If you landed here, it’s safe to assume you’re looking for a Memberful alternative that fits the way you work. Or maybe you’re starting fresh and want to see what’s out there.
Both Buy Me a Coffee and Memberful cover the basics pretty well, no doubt. Here’s a closer look at both. We’ll go through the details, run some numbers. You can take it from there and get your membership up and running.
Getting started
Pay a cut only when you earn
Though Buy Me a Coffee and Memberful help creators host memberships, the way they work diverges the most here. On Memberful, your running cost starts on day 1. Simply put, you pay for a subscription to start one of your own. A standard plan of Memberful would cost you $49/month. That’s just to get your membership active. Then, a 4.9% per successful charge on top of that.
Say you’re just starting out with 10 members paying $5 a month. That’s $50 coming in. Between Memberful’s $49 base fee, the 4.9% cut, you could end that month owing more than you made.
It’s not a bad model. It may even be just a minor hiccup for a creator who has a crowd waiting at their door. For new creators venturing into this space, this immediately gates their entry. There’s more at stake; you may end up making less than you spend. Or worse, make nothing at all and still end up with a bill.
This isn’t to discourage you. You may get your money’s worth with their wide array of tools and offerings. It is to say, this is a risk you can dodge and still run a membership just as smoothly.
On Buy Me a Coffee it starts the other way around. You can set up your page and membership tiers for free. What you’d have to spend is a flat 5% on the support you receive. The risk is close to 0, because on days a creator earns nothing, they pay nothing.
Get your membership live without the extra setup
Now, maybe you’re fine with a recurring upfront cost. Agreed, almost all platforms today run on a subscription model. There’s still more to consider: How much time and effort does it take to just make your membership live?
On Memberful, getting started involves a few more decisions before you can accept payments. You can build your membership site with Memberful itself, or connect it to an existing site, including WordPress. From there, you set up your membership plans, connect your payment account, and decide what content members should have access to.
If you’re using Memberful with an existing website, there’s another system to connect and manage alongside it. Your website is one, and Memberful is another, so you’ll be going back and forth between the two when you need to make changes. You’ll also be paying for your website and Memberful separately.
None of these steps are particularly difficult on their own, but there’s more to set up before you’re ready to start earning.
Buy Me a Coffee starts much closer to the point of earning. You sign up, choose a username, and your page is live. From there, you can turn on memberships, customize your tiers, and start sharing your page. There’s no website to configure or plugin to install, which makes it quicker to go from signup to accepting your first payment.
Running your membership
Once the membership is live, the setup doesn’t get easier. You still need to manage your tiers, members and content. If you’ve connected Memberful to your own website, that means maintaining the website and the Memberful setup alongside each other. You may need to make changes in your website’s admin area and then manage the membership side through Memberful.
With Buy Me a Coffee, the membership sits on your creator page. Your tiers, members and posts are managed from the same place. For a creator who just wants to run a membership without adding another system to an existing website, that’s one less thing to maintain and time that can be used to create what they love.
Growing your membership
Turn your audience into members
Getting people to join is the next part. Memberful lets you put content behind a paywall, with previews that encourage visitors to subscribe. You can also have a dedicated subscribe page through its hosted website.
Buy Me a Coffee works a little differently. Your creator page can have public posts, member-only posts, and your membership levels all in one place. So someone can come across your public content, land on your page, see what you offer, and join a membership from there. You can share that same page across your social profiles, newsletter, blog, YouTube, or wherever your audience is.
Keeping existing members
Say you have a slow month. You’re stuck, or just unable to put out anything new. Some may stick on, but others might see this as not getting their money’s worth, and choose to unsubscribe. Even though they still love your content and want to support you. Memberful currently doesn’t have a workaround for this. You get a bill and so do your members. Sounds unfair, yet fair at the same time. It doesn’t have to be that way though.
Buy Me a Coffee has accounted for this. Creators can pause a membership level when they choose to, so their supporters aren’t charged for that duration. This has drastically helped in retention and also in taking the pressure off creators as well.
One place for different kinds of earning
A membership doesn’t have to be the only way people support your work.
Memberful is primarily built around memberships and the content, websites, integrations, and benefits connected to those plans.
Buy Me a Coffee combines memberships with other ways to earn from the same creator page. Creators can receive one-time support, publish public and member-only posts, and sell products through the Shop alongside their membership levels. That means a visitor doesn’t have to become a recurring member to support a creator. They can send a one-time payment instead, or buy something from the Shop. The membership can remain one part of the overall page rather than the only payment option available.
So, Memberful or Buy Me a Coffee?
The biggest difference is what you have to take on to run your membership.
With Memberful, you’re getting a dedicated membership system with plenty of control over how you build it. But you’re also taking on a monthly platform cost, more setup, and potentially another system to manage alongside your website.
Buy Me a Coffee keeps that whole process lighter. You don’t have to pay a monthly fee just to keep your membership running. You don’t need to build a separate membership site. Your membership, posts, supporters, and Shop can live together on your creator page. And when things change, like when you need to take a break, you have tools to handle that without having to work around your membership.
The result is pretty simple: you can spend less time building the machinery around your membership and more time actually running it.
And for a creator who just wants to get their membership up, grow it, and keep creating, that’s a pretty good trade.
