Studying real membership site examples is the fastest way to design your own. Pricing pages, sales funnels, and content libraries from sites that already work tell you more in an afternoon than most “how to start a membership” guides will tell you in a week.
Most lists of membership site examples mix categories together, which makes them hard to use. A fitness subscription works nothing like a B2B research community, and copying the wrong pattern is a very expensive mistake.
This guide covers 18 membership site examples grouped by model, what each one does well, what their pricing looks like, and how to apply the pattern to your own membership. Each example is a real, currently-running business you can visit and study right now.
A membership site is a gated online business where members pay a recurring fee for access to content, community, software, or coaching. The model has grown rapidly since 2020, with Stripe reporting subscription businesses growing roughly 17 percent year on year. The examples below show that growth in practice across nine different categories.
What Counts as a Good Membership Site Example?
A useful membership site example needs to do more than look polished. The patterns worth studying have five things in common:
- A clear, named outcome. Members can finish the sentence “I joined because I wanted to…”
- Content depth that matches the price. A $5 a month membership and a $500 a month membership justify themselves differently. Both can work.
- Visible community heat. Whether it is comments, replies, posts, or events, members are showing up regularly.
- Pricing that has clearly evolved. Sites that have been around for years almost never charge what they launched at.
- A model that fits the audience. A single brilliant creator can sell a $20 personal membership; a niche professional group can sell a $500 mastermind. Both are right for who they serve.
Use these five tests as you read through the examples below. The point is not to copy any of them exactly, but to recognise the pattern that fits your audience.
Media and Subscription Membership Site Examples
Media memberships are the most familiar pattern. Pay monthly or annually, get behind-the-paywall content. The model works because the content compounds and the publishing cadence creates ongoing reasons to stay.
1. The Athletic
Sports journalism with city-specific coverage. The Athletic launched as a mobile-first subscription, charged premium pricing from day one, and was acquired by The New York Times in 2022 for $550 million. Their model proves that vertical depth beats horizontal scale: covering one sport in one city well outperforms shallow national coverage.
2. NYT Cooking
A standalone subscription inside the New York Times bundle. Recipes, technique videos, weekly newsletters, and a recipe-saving feature that genuinely changes how members cook. NYT Cooking is the canonical example of a media product becoming a tool members use every week.
3. The Information
Technology business journalism aimed at investors, founders, and operators. The Information charges considerably more than mainstream tech publications and competes on quality, exclusivity, and the seniority of its sources. Their pattern: pick a small audience that pays a lot, not a big one that pays a little.
4. Stratechery
Ben Thompson’s analysis subscription, mostly a single-author newsletter and podcast. Stratechery proved that one writer with a clear point of view can build a media subscription rivalling a small newsroom in revenue per reader.
Fitness and Wellness Membership Site Examples
Fitness memberships convert well because the outcome is concrete and the engagement loop is daily.
5. Peloton App
The standalone app subscription, separate from the bike, lets anyone with a yoga mat and a phone access live and on-demand classes. Peloton’s app-only tier shows the strategy of unbundling: take a pricey hardware experience and offer the software layer at a much lower price to a much bigger audience.
6. Yoga With Adriene Find What Feels Good
Adriene Mishler runs a free YouTube channel with millions of subscribers, then offers a paid membership called Find What Feels Good with deeper programmes, member-only classes, and a community. The pattern is a textbook two-tier funnel: enormous free audience, optional paid layer for the most engaged segment.
7. Obé Fitness
Live and on-demand workout classes with a strong brand identity, app-first delivery, and a tight class library. Obé proves that production polish and a clear aesthetic can differentiate a fitness app even in a crowded category.
Professional and B2B Membership Site Examples
B2B membership sites tend to charge significantly more per member because the ROI for the buyer is measured in deals, hires, or career progression.
8. Pavilion
An executive community for sales, marketing, and customer success leaders. Pavilion charges enterprise-level annual fees, runs in-person events, and structures access by career stage. The model: combine peer community with structured learning and gate access by qualification, not just payment.
9. Demand Curve Growth Newsletter and Community
A growth marketing community plus a paid newsletter, originally born out of a YC-backed agency. Demand Curve shows the agency-to-community pivot: turn the playbooks you sell to clients into a productised membership.
10. Trends.vc
A research subscription analysing emerging business trends. Trends.vc is a single founder turning curiosity and pattern-recognition into a recurring product. Notable for showing that a tiny team can run a healthy subscription if the research is consistently useful.
Hobby and Interest Membership Site Examples
These are smaller in revenue per member but can scale to large communities because the price is low and the affinity is high.
11. Patreon Creator Memberships
Patreon hosts hundreds of thousands of creator-led memberships and reports paying out billions of dollars to creators since launch. The most successful follow the same structure: a clear free tier (the public podcast or video), a $5 a month tier with bonus content, and a higher tier with rare access (Q&As, early releases, signed merchandise). Worth browsing the Patreon directory for examples in your niche.
