Plans & Pricing
Charge your own members, on your own Stripe account.
What plans are for
Not every Coterie needs to charge, but plenty benefit from it. A paid tier signals commitment, filters for members who are serious, and gives you a way to gate deeper access behind a level of investment.
Money goes directly to you. Members pay into your own Stripe account, not Coterie's — you are the merchant of record, and your members never see Coterie in the transaction.
Connecting Stripe
Before you can charge anyone, connect your Stripe account under Admin → Payments.
If you already have a Stripe account you can link it. If you don't, you'll create one during the flow. Either way Stripe will ask for real business and bank details and set up two-factor authentication — it's their process, not ours, and it takes a few minutes. Stripe may also hold a new account for review before enabling charges, so don't leave this until the day you launch.
Your Payments page shows Ready to take payments once Stripe has verified you. Until then, members can't be charged.
Coterie takes 10% of each member payment on the Pro plan, and 0% on Standard. Stripe's own processing fees apply on top, as they would with any Stripe account.
Defining a plan
Each plan has a name, a price and interval, an optional short description, a list of features, and a monthly session allowance. You can run up to ten, and mark any of them inactive to hide it from members without deleting it.
Sessions per month is the main entitlement. Leave it blank for unlimited, or set a number to make higher tiers meaningfully different. Usage is counted against the member's own billing period, so cancelling and resubscribing doesn't reset the count.
How members pay
Payment happens after approval, never before:
- Someone applies to join
- You approve them
- They pick a plan and pay
- They become a member
You never charge someone you might decline. If How people get in is set to Join immediately, the first two steps are skipped and they go straight to picking a plan. See Joining & Access for the full picture.
Approvals expire after 30 days if the person doesn't complete payment.
Free tiers alongside paid ones
You can offer a free plan next to paid ones. Someone choosing the free tier joins immediately with no payment step. This tends to work better than making the first interaction a payment decision — let people in, then give them a reason to move up.
Structuring tiers well
The strongest plan structures map to something a member can clearly feel: more sessions, access to a smaller inner circle, tier-gated Resources. A paywall on exactly the same experience everyone else gets free is a hard sell, and tends to generate cancellations rather than upgrades.
Two or three tiers is usually plenty. Every extra tier is another decision you're asking someone to make before they've experienced anything.
Managing payments and refunds
Everything after the sale — payouts, refunds, disputes, invoices — happens in your own Stripe dashboard, not in Coterie. That's the trade-off of being the merchant of record: you keep the customer relationship, and you handle the support that comes with it.