What does a membership actually do and how is it different to a subscription?

Hello

I am testing the free plugin on a test site and I don’t quite understand how the membership works and what it does. It seems it allows people to purchase a product called “membership”, but then what does it actually do when purchased? It doesn’t seem to grant or revoke any permissions and also does not allocate a user role.

Also, I noticed that when setting up a membership, you can set the Access Type to “limited”, give it a “Duration” and even make it a “Subscription Membership”. How is this different to your “Subscriptions for WooCommerce” plugin?

What I would like to do is have a way to give users a way to sign up to a specific user role, say “Author”, for a limited time, say 30 days, and they have to pay to have that user role at the start of every 30 days, and they will have that user role for as long as they are a “member” (or subscriber) of that plan. If they don’t pay or renew their membership/subscription and let it expire, then their user role will return to what it was before they purchased it.

Thank you