12. Skillshare
A creative learning marketplace where members pay an annual or monthly fee to access the entire course library. Skillshare’s example is what happens when you scale a membership to tens of thousands of pieces of content: discovery becomes the product.
13. Substack-Hosted Niche Newsletter
Newsletters covering a single hobby, sport, or subject often outperform broader publications because the audience is self-selected. Substack hosts the highest-profile examples, but the same pattern works on Ghost, Beehiiv, or self-hosted setups.
Education and Coaching Membership Site Examples
Education memberships sit between media (low touch, broad audience) and coaching (high touch, narrow audience). The most successful blend the two.
14. Ali Abdaal Part-Time YouTuber Academy
A cohort-based course evolved into a community-led ongoing membership. Ali’s example demonstrates the natural progression from one-off course sales to a recurring community model: students who finish the course become long-term community members, and the live calls keep them paying.
15. Lenny’s Community
Newsletter writer Lenny Rachitsky built a paid newsletter, then layered a community on top for senior product managers. Pricing tiers run from newsletter only, to community access, to higher-tier mentorship. The pattern: start with a strong free or low-priced newsletter, validate audience demand, then layer community.
16. Notion Certified Community Style Memberships
Tool-specific certified expert communities (Notion, Airtable, Webflow, etc.) bundle ongoing learning, peer support, and access to experts. These work because the product itself keeps evolving, so members need ongoing learning rather than a one-off course.
Newsletter and Subscription Newsletter Examples
The boundary between “newsletter” and “membership site” has dissolved. The best examples now blend long-form content with community, events, and tools.
17. The Hustle (Pre-Acquisition Model)
Before HubSpot acquired The Hustle in 2021, it ran a free daily newsletter with a paid premium tier (Trends) covering business analysis. The pattern: huge free top-of-funnel, narrow paid tier, eventual acquisition. Trends still runs at HubSpot under similar pricing.
18. Lenny’s Newsletter (Free Plus Paid)
Lenny’s Newsletter is the best-known free-plus-paid Substack in the product management space. The pattern: most posts free, premium posts paywalled, plus a community layer. Worth studying for how the free and paid sides reinforce each other rather than cannibalize.
What These Membership Site Examples Have in Common
Read across the 18 examples and the same five patterns repeat.
The free side is genuinely useful. Almost every successful membership site has a thriving free tier (a YouTube channel, a free newsletter, a free podcast). Members pay for more of something they already love, not for access alone.
Pricing has tiers that ladder cleanly. A free or low tier for browsers, a mid tier for engaged members, and a high tier for the small group who want access, mentorship, or live sessions. The lazy mistake is launching three tiers on day one. The right move is launching one and adding the next when demand makes it obvious.
Community is part of the product, not a tab. The strongest examples weave community into the experience: events, comments, member directories, working sessions. The weakest treat community as an afterthought and watch it die.
Pricing has gone up over time. Almost no successful membership site is selling for what it launched at. Raising prices for new members while grandfathering existing ones is the standard playbook.
The platform fades into the background. Members do not think about the platform powering NYT Cooking or Peloton. The branding, the navigation, and the experience belong entirely to the publisher. Most casual creators undervalue this and end up paying transaction fees on platforms that brand the experience as theirs, not the creator’s.
How to Apply These Membership Site Examples to Your Own
Pick the example closest to your model. Write down what they do well. Then write down what is missing, what you would do differently, and how your audience differs.
For most coaches and educators, the closest analogue is the Lenny’s or Ali Abdaal model: free content as the funnel, low-priced or premium membership as the recurring product. For creators looking at the course-led examples above, our guide on how to sell online courses walks through the launch sequence step by step. For media and journalism creators, the Athletic and Stratechery patterns apply. For B2B operators, Pavilion and Demand Curve are the patterns to study.
The platform you choose shapes which patterns are even possible. A community-led membership runs poorly on a platform built for one-off course sales. A media-style subscription does not need community features and pays a needless monthly cost for a platform that includes them. The closest fit between your model and your tooling is the difference between a membership that grows and one that stalls.
For most creators looking at the examples above and trying to find their own version, an all-in-one membership platform with 0% transaction fees handles the courses, community, and checkout in one place. You keep the branded experience the best examples above all share, and you do not lose a percentage of every payment to the platform that runs it.
If you are still narrowing down options, the best membership platforms comparison breaks down the trade-offs between the major platforms. The shorter version: pick the platform that fits the example pattern you are copying, not the one with the best landing page.
Pick the Pattern That Fits, Then Build
Eighteen membership site examples is enough variety to recognize yourself in at least two of them. The mistake is trying to combine three patterns into one product on launch day. The pattern that wins is the one that fits your audience, your content cadence, and your appetite for live engagement.
Start with the closest analogue. Run your version for ninety days. Talk to the first ten paying members. Then tighten what you offer based on what those members actually use, not what your competitors are doing. Once that loop is working, the next step is creating a successful membership site at a pace that does not burn you out.
If you want a single platform that can deliver any of the patterns above, including paid communities, courses, and checkout, start a free trial of Kourses. Fourteen days, no credit card, no transaction fees on anything you sell.
