Membership and subscription platforms that scale past what SaaS can handle.

Membership platforms built in production for media, fitness, B2B services, and community businesses. Stripe Connect, content gating, entitlement management, recurring billing.

The case for a custom membership platform

The membership SaaS market is crowded. MemberPress, Memberful, Patreon, Substack, Mighty Networks, Circle, Kajabi, and dozens of others each cover a slice of the membership model. For straightforward cases (one membership tier, content access, monthly recurring billing) any of them will do the job. The market is mature, and that is a good thing.

The cases where SaaS does not fit are predictable.

• Tiered or hierarchical memberships. A “family” membership that covers four people. A “corporate” membership that covers an entire company. A “premium” tier that includes specific add-ons. The parent-child relationship between the buyer and the people who actually use the membership is the case off-the-shelf platforms handle worst.
• Mixed product types. Recurring memberships plus one-off purchases plus event tickets plus merchandise. The accounting treatment of each is different; the SaaS platforms typically handle one well and bolt the others on awkwardly.
• Complex entitlements. Different members get different access to different content, products, or services, with rules that change over time. The entitlement matrix is more nuanced than a simple “tier A vs tier B” flag.
• Integration into operations. The membership is not just digital. It triggers physical fulfilment, schedules services, or grants access to facilities. The membership platform is the front end; operations is the back end; they need to be one system.
• Marketplace or franchise patterns. Revenue splits between the platform and members, sub-members, or affiliated businesses. Stripe Connect is usually involved; the SaaS platforms rarely support it cleanly.

For these cases, the SaaS path either does not work at all, or requires duct-tape integration between five different tools. Custom is the cleaner answer.

The honest moment most agencies skip: most membership businesses should not commission a custom platform. If MemberPress or Memberful covers your model, the build cost of custom rarely justifies itself before year three. About one in three membership platform discoveries we run ends with our recommendation to fix the existing stack (usually the integration between billing and content gating) and skip the rebuild. The discovery cost is the audit deliverable. The answer “you do not need a custom platform” is just as valid as “you do.”

If your membership model has outgrown the off-the-shelf platforms, call 0431 000 062.

Symptoms to look for

You probably need a custom membership platform when one or more of the following are true.

• You are paying for 4+ SaaS products to make your membership work. A membership tool, a payment processor, a content management system, an email tool, a community tool, and an analytics tool, all stitched together. The integration between any two of them breaks at least once a quarter.
• Member churn is high because the experience is fragmented. Members log in to different places to access different things. Onboarding is confusing. Cancellation creates support load. The data tells you new members are not returning in week two.
• Your billing rules are unusual. Prorated upgrades, mid-month tier changes, family group billing, corporate bulk membership, lifetime memberships with grandfathered terms. The accountant has a spreadsheet that reconciles the SaaS reports against what should have happened.
• You have data silos. Member data lives in five places. Marketing has one view. Operations has another. Finance has a third. Nobody can answer the question “what is this member worth across all our products.”
• The economics no longer work. Your SaaS stack costs more than building and running a custom platform would. At per-member pricing, you are paying tax on growth.
• You are bumping up against a SaaS feature ceiling. Your platform vendor has told you a particular feature is on the roadmap, and you have been told the same thing for 18 months. You are now planning your business around a feature you cannot control the delivery date of.
• You want to own the member relationship. If your members live inside Patreon, Substack, or a similar platform, the platform owns the relationship, not you. If the vendor changes terms or your account is suspended, you cannot reach the members directly. For some businesses this is an acceptable trade-off; for others it is a board-level risk.

DIAGNOSTIC

If three or more describe your situation, custom is probably the right answer. The question is which parts to build first.

The architecture we deploy

Every membership platform we build follows a layered architecture, with Nexus orchestrating the integrations. The components are deliberately boring. Boring is the point.

Member identity and profile

A single member record holds identity, contact details, membership history, payment methods, entitlements, preferences, and audit history. One source of truth, accessed everywhere through a clean API. When the support team opens a member’s record, every system that touches the member is represented in that single view.

Subscription and billing engine

Recurring billing through Stripe (or Stripe Connect for revenue-share models). Plan changes, prorations, refunds, dunning, and reactivation handled with correct accounting treatment. Annual prepay with monthly recognition is built-in. Failed payment recovery follows a configurable dunning sequence that respects the member relationship rather than punishing the member for an expired card.

Entitlement management

A rules engine that determines, for any member at any moment, what they have access to. Entitlements can be product-based, time-based, tier-based, or rule-based. Changes to entitlements (upgrades, downgrades, expiries) flow through the same event stream as everything else. The entitlement engine is the part of the platform that most “off-the-shelf plus plugins” stacks get wrong; getting it right is the difference between a coherent platform and a stack of duct-tape.

Content and access gating

Content delivery, video streaming, file downloads, course modules, and community access gated by entitlement. Integration with WordPress, custom content platforms, or third-party content providers as required. The gating decision lives in one place (the entitlement engine), even when the content lives across several systems.

