's pricing tutorials, a Heartbeat customer named Drew shared the numbers from his niche health community, a training program for people with lazy eye. He tested $9 a month, $29 a month and an annual plan. The $9 tier did worst on revenue and on response: fewer people signed up, and the ones who did took part less. The higher price did better on every count.

Price filters. At $9 you tell the market this isn't very important, and you attract people who agree. They try it for a month and forget. At $79 or $149 you say this is for people who want results, and the people who join have made a deliberate decision. That decision shows in how they behave from day one. It's the same reason a $3,000 conference has a more engaged room than a free webinar.

Lisa sees the same pattern with her clients and in her own life. When she was paying $2,000 a month for her own development, she was immersed, paying attention, doing the work. The content was no better than cheaper options. What she paid made her show up. The cycle runs both ways. A low price brings low engagement, the room feels empty, people cancel, and you drop the price again to replace them. That's how an underpriced community spirals down, and the way out starts with the price.

Specificity sets the ceiling. Tatiana Figueiredo, founder of Friendly Nooks, coaches founders on this all the time. A community for entrepreneurs could be worth $15 or $500 a month, and nobody can tell which. A community for DTC founders doing $1M to $5M who want to grow without venture capital is worth $200 a month to the right person, and they know at once whether it's for them. A narrower promise means fewer people and a higher price for each. It also gives members what Tatiana calls the almost magical feeling of finding your people, which is what they actually pay for.

A few practical rules follow. Price for the audience you have. With 30 potential members, $100 a month is a $3,000 business and $9 a month is lunch money. If accessibility matters to you, use scholarships, a sliding scale or regional pricing instead of a lower price for everyone, so the price still says what it should. And test upward. You can always lower a price, but raise one after people have anchored to the low number and you lose the members who feel the rug moved.

Price is a boundary: the psychology of charging

The biggest pricing problem has nothing to do with maths. It's your own head. Builders underprice because they are afraid to ask, afraid of rejection, or carrying beliefs about money that formed long before the business did. If charging a lot felt greedy in the house you grew up in, that belief follows you to the pricing page. It shows up as $29 a month because it feels right, a discount offered before anyone asked, and "but it's totally fine if this isn't in your budget" on a sales call.

Nivi Achanta, founder of Soapbox Project, puts it simply. Price is a boundary, the same as the ones you set around your time and availability. She ran her climate action community at $5 a month for a long time while running weekly workshops and curating action plans. The effort was enormous and the price reflected none of it. When she moved to $250 to $350 cohorts, the people who joined did the work and got results, and she stopped burning out because the revenue finally matched the effort. Her exercise is two columns. What is okay: charging a price that reflects my expertise, raising it when my delivery improves, saying no to requests for free access. What is not okay: earning below minimum wage for my time, unlimited access for $15 a month, discounting before anyone asks. Once they're written down, the boundaries are obvious.

Doc tells of a student who said, "I understand everything you said and it makes total sense, but I'm not going to do it because I'm afraid of rejection." That fear is the most common reason communities are underpriced, and the fix is practice. Get on calls, say the number, skip the qualifiers, don't apologize, don't offer a discount, and stop talking. The first few times feel terrible. Every yes builds the habit, and every no tells you something about the offer.

Lisa's test is simpler still: track your hours. For one month, log every hour you spend on the community and divide the revenue by it. Most builders who try this find they earn below minimum wage for expertise that bills $200 to $500 an hour in a consulting setting. The expertise is worth the money, so the gap is confidence. The calculator above shows it by putting a price on your hours.

Two more levers once your head is straight. Anchoring: a $49 price on its own has nothing to compare with, while $49 next to $149 looks reasonable, which is why three tiers push most buyers to the middle. Each tier still has to be real, so don't launch three on day one for the effect. Then watch the small signals that undercut a price: the payment plan offered before anyone asks, "I know that sounds like a lot", fourteen justifications where two would do, and a checkout that shouts about promo codes. Each one tells buyers you don't quite believe the number.

Should you offer a free tier?

No. If you're building a paid community, don't run a free tier next to it. Freemium works for software because a free user costs almost nothing to serve, and the product has natural limits (a storage cap, a locked feature) that push people to upgrade. A community has none of that. Free members never hit a ceiling, because there is always more conversation than anyone can read, and every one of them adds moderation, content and attention you now owe them.

