Run a paid membership on your own site
Charge readers directly for an ad-free experience, members-only recipes, and meal plans. You keep the relationship, the branding, and the audience.
On this page
Overview
A site membership lets you charge your readers directly. They pay you, on your own domain, and in return they get whatever you choose to include: an ad-free experience, members-only recipes, meal plans, or articles reserved for members.
This is different from meal plan products, which are one-time purchases of a specific thing. A membership is recurring, and it changes what a reader can see across your whole site.
Page caching must be configured so member pages are never served from a shared cache, or gated content can leak to everyone. See Memberships & Page Caching.
You can run more than one membership. Each verified domain on your account can have its own, so a publisher with several sites can price and brand each one separately.
How It Works
From your reader's side:
- They hit something you have gated, or click a Join link you have placed
- They see your membership offer with your pricing and benefits
- They pay through Stripe without leaving your site
- Their access updates immediately, on every domain attached to that membership
They manage their own billing from the 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 Program tab is where the membership itself is defined:
- Name - what readers see on the offer and the sales page
- Description - a sentence on why it is worth paying for
- Benefits - what members get (see below)
- Pricing - monthly, annual, or both
- Free trial - optional, in days
Nothing is charged to anyone until you publish. Before that you can change every part of it freely.
Pricing
You can offer a monthly price, an annual price, or both. Most publishers offer both and discount the annual.
Why pricing locks after you publish
This is the single most common question, so it is worth explaining properly.
Allspice bills through Stripe, and in Stripe a price is immutable. Once a price exists and someone is subscribed to it, its amount can never be edited - not by us, not in the Stripe dashboard. This is deliberate on Stripe's part: it guarantees that what a customer agreed to pay cannot be changed underneath them.
So once your membership is published and can take payments, the amount is fixed.
What to do 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 migrated, which is a decision with real consequences for churn and for your relationship with them.
Because the number is hard to change later, it is worth spending time on it before you publish. If you are unsure, start slightly higher than feels comfortable. Discounting later is easy; raising a price on existing members is not.
Tax
You are the merchant of record for your membership. Readers pay you, and the tax obligation is yours, not Allspice's.
Allspice calculates and adds sales tax and VAT at checkout based on where your member is, so you are not working it out by hand. There is one decision you have to make first.
Set your price tax behaviour before you publish
Every price has to say whether tax is added to it or already inside it. You set this once, under Accounts → Payments & Tax. Publishing is blocked until you do, because the choice cannot be made after a price exists.
| Choice | What your member pays | What you keep |
|---|---|---|
| Tax added at checkout | Your listed price, plus tax on top. | Your full listed price. |
| Prices include tax | Exactly the price shown, with nothing added. | The listed price minus the tax, wherever you are registered. |
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.
Stripe fixes tax behaviour when a price is created, and it can never be changed afterwards by anyone. Every price you create from then on carries the setting you chose, so changing your mind later means new prices and a catalogue split between the two.
Payments & Tax is restricted to the account owner. Admins can build and publish a membership but cannot make this choice, so if your team is set up that way, have the owner do this step first or publishing will stop and wait for them.
Automatic calculation is not the same as automatic compliance. Whether you are required to collect in a given place, and where you have to register and file, depends on your own business and your own thresholds. Nothing is collected anywhere you have not added a registration.
If you are not sure what you are registered to collect, or which of the two options suits your pricing, talk to your accountant before you publish. This is the one part of setting up a membership that Allspice cannot answer for you.
Member Benefits
Benefits are what a member is actually buying. Choose them on the Program tab:
| Benefit | What the member gets |
|---|---|
| Meal plans | Every paid meal plan, without buying them separately. |
| Members-only recipes | Specific recipes reserved for members. |
| Exclusive articles | Non-recipe posts reserved for members. |
| Member resources | Whole pages reserved for members, such as guides or downloads. |
| Premium Pico | Your members get the more capable AI cooking agent. |
| Ad-free browsing | Your site without display ads. Usually the easiest one to sell. |
You can also add your own benefits with any wording you like, for anything the list above does not cover. They appear alongside the built-in ones.
Benefits appear on your sales page and in the offer readers see, so they double as your marketing copy. Pick the ones you will actually deliver.
A benefit is a promise on your sales page. Gating is what actually locks a given recipe or post. Members-only recipe cards, for instance, are a gate you apply to a recipe, not a benefit you tick here. See Gating Content.
Pausing New Signups
You can stop taking new members without shutting the membership down. Turn off new signups on the Program tab and the Join buttons disappear everywhere they normally appear: your gates, your sales page, and the offer inside the widget.
Nothing changes for the members you already have. They keep their access, they keep being billed, they can still log in and manage their own billing. Only new signups stop.
You can write the message readers see in place of the Join button, so a gate can explain that the membership is closed for now rather than simply going quiet.
Useful when you are at capacity, taking a break from producing member content, or running a limited intake. Turning signups back on restores every Join button exactly as before.
Gating Content
The Content Access tab is where you choose what is reserved for members. You can gate a whole page, or just the recipe card on it.
Gating the recipe card is the gentler option and usually converts better. The post, the photos, and your writing stay public and keep ranking in search. Only the card is held back, at exactly the moment the reader has decided they want to cook the thing.
Gating the whole page is the stronger option. Use it for content that is genuinely a member perk rather than a traffic driver.
Recipe card gating is only available on recipe pages, since there is no card to gate on a page without a recipe. Non-recipe pages can still be gated as a whole.
Gating is not retroactive punishment for existing readers: think about how much of your archive you close off at once. Many publishers gate new members-only content going forward and leave the back catalogue open.
Domains
The Domains tab controls which of your verified sites a membership covers. A member who joins on one attached domain has access on all of them.
If your sites have genuinely different audiences, give them separate memberships instead. If they are one brand across several domains, attach them to one.
Sales Page
The Allspice WordPress plugin can generate a full sales page on your site, built from the pricing and benefits you have already set. From Memberships → Marketing, follow the link into WordPress and choose Create membership page.
What to expect:
- The page is created as a draft. Nothing goes live until you publish it yourself.
- 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. Your edits are never overwritten.
- Pricing stays in step with the portal automatically.
Because the page lives on your site, WordPress is where its address and published state are managed - not the Allspice portal.
Membership Links
Use these as the href on any button, menu item, post link, or email. The plugin opens the right screen in place, without loading a new page.
| Link | Opens |
|---|---|
#allspice-membership | Signup and pricing. This is the one for a Join button, a menu item, or an email campaign. |
#allspice-login | Sign-in for an existing member. |
#allspice-account | The member's own account and billing screen. |
These work on any page of a domain attached to the membership, as long as the Allspice plugin is active there. You can copy them from Memberships → Marketing.
Email Automation
Allspice can tell your email platform when someone joins, starts a trial, has a payment fail, or cancels - so you can run a welcome sequence, a dunning email, or a win-back campaign.
Map each event to a tag or segment in Memberships → Marketing. Full detail, including how membership tags differ from your newsletter list, is in Email Integrations.
Troubleshooting
A member paid but still sees the gate
- Confirm the domain they are on is attached to the membership
- Ask them to reload the page, which refreshes their access
- Confirm they are signed in with the account they paid with
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
I need to change my price
See Pricing above, then contact Allspice support.
Still stuck?
Contact Allspice support with your domain and the membership name.