Fine for starting out

I wanted to migrate my Patreon following onto my own website for various reasons. So I’m running the free version, and hope to upgrade to the paid version once I build a large enough membership to cover the cost.

The leap from free to paid is pretty huge (the equivalent of multiplying my membership by 3x and my income by 25%), which creates a big barrier to upgrading.

I spend so many hours managing workarounds for the limitations such as clunky front-end pages and a lack of multiple memberships that could be better spent marketing and building up my membership – but other than multiple memberships, the paid version doesn’t address any of the issues I have with the plugin, nor would it save me time.

Despite having many new features on my website that Patreon couldn’t manage, I now realize that if I had stayed with Patreon’s registration and checkout process, my income would have keep growing, but it’s only dropped off since I switched to PMPro.

Pros:

After a year, this is working well enough, and I’ve only gotten into a few hiccups which were reasonably easy to help my members through.

It’s free, which is great when you’re just starting out.

Integrates with mailchimp (although not entirely – new members get added to MC, but cancelled members don’t get removed).

Cons:

After getting two fraudulent registrations and a charge-back, I’ve tried many times to set up google authentication and it doesn’t seem to work. Ended up having to make my checkout process overly-complicated (asking custom questions, requiring users enter full addresses and other unnecessary info) at checkout to avoid bots and scammers. This creates friction at checkout, and has cost me new memberships.

I have two sites I plan to merge together one day. Only after setting up PMPro on both of my sites and running it for 6 months did I realize the ‘multiple-memberships add-on’ only works with the paid version. That’s fine, but the documentation was unclear a year ago (it’s since been updated).

The lack of multiple membership levels means I have to spend a few hours every couple months reconfiguring things from the back end to allow some of my members to upgrade their membership. I wish I could use this time recruiting for new members instead, which would get me faster to being able to afford the paid version.

Editing the front-end checkout pages is impossible. Maybe it’s my theme (Soledad, using Elementor) but there are some pages (such as the ‘this content is locked’ page) that I simply can’t figure out how to edit. This makes my membership pages look like trash, reflecting poorly on my content – and doesn’t inspire confidence in potential new members. I’m fairly certain this is a large reason why I can’t convert unpaid members into paid members from these pages.

Does not integrate with substack.

Good to know:

Intimidatingly complicated back-end, and I needed someone who already uses it to walk me through the setup. (I have 25 years experience in web design, a bachelors in graphic design, and a couple years of software engineering undergrad, so I’m not completely new to this). If I hadn’t been short on time, I would have probably chosen a different plugin, but this was recommended to me by a friend and I had to settle.

• This topic was modified 11 months, 2 weeks ago by ashiarhea.