Run a paid membership on your own site

Overview

A site membership lets you charge readers directly, on your own domain. In return they get what you include: ad-free reading, members-only recipes and articles, your paid meal plans, or unlimited chat with your site's cooking assistant.

Meal plan products are one-time purchases of a single plan. A membership is a recurring subscription, and it changes what a reader can see across your whole site.

How it works

From your reader's side:

1. They reach something you have gated, or click a Join link you have placed
2. They see your membership offer with your pricing and benefits
3. They pay on Stripe's checkout page and are returned to your site
4. Their access applies on every domain attached to that membership

Members manage their own billing from their account screen, so cancellations and card updates do not come to you as support requests.

Creating a membership

In the Publisher Portal, go to Memberships. The membership has six tabs: Program, Content Access, Domains, Members, Analytics, and Marketing.

The Program tab defines the offer:

• Name and description - what readers see on the offer and the sales page
• Pricing - monthly, annual, or both
• Free trial - none, 7, 14, or 30 days
• Benefits - what members get (see below)

You need a connected Stripe account before you can publish (see Configure Payouts), and at least one attached domain. Nothing is charged until you publish, and until then you can change everything.

Pricing

You can offer a monthly price, an annual price, or both. If you offer both, a discount on the annual price gives readers a reason to choose it.

Pricing locks when you publish

Pricing and the free trial stay editable while the membership is a draft. Publishing creates the prices in Stripe, and from then on the Program tab shows Pricing is locked.

The reason is Stripe: once a price exists and someone is subscribed to it, its amount can't be edited, by Allspice or in the Stripe dashboard. What a member agreed to pay can't change underneath them.

If you need to change the price

Contact Allspice support. Changing what new readers pay means creating a new price and pointing the membership at it. Existing members stay on the price they signed up for unless they are deliberately moved.

Tax

You are the merchant of record for your membership. Readers pay you, and the tax obligation is yours, not Allspice's.

Stripe calculates sales tax and VAT at checkout based on where the member is, in the places where you have added a tax registration. Two settings have to be in place first, both under Accounts → Payments & Tax. Publishing is blocked until they are.

How your prices are taxed

Every price has to say whether tax is added to it or already included in it:

Adding tax at checkout is the norm in the US and Canada. Including it is the norm in the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand, where advertising a price that grows at checkout is often not permitted. Allspice suggests the usual choice for your country, but the decision is yours.

Product classification

In the same place, set your business location and default product classification. Stripe needs the classification to calculate tax; without it, checkout fails.

Calculating tax is not the same as being compliant. Whether you have to collect in a given place, and where you register and file, depends on your business and your thresholds. Nothing is collected anywhere you have not added a registration. If you are unsure which pricing option suits you or where you are registered, ask your accountant before you publish.

Member benefits

Benefits are what a member is buying. Turn them on in the Benefits section of the Program tab:

You can rewrite the title and description of any benefit. The text appears on your sales page and at checkout. Rewording a benefit changes only how it reads, not what members get.

You can also add custom benefits for things you deliver yourself, such as a monthly live Q&A, and reorder them. Allspice shows them at checkout but does not provide or enforce them.

Gating content

The Content Access tab lists the pages on your attached domains. Select pages and choose a gate type. You have to publish the membership before you can gate anything.

Gating only the recipe card keeps the post public and searchable, and puts the offer in front of the reader when they have decided to cook. Use a full gate for content that is a member perk rather than a traffic driver. For what search engines see with each type, read Gating & SEO.

Gate design

Further down the Content Access tab you can design the gate itself, with a live preview. For each gate type you can set the title and description, and for all of them the join and login button labels, colors, border, corner radius, and font.

The same section controls lock badges: a small "Members" badge the plugin adds to the thumbnails of posts with a preview or full content gate in your theme's listings, such as the home page, archives and search results. Badges are on by default; you can change the label and color or turn them off.

Pausing new signups

You can stop taking new members without shutting the membership down. In the gate design section of the Content Access tab, switch New signups from Open to Closed.

Existing members keep their access, keep being billed, and can still log in and manage their billing. Only new purchases stop.

While signups are closed, the Join button on your gates is replaced by the message "Membership is not currently accepting new signups." The login link stays. The message can't be customized. Switching signups back to Open restores the Join buttons.

Domains

The Domains tab controls which of your verified sites a membership covers. Publishing needs at least one attached domain. A member who joins on one attached domain has access on all of them.

If your sites have different audiences, give them separate memberships. If they are one brand across several domains, attach them to one.

Members & complimentary access

The Members tab lists everyone with access: paid subscribers, trialists, and people you have given free access. Filter by All, Active, Trialing, Past due, Complimentary, or Canceled, search by email, and use Export CSV to download the rows on screen.

Granting free access

Click Grant access to give someone a complimentary membership, for example a contributor, a giveaway winner, or a reader you want to compensate. Enter their email, choose a duration (Indefinite, 30, 90, or 365 days), and add an optional internal note.

• The membership has to be published first.
• The reader needs an Allspice account with that email. If they don't have one, the grant fails; ask them to create an account and try again.
• A grant is created as a $0 subscription in your Stripe account, so it shows up there too. Nobody is charged.
• Granting again to the same email replaces the earlier grant. You can revoke a grant from the Complimentary list.

Analytics

The Analytics tab shows how the membership is doing over 3, 6, or 12 months. Along the top are active paid members, trialists, complimentary members, and trial conversion. Below them are charts for revenue and net member growth, member growth, plan mix (monthly vs annual), new and churned members, and membership revenue.

The tab also has a Signup funnel card, from membership offer views through to paid. It is not measured yet, so it shows no figures for now.

Sales page

The Allspice WordPress plugin can generate a sales page on your site from the pricing and benefits you have set. From Memberships → Marketing, follow the link into WordPress, then choose Create Membership Page in Settings → Allspice.

• The page is created as a draft. Nothing goes live until you publish it.
• If you already have a page at /membership/, it is adopted rather than duplicated.
• It is built from ordinary blocks, so you can edit all of it, and your edits are never overwritten.
• Pricing stays in step with the portal.
• The sales page can never be gated.

Regenerate Default Membership Page moves the current page to the Trash (not a permanent delete) and creates a fresh draft from the latest layout.

Because the page lives on your site, its address and published state are managed in WordPress, not the Publisher Portal.

Membership links

Use these as the href on any button, menu item, or post link. The plugin opens the right screen in place, without loading a new page.

These work on any page of a domain attached to the membership, as long as the Allspice plugin is active there. In an email, link to a full page address with the fragment on the end. You can copy the links from Memberships → Marketing.

Email automation

Allspice can tell your email platform about four membership events: Member joined, Trial started, Payment failed, and Membership ended. Use them to run a welcome sequence, a failed-payment reminder, or a win-back campaign.

Map each event to a tag or segment in Memberships → Marketing. How membership tags differ from your newsletter list is covered in Email Integrations.

Troubleshooting

A member paid but still sees the gate

• Confirm the domain they are on is attached to the membership
• Confirm the membership includes the benefit for that kind of page (for example, Premium recipes for a gated recipe)
• Ask them to reload the page, which refreshes their access
• Confirm they are signed in with the account they paid with
• If it happens intermittently, a page cache is serving them the public copy. See Memberships & Page Caching.

Publishing is blocked

Check that Stripe is connected, at least one domain is attached, and the account owner has set tax behavior and product classification under Accounts → Payments & Tax.

A grant fails

The reader needs an Allspice account with the email you entered, and the membership has to be published.

The sales page is not showing up

It is created as a draft. Open it in WordPress and publish it.

A Join link does nothing

• Confirm the Allspice plugin is active on that domain
• Check the link is exactly #allspice-membership
• Check whether new signups are closed

I need to change my price

See Pricing, then contact Allspice support with your domain and the membership name.