How members manage their subscriptions
Memberful provides an intuitive payment and account management experience for your members which mean you’ll spend less time providing customer support. Once you create your membership Plans, your audience can buy subscriptions to those Plans and manage their own membership accounts.
Learn how a member can:
- Manage their subscriptions.
- Change Plans.
- Apply a coupon code during an upgrade.
- Renew a subscription that is past due.
- Manage a group subscription.
Manage their subscriptions
When you create a Plan (other than one-time payments and subscriptions with a fixed number of payments), you can decide if you want auto-renew to be on or off by default.
If a member wants to toggle off auto-renew (i.e. cancel their subscription) or on (i.e. renew their subscription automatically and indefinitely) later on, they can do so under the Subscriptions menu item in their account.
https://YOURSITE.memberful.com/account/subscriptions
If a member is subscribed to a Plan that allows them to choose what they pay, they can click Change Price and enter a new price.
Change Plans
If you sell multiple Plans, you may want to offer members the option to upgrade / downgrade. When you add all your Plans to the same Plan Group, members will have the option to change between them from the Subscriptions menu item in their account.
Apply a coupon during an upgrade
To add a coupon during a Plan upgrade, members can navigate to the Subscriptions menu item in their account, click Change plan, and apply the coupon code.
Apply a coupon code to an existing subscription
To add a coupon to an existing subscription, members can navigate to the Subscriptions menu item in their account, click Add coupon, and apply the coupon code.
Renew a subscription that is past due
If a member's subscription is past due or expired, they can navigate to the Subscriptions menu item and click Renew Now. Next, they can update their credit card details or switch to Apple Pay or Google Pay (if required) and renew their subscription.
After the first payment failure, we retry the payment up to 4 times—always with 12 hours between retries. If we are unable to charge the member after 48 hours, we will deactivate their subscription.
Manage a group subscription
From the Subscriptions tab in their account, the group subscription manager can click the Manage members action to add members, remove members, and purchase additional member seats. They can also access the Manage members page through this direct link:
http://YOURSITE.memberful.com/account/plan_manager/team_subscriptions
They also have access to a unique link they can send to people to directly join the group subscription, and the option to require the group subscription manager’s approval before new members can join the subscription.
For group subscriptions with more than 10 members, we switch to a search bar, rather than a list of members, for ease of use.
Group members can also voluntarily leave a group via the Subscriptions tab in their account. The seat will return to the group subscription manager's total available member seats.
Exclude the group manager from the seat count
Group managers take up a seat in a group subscription, and receive member benefits, by default. However, they have the choice to be excluded from the seat count, and keep their involvement to just billing and member management. Both you, as a site admin, and the group subscription manager, can access this setting.
Learn how you can access this setting from the dashboard.
To exclude themselves from the seat count, group subscription managers can navigate to the Subscriptions menu item in their account and toggle off the Group manager is also a member setting.
This will automatically free up a seat in the subscription and prevent them from receiving member benefits (newsletters, Discord access, gated content, etc.).
If all available seats are taken and the Group subscription manager is also a member setting is toggled off, the group subscription manager will not be able to switch it on, and will get an error message instead.
In this case, the group subscription manager would need to either buy an additional member seat or remove one member from the group to become a member again.
Purchase additional member seats as a group subscription manager
You can allow the group subscription manager to purchase additional member seats for their group—as long as there are no scheduled plan changes. They can access the purchase form link via the Manage members tab in their account.
To allow additional member seat purchases, you must set a per-member price. Depending on when the group subscription manager purchases the additional member seats, the total charge will be pro-rated based on how much time is left before the next renewal date for the subscription. Then, on the next renewal date, the full seat price will be added to the total renewal price.
Related help docs: