Sam Orr

Memberships, or tiered, subscription-based access to your content, have more than tripled in adoption and usage on our platform in the past two years. And this trend is not specific to Teachable - market analysis predicts a growth rate of the online subscription market of over 65% by 2028.  

So, why the upward trend? For starters, there is the clear benefit of revenue stability that comes from recurring payments. But a Membership is much more than a simple subscription pricing model - Memberships are a vessel for long term student engagement, thriving peer-to-peer community, and manageable content creation. Put simply, Teachable strongly encourages Memberships because it is a self-sustaining strategy: a way to both nurture engagement and grow recurring revenue that you can count on. 

But a Membership model is only as good as the system that’s powering it. 

Without the right infrastructure to support, every aspect of managing a membership from billing to content regulation becomes a headache. Managing a membership on your own ultimately puts you further away from what matters most: your knowledge and the audience you’re sharing it with. 

That’s why we have invested heavily this past year in the health of our membership product - to ensure that you don’t have to. We’re excited to share the following enhancements and bug fixes: 

Updates to our billing architecture

One of the core functionalities of our Memberships product is the ability for a student to upgrade and downgrade between tiers. The student simply navigates to their subscription from the student admin, clicks ‘compare tiers’, selects the new tier they’d like to purchase, and Teachable will handle movement and proration across tiers. 

• New proration logic for upgrades. On Teachable, upgrades and downgrades are determined by a comparison of monthly prices. If the current tier has a lower monthly price than the desired tier (example: a student is on a $20/month tier and wishes to switch to a $50/month tier), your students will now be taken to checkout with a coupon automatically applied to the full price of the new tier - that coupon will be equal to the amount of the current billing cycle that has not occurred yet, but has been paid for. After purchase, the upgrade will be effective immediately.
  
• Fix to properly handle downgrades. If a student’s current tier has a higher monthly price than the desired tier (example: a student is on a $50/month tier and wishes to switch to a $200/year tier), then a switch to the desired tier will be treated as a downgrade. The downgrade is completed by simply clicking ‘Join’ on the lower tier - once clicked, the student will retain access to their existing, higher tier until the end of their current billing cycle. At the end of the billing cycle, teachable will automatically enroll the student in their new tier, at which point they will be billed the full price of the lower tier.
  
• Fix to allow for upgrades and downgrades within the same tier. Previously, a student could not move between annual and monthly pricing on the same tier. This is now available. 

Updates to our tier content management 

As a creator, you have the ability to add/remove content at any time from any of your tiers, and that content change will be reflected for both new and existing members. We’ve made a few updates to ensure this process works seamlessly and smoothly every time.

• Duplicate products can no longer be added to the same tier. Previously, a creator could add the same product to the same tier, causing issues with enrollment for students within the tier. Teachable’s system now protects against this, ensuring that students remain enrolled in tier products when they should, and removed when they shouldn’t. 

New ways to sell your Membership

While maintaining your existing membership base is crucial for long term success, it’s equally important to continue to grow that membership base. We’ve launched a great new tool to help you do so.  

• New Memberships Product Detail Page. Skip the sales page creation and management process, let us handle it for you! With our new Product Detail Page, Teachable automatically generates a hosted sales page with your membership tier, pricing, and content information already populated. As you make changes to your membership in the future, these changes will be reflected on the Product Detail Page.

The result of all of these improvements? An average increase in student lifetime value of 11% across adopting schools, and a community of creators leveraging our membership offering that grows by the day. 

We’re excited to continue our investment in this core Teachable offering well into the future, and we’d love your help in shaping how this feature evolves. If you have any feedback for us on Memberships, or additional improvements, please reach out to support@teachable.com.