Memberships, without the tax.

Selling memberships on WordPress used to mean assembling four plugins and paying for each one separately. A membership plugin here, an LMS there, a forum, and a billing add-on — each with its own renewal and its own idea of what a "member" is.

We had built and run that stack ourselves, and the seams showed up in the worst place: the member experience. Two logins. Access that lapsed in one system but not another. Support tickets that were really integration bugs.

SmartMembers is the plugin we wanted instead. One member record, one billing system, one place to set who can see what — with the course builder, community, and recurring payments included rather than sold back to you.