Operational integration

If memberships trigger physical fulfilment (welcome packs), service scheduling (personal training, consultations), or facility access (gym access cards), those flows are orchestrated through the same event layer. The new-member event fires once; everything downstream subscribes to it.

Member portal

A clean, fast member-facing interface. View membership, change plan, update payment, access content, see history, manage family or corporate sub-members. The portal is built mobile-first because members increasingly access membership stuff from their phone, not their desk.

Admin and reporting

Admin tools for managing members, viewing financials, running reports, and investigating issues. Built for the operations team, not just for developers. The admin interface is where the support team spends most of their day, so it gets the design care that public-facing pages usually receive.

Full audit trail

Every member event, every billing event, every entitlement change is logged. Disputes, compliance investigations, and member support each become a query. When a member calls saying “I was charged twice in March,” the answer takes minutes, not days.

Three engagement shapes

We structure membership platform engagements one of three ways. All three start with discovery.

• Focused platform. From $60,000. Single membership type, standard billing, content gating, member portal. 12 to 16 weeks. Best for businesses with a clear single product where the existing SaaS stack has become uneconomic.
• Multi-tier platform. From $120,000. Multiple tiers, complex entitlements, operational integrations, full admin. 18 to 24 weeks. Best for businesses where the membership is the heart of the operating model.
• Run With Us retainer. From $6,500 per month. Post-launch development and support. Continuous additions, security patching, quarterly reviews. Membership platforms evolve constantly; the retainer is the most common path post-launch.

Call 0431 000 062 to talk through which fits.

Membership platforms we have built

Three membership platform builds. One named client, two confidential at client request. Reference calls available.

Motiv8sports franchise platform

• Problem: Sports franchise with weekly recurring membership programs, complex commission structures with franchisees, and a need for member onboarding that triggered scheduling and physical kit fulfilment. The previous solution stitched together five SaaS products with Zapier, and the onboarding flow broke routinely.
• Built: Custom membership platform on Symfony with Stripe Connect for franchisee payouts. Member onboarding triggered scheduling, kit fulfilment, and franchisee notification through Nexus. Custom admin for head office, separate portals for franchisees. 100+ franchises Australia-wide.
• Result: Member onboarding time reduced significantly. Franchisee payouts automated. Cross-franchise reporting available for the first time. Head office support load on payment-related queries dropped to near zero.
• Stack: Symfony, PostgreSQL, Stripe Connect, Xero API (multi-tenant), AWS Sydney, Nexus middleware.

Community membership with content gating

• Problem: Community business with three membership tiers, monthly and annual billing options, gated content library, and member-only events. Existing stack was MemberPress + WooCommerce Subscriptions + WordPress + Mailchimp + Discord, glued together. The integration between any two of the five broke once a quarter, generating support tickets nobody had budgeted for.
• Built: Unified platform replacing the stack. Single member record. Entitlement engine drives content access, event registration, and community access. Stripe billing with proper deferred revenue accounting to Xero. Built over 16 weeks.
• Result: Member support tickets reduced significantly. Member churn improved because the experience became coherent. SaaS spend reduced by approximately 70% on a 3-year horizon. The Discord integration was the only piece of the original stack retained, and it now receives clean entitlement events instead of brittle webhook chains.
• Stack: Symfony, PostgreSQL, Stripe API, Xero API, Discord API, custom Vue.js member portal, AWS Sydney, Nexus middleware.

B2B corporate membership, name confidential

• Problem: Professional services membership organisation with corporate memberships covering 5 to 500 individual users per company. The off-the-shelf platform handled individual memberships but had no concept of a parent organisation buying memberships on behalf of employees. Sales were being processed via PDF invoices and manual provisioning, taking three days per new corporate customer.
• Built: Custom platform with parent-organisation membership as a first-class concept. Company admin portal for managing seats, adding and removing employees, and viewing usage. Individual member portal preserved alongside the corporate layer. Single sign-on integration for corporate customers. Built over 22 weeks.
• Result: New corporate customer onboarding reduced from three days to under an hour. Self-service seat management retired three FTE worth of admin work. Corporate renewals automated. The largest corporate customer now manages 480 seats through the company admin portal without contacting head office.
• Stack: Symfony, PostgreSQL, Stripe API, SAML/OAuth SSO, custom Vue.js corporate admin portal, AWS Sydney, Nexus middleware.

Who you will work with

No account managers, no offshore teams, no juniors learning on your project. The two engineers below scope, build, and ship the work. Bring your operations lead and your finance person to discovery. Membership platforms touch billing, content, operations, and member experience, and the rules need to come from the people who own each domain.

How we ship it

Membership platform builds run in five named phases. Each phase is fixed scope and fixed price.

For most builds, total project time is 12 to 24 weeks. Multi-tier B2B platforms with SSO or complex entitlement matrices run longer.

Membership platform FAQs