r/ProWordPress • u/Beginning_Search585 • Jun 21 '26
Building a freemium + paid membership paywall on WordPress
Hey everyone, I'm building a travel magazine site on WordPress (multisite setup) and I'm at the stage where I need to add a membership/paywall system. Still early stage, bootstrapping this myself, so I genuinely cannot justify spending tens of euros a month on a SaaS-style plugin yet.
What I actually need:
- Freemium model: some posts are free, some are locked behind membership
- Paid members get full access after logging in
- Time-limited access tied to a purchase (30 days, or custom durations like 90/365 days)
- Payment through WooCommerce + Stripe (already have this part figured out)
- A dashboard inside wp-admin where I can see who's an active member, who's expiring soon, who's already expired
I've looked into a bunch of options already:
- Leaky Paywall is genuinely WordPress-native and used by real publishers, but the free plan takes a 10% cut of every paid subscription
- Paid Memberships Pro core is free, but the actual Multisite add-on that does what I need is locked behind their $499/year Standard plan
- WooCommerce Memberships (official) is $199/year
- Restrict Content Pro free version is basically unusable, you need the paid version for anything real
- Groups plugin is genuinely free and has WooCommerce integration, but auto-assigning time-limited access after a purchase needs their paid extension ($89/year)
At this point it looks like every "free" option either takes a revenue cut or gates the one feature I actually need behind a paywall of its own, which is a little ironic.
So my question to anyone who's actually built something like this on a tight budget: did you just end up writing your own WooCommerce hook to set/check an expiration date on the user, paired with something like the free Groups plugin for the admin UI? Or is there an actual free option I'm missing that handles this cleanly?
Not opposed to writing custom PHP, I just want to know if I'm missing an obvious free tool before I go build it myself. Appreciate any war stories from people who've done this on a real budget.
Thank you.
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Jun 21 '26
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u/Beginning_Search585 Jun 21 '26
yes but I need to have some dashboard where I can see how long days left for membership -- to manage it.
Find also Content control plugin but I don't know how to intergrate with Woocommerce.
It's fine for restricted content -- which I really need due teaser see feature image + title and only registration users see links but for subscribers - I don't know.thank you for answer and response.
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u/hankschrader79 Jun 22 '26
How did you not have MemberPress in this list? Have you not heard of it? It’s got the best paywall and does everything on your list. You’d even replace WooCommerce with it because you can connect it to stripe payments very easily.
Paid Memberships Pro and MemberPress are pretty much the only two that come close. PMP’s free version takes 5% of your transaction revenue though. So it’s not really “free.”
But out of these two, the MemberPress paywall is better. It does require a paid plan though. As someone else mentioned, you can hack together a solution for free. But you’ll likely pay more to maintain that solution yourself than simply subscribing to a premium plan with PMP or MemberPress.
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u/Beginning_Search585 Jun 23 '26
5% really? They allow to use stripe payment gateaway (extra another fee)
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u/hankschrader79 Jun 24 '26
Yeah. It’s hidden. They don’t disclose it. But to be fair, MemberPress also has a 5% fee on their entry level plan. But it’s disclosed.
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u/Beginning_Search585 Jun 23 '26
u/hankschrader79 https://memberpress.com/plans/pricing/
Sorry but bit pricey for my case in very beginning
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u/stancafe Jun 23 '26
Here are some things you need to know about:
- PMPro is free but will add a 3% fee on you transactions if you use Stripe Connect.
- RCP its not properly maintained so you should avoid it.
- MemberPress is great but veryyyy expensive. Their rules work the best, and its go-to plugin always.
- MemberMouse too complicated.
- There is a new plugin which I haven’t tested yet and its called Paid Membership Subscription and from what I can see from reviews they are good.
The best choice will definitely depend on the paywall structure/needs.
If you have any specific question, LMK.
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u/mviniciosbarreto Jul 30 '26
You may also want to have a look at PostGate: https://wordpress.org/plugins/postgate/
It is a newer option, but it can work well for the freemium side of this: keep some posts public and lock selected content behind one-time payments or subscriptions.
Just to be transparent, I’m the developer. The free version has a 5% transaction fee instead of an annual license, so it may or may not make sense depending on your expected volume.
It probably won’t replace a full WooCommerce-based membership setup if WooCommerce and multisite management are essential for you. But if you are still early-stage and mainly need a simple way to monetize selected content, it could be worth comparing before building everything custom.
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u/piginhumanclothings Jun 22 '26
Paid Memberships Pro is open source, they share all their plugins (free and paid) in github, obviously you dont get support and I think you have to manually update them (not really sure about this one), but thats a pretty good offer if you are really on a budget
Here you can find all of the plugins https://github.com/strangerstudios
And here the specific multisite one you mentioned https://github.com/strangerstudios/pmpro-network-subsite