The bigger problem is that a free tier lets you skip the one question a business has to answer first: will people pay for this? You can have 500 active, grateful free members and still not know whether any of them would pay $49. Tatiana calls free communities a red herring for exactly this reason. Activity doesn't pay the bills, and people engaging with free content tells you nothing about a paid offer. Free and paid members are also different people. Free members are earlier in the journey and less committed, so the conversations that serve one group bore the other. In software, a 2% to 5% upgrade rate is fine on a huge base. In a community, 500 free members converting at 2% gives you ten paying members and 490 people who dilute the room.

If you want people to sample the community, there are better ways than free. Give your first cohort a founding-member rate, lower than the eventual price but above zero, because a free beta only proves people will join a free community. Run a three or four week paid cohort instead of an open-ended free tier. Let your YouTube, newsletter and social posts be the free tier, and keep the community as the paid product. And under 30 people, talk to them one by one, then invite them to pay for the answer.

Free trials are a little better than freemium, and still not ideal. A community's first day should feel like walking through a door, and "I clicked a button and now I'm in" doesn't. If you run one, keep it to seven days, take a card up front, and make onboarding good enough that cancelling feels like leaving something behind. Charging from day one with a money-back guarantee is usually the better trade. Scholarships and sliding-scale pricing keep the community inclusive without pricing it at zero.

Designing pricing tiers

Start with one tier. Most builders launch a menu before they know what any single tier should contain. Every extra tier is more to manage, another comparison for a prospect to puzzle over, and another reason to pick the cheapest option. Add a second tier when you have evidence, which usually comes as three signals.

Your best members keep asking for more: deeper access, faster results, more of your attention. There's a clear gap worth paying for, something specific like direct coaching, live feedback or a structured cohort, that makes the next tier worth two or three times the base. If you can't say what it is in one sentence, you don't have a second tier yet, just a confusing pricing page. And you can deliver it without overextending, because a premium tier adds work, and if you're already at capacity it will burn you out faster. Tatiana's rule for names: the more specific, the better. Silver, Gold and Platinum tell a member nothing. Community, Coaching and VIP tell them what changes.

Each tier has to stand on its own. The base tier shouldn't be a teaser for the next one. Higher tiers add depth and speed on top of the same core. Describe each tier by who it's for and where they are in their journey, instead of with a feature list, and the right people pick themselves. That also stops a lower tier eating into an upper one. In Heartbeat all three tiers live in one community. Access groups gate the premium channels, and everyone else can still see the locked icons, so the upgrade sells itself without a separate space.

Offer annual billing from the start. Communities that add an annual option often see 20% to 25% of members switch within two months. Those are your most loyal members anyway, and now they're committed for a year instead of deciding every month. The usual discount is 15% to 20%, about two months free, shown next to the monthly price on the same page with annual as the highlighted choice. Once a member passes 90 days, a short note offering to lock in their rate for the year moves more of them across. Lisa adds one refinement: price the annual plan slightly above your average member's lifetime value, so it pays off even if nobody renews.

Test before you build the whole thing. Tatiana runs a paid beta of five to fifteen founding members: open a waitlist for the new tier, set a member cap, publish, deliver, listen, adjust. You usually know after five to seven people whether the price, the delivery and the audience fit.

Raising your price without losing members

Keep existing members on their current rate, announce the new price for everyone else, and stop overthinking it. Raising your price is one of the biggest moves you can make, and the fear of losing members is almost always bigger than the real risk. Builders who raise with care lose a few of their least engaged members and keep more revenue and better members for good.

Three signals say you're ready. You're consistently overdelivering: weekly calls, personal feedback and course content for $19 a month, members who love it, and you're exhausted. Your best members are asking for more. And you have proof (testimonials, results, revenue milestones), so new members pay on evidence instead of a promise. If two of the three apply, you're already late.

Then grandfather your current members, in four steps. Set the new price by working back from your revenue goal, and skip the 10% bump: if a price is wrong, it's usually wrong by two or three times. Tell current members at least 30 days ahead, and lead with the line they care about: your rate stays the same, and this only affects new members. Lock existing members in at their current rate, which rewards loyalty and gives them a reason to stay, since leaving means losing it. When you change a tier's price, Heartbeat asks whether existing members keep their original rate or move to the new one. Pick the original rate and move on. From then on, every new member sees only the new price and judges it on what they get, without comparing it to what someone else pays.

Post it inside the community and send it as an email, so it lands in every inbox and opens a comment thread. Members of a small community where they know you personally don't revolt the way Netflix subscribers do. They reply with "makes total sense" and "well deserved", and the thread becomes a public vote of confidence that sells the next tier for you. Give anyone on the fence a real deadline to join at the old price, two to four weeks out, and don't apologize. If you've been delivering, you've earned the increase.

You don't have to add anything to justify a price that was too low. Nivi added nothing when she went from $5 to $250. If you want a visible reason, launch a cohort or a course alongside the raise, add office hours or a monthly hot seat, or move from a loose always-on space to a monthly rhythm of workshop, Q&A, resource drop and discussion. What follows is usually the same. A few of the least engaged members leave in the first month. New members join at the new price without blinking over the next two. Revenue passes the old baseline by month three to six, and by month twelve you wonder why you waited.

Moving up to high-ticket pricing

Nobody goes from $29 a month to $5,000 in one move. The builders who make the jump build a ladder, and each rung earns the next. Alejandro kept free Twitter threads at the top, sold a €5 tutorial to turn attention into a first purchase, ran €120 courses for people who wanted more, and saved the €349 cohort for members ready to commit to six weeks of work.

Tom Morkes, a launch strategist and co-founder at Groove, teaches the part most people get wrong: low-ticket buyers convert best. The first purchase changes the relationship, and a customer buys again at a far higher rate than a prospect does. His data suggests about 1% of low-ticket buyers eventually spend tens of thousands with you. With 200 members at $49, that's two people who would pay $5,000 or more, from a group you weren't serving. Under $49, people buy without a sales call, which is what makes that rung the entry point. At the top rung you can't automate it. People need to talk to you, see you live, and feel sure the investment will pay off, so the checkout page becomes an application and the sales emails become teaching emails.

Amy Yamada, a business coach who has run more than 20 VIP days at $10,000 to $15,000, offers a bridge. A VIP day is one day of your full attention on one member's specific problem, squeezing months of trial and error into a day. Her three pillars are access, attention and acceleration. She started at $5,000 and raised the price as the testimonials came in. A VIP day changes nothing about your existing community: the $49 membership keeps running, and the VIP day is an extra offer for members who have been with you three to six months and want to go deeper.

The move itself takes five steps. Find your best members, the ones getting results and asking advanced questions. A workflow that sends a check-in from you at 7 days, 30 days and 2 months will surface them. Design a premium offer that solves a narrower problem or gets a faster result, instead of more of the same content at a higher price. Pilot it as a four to six week cohort: open a waitlist with a cap of five to ten, set the price, publish, and use the results as proof for the next round. Keep the low-ticket community running as the entry point, with both tiers in one community and the premium channels gated, so every locked icon is a quiet sales pitch. And give it time. Tom's data puts high-ticket sales cycles at 12 to 24 months, with some people attending three or four webinars before they book a call.

The jumps are real. Alejandro went from €5 to €349, Kat from $99 to $15,000, and Emily from $199 to $1,500 a month. DeWayne Williams at MAC Enterprise Consulting went from about $80K of masterclass revenue to more than $5M in under a year by building a business around education and consulting as well as content. None of them only raised the price. Each changed what they delivered to match it.

The four pillars of a price that lasts

A price that works today and burns you out in six months is a bad price. Lisa's test has four parts, and a price that fails any one of them catches up with you.

Profitable: revenue beats costs, including the value of your time, so track the hours and money each member takes. Scalable: you could serve ten times the members without ten times the work. If every new member costs you another hour a week, the model breaks. Enduring: the price still makes sense in two years, at 50 members and at 500. Memberships last for years, and when you add 10 to 15 members a month, a price that only works once you reach 1,000 by month twelve won't hold. Satisfying: you enjoy running it at this price, because overdelivering for too little pay shows in what members get.

Run all four every quarter, and whenever something feels off. Cancellations up? Check enduring and satisfying. Burned out? Check profitable and scalable. Growing fast but quality slipping? Check scalable. The builders whose pricing stays right are the ones who keep checking.

Common pricing mistakes

Charging too little for a small audience. Twenty members at $15 is $300 a month, and the same twenty at $97 is a business. Small communities should charge more, because closeness and access are part of what they sell.

Copying a competitor's price without their model. A $29 community with 2,000 members runs on different economics from yours, so anchor to your own revenue goal and delivery.

Selling lifetime memberships for less than a member is worth. At $49 a month and a 14-month average stay, a member is worth about $686, so a $299 lifetime deal costs you $387 each.

Launching with three tiers. One tier and a waitlist for the second is the better start.

Hiding the price. Under $500 a month, put it on the page, because people who would be surprised on a call will leave anyway.

Defending the price when someone pushes back. Ask what result they want and show how the community gets them there. If that doesn't land, fix the offer before you touch the number.