Membership apps
Your members are not churning because the content is bad.
They are churning because they cannot find the one thing that would have helped them this week. Every membership past about ten resources has the same problem, and no search box has ever solved it.
Membership app development means building the parts of your community that a platform template cannot: a dashboard that knows where each member is, progress that persists, and an assistant that can be asked a question in plain English.
It is not a replacement for your community platform. It is the layer that makes the library you already have findable — which is almost always the difference between a member renewing and a member drifting.
The problem is navigation, not content
A member joins, meets an index of forty modules, picks one at random, and never comes back with the same energy. The thing that would have solved their actual problem was in there. They had no way of knowing which one it was.
Search does not fix it because members do not search for course titles. They describe a situation — "my launch flopped", "nobody is opening my emails" — and no library is indexed that way.
So the interface becomes a conversation, and the routing becomes the product.
- An assistant members can ask, which routes them to a specific module, expert or event
- A dashboard that shows where they are, not where the library starts
- Progress that persists across sessions, so returning feels like continuing
- Onboarding that puts a new member in front of the right first thing within a week
- Payments and access tiers, where the platform’s own handling has become the constraint
Built to sit alongside what you already run
Nothing here requires abandoning the platform your community lives on. What gets built runs as its own application and embeds into the pages you already have, which means two things worth caring about.
First, no migration. Second, it is portable — if you move platforms in two years, the assistant and the dashboard come with you rather than dying with the plugin directory they were built into.
What it costs and what it touches
The numbers, before the call.
- A member assistant
- From around £4,000.Your library structured into a catalogue, plus an assistant that routes members to the right thing out of it. The single highest-return piece for most communities.
- Dashboards and progress
- From around £8,000.Member accounts, saved progress, a personalised view, and onboarding that gets a new member to the right first resource.
- Payments
- Stripe, usually.Subscriptions, tiers, upgrades and cancellations. Or your existing platform keeps the billing and the custom layer reads access from it — often the cheaper answer.
- Do we migrate?
- No.It embeds into what you already run. Migrations are how community projects die, and there is no reason for one here.
The evidence
A community with twenty-six resources and members who could not find the right one.
The boring answers
Asked and answered, without the discovery call.
Can members ask a question instead of searching through videos?
Yes — and it is the thing members notice first. They describe their situation in their own words and the assistant routes them to the specific module, expert or event that addresses it.
The Graeae do exactly this for a paid community of twenty-six resources, using three characters rather than one because the kinds of question genuinely split three ways.
Will this work with Circle, Kajabi or Skool?
Yes. What gets built runs as its own application and embeds into pages you already have, so the platform does not need to support anything special.
It also means you are not trapped. Change platform later and the assistant and dashboard move with you.
Can it handle payments and subscriptions?
It can, usually through Stripe — subscriptions, tiers, upgrades and cancellations.
Often the better answer is to leave billing where it already works and have the custom layer read access from it. Rebuilding working billing is a way to spend money without gaining anything.
Can members track their progress?
Yes, and it changes the feel of a membership more than almost anything else. A member who returns to a view showing where they are is continuing; a member who returns to the library index is starting again.
Progress, saved state and a personalised dashboard are the usual second phase after an assistant.
Do we have to migrate the community?
No, and you should be wary of anyone who suggests it. Migrations lose members, and the loss is permanent.
Everything built here is designed to sit alongside what already runs.
Tell me what you are trying to build.
Describe the problem rather than the specification. Working out what it actually needs to be is the first part of the job.