How much do paid communities make?

Paid communities vary widely. A 100-member community at $15/month generates $1,500 MRR before fees and churn. After Stripe fees (2.9% + $0.30/transaction) and typical 8% monthly churn, a realistic net of $1,200–$1,350 is common. Larger communities with multiple tiers and good churn management routinely exceed $10,000–$50,000 MRR.

What is a normal churn rate for a paid community?

Industry average monthly churn for paid communities sits between 5–12%. Communities with strong engagement, exclusive content, and automated onboarding tend to sit at the lower end (3–6%). Communities relying on manual management and lacking a clear value loop see higher churn (10–15%). Reducing churn by even 2% on a 200-member community at $19/month saves ~$912/year.

How much does Stripe take per transaction?

Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card transaction (standard rate). On a $10 subscription, that is $0.59 per month — about 5.9%. On a $99 subscription, it drops to approximately 3.2%. Higher-tier memberships are proportionally cheaper to process. Note that failed payments still incur a dispute fee if disputed.

What are zombie members in a paid community?

Zombie members are people whose payment failed or subscription cancelled, but who still have access to your community because removal was not immediate. Every day a cancelled member keeps their Discord role or Telegram access, they are consuming your time and potentially your content without paying. On a 200-member community with 8% monthly churn and 7 days average manual removal lag, you are giving away roughly $285 of access per month for free.

How do I stop losing money when members cancel?

The only reliable solution is automation: connect Stripe webhooks to Discord or Telegram so role removal or ban happens within seconds of a cancellation or failed payment. Manual processes inevitably lag — admins sleep, get busy, or simply miss the notification. Automated access revocation typically recovers 80–100% of the zombie member revenue leak shown in this calculator.

Is manual community management really that time-consuming?

Yes — most community owners are surprised by the real number. At 4 hours/week of manual onboarding, role assignment, and access revocation, you are spending ~208 hours per year on admin. At $75/hour, that is $15,600 in time cost annually. That is before factoring in errors, slow response times, and the churn caused by poor first-day experience from slow manual onboarding.

Paid Community Revenue & Churn Calculator — Discord & Telegram

Your Community

Active paid members Current count of paying members

Tier name Price/mo % of mbrs

Growth & Churn

Monthly churn rate

% of members who cancel each month

Free-to-paid conversion

% of free/trial members who convert

Payments & Access Leaks

Payment fee

Stripe standard: 2.9%

Fixed fee per txn

Stripe standard: $0.30

Failed payments / month Cards that decline or expire

Avg days to revoke access How long cancelled members keep access

Your Manual Work

Hours/week on admin Onboarding, roles, removals

Your hourly rate

What an hour of your time is worth

Monthly Revenue

Gross MRR —

Payment fees —

                            Net MRR
                            —
                        

Annual run rate —

Leaking Out Monthly

Failed payment revenue —

Zombie member access —

Total revenue leak —

Your Time Bill

Admin hours/month —

                            Cost of your time
                            —
                        

Manual management costs you

—

per month

Per year —

We plug these leaks →

How to Read Your Community Revenue Results

Gross MRR is the raw monthly recurring revenue before any platform costs. It is the number most community owners quote when they talk about how much they make — and the number most misleading on its own.

Net MRR is what actually lands in your account after payment processing fees. On a $10/month membership, Stripe takes around $0.59 — roughly 6%. On a $49/month VIP tier, that drops to about 3.5%. The fixed per-transaction fee ($0.30) punishes low-ticket communities disproportionately, which is one reason pricing above $10/month tends to improve margins dramatically.

Annual run rate projects your current net MRR × 12. This is intentionally flat — it does not compound churn out of your member base, which would paint a grimmer (but truer) picture. Treat this number as your ceiling, not your prediction.

What the Leak Numbers Mean

Failed payment revenue represents the subscription value of transactions that failed this month. These members tried to pay. Their card bounced, expired, or was reported stolen. Without automated dunning and immediate grace-period management, a significant slice of them quietly leave — and you gave away access while the recovery window closed.

Zombie member access is the one that surprises people. Every cancelled member who still holds a Discord role or Telegram invite is in your community for free. The calculator assumes a 7-day average manual removal lag by default — which, if anything, is conservative. Community owners report delays of two to fourteen days between a cancellation and actually noticing it and acting. Each day of lag is a fraction of that member's monthly subscription given away.

                    Example: A 200-member community at $19/month average, 8% monthly churn, and 7-day manual removal lag is giving away approximately $285 in free access every month. Over a year, that is $3,420 — roughly the value of 15 annual memberships handed out for nothing.
                

The Three Revenue Leaks Paid Communities Ignore

Slow access revocation. When a cancellation event fires in Stripe, your community member should lose their Discord role or Telegram access within seconds — not whenever you next check your dashboard. Manual removal processes almost always lag by days. The longer the lag, the more free access you distribute.
Failed payment drift. Failed payments do not just mean lost revenue on that transaction — they mean losing the member entirely. The industry average recovery rate for failed payments drops by roughly 20% per day. Immediate retry sequences and dunning emails, triggered automatically within hours of a failure, recover the majority. Manual follow-up, the next morning or afternoon, recovers a fraction.
Friction in onboarding. New members who wait hours for a role, a welcome message, or access to the right channels have a dramatically higher likelihood of churning within their first 30 days. Manual onboarding introduces exactly that wait. Communities with automated day-0 onboarding consistently report 15–30% lower first-month churn than those relying on admins to handle access manually.

How to Price Your Membership Tiers

The default preset (Basic $9 / Pro $19 / VIP $49) reflects a common pattern: a low-anchor entry tier, a middle tier designed to be the "right" choice, and a premium tier that makes the middle look good by comparison. Multi-tier pricing consistently outperforms single-price communities on both conversion and ARPU.

A few rules of thumb: price your entry tier above $9 if your content is genuinely valuable — $15–$25 is where most growing communities land. Make the jump from middle to VIP feel worth it with exclusive access (1:1 calls, private channels, direct access to you). Annual billing options, at 10–20% off, significantly reduce churn by removing the monthly re-evaluation moment.

FAQ

Common Questions

It varies widely, but the numbers are more accessible than most people assume. A 100-member community at $15/month is $1,500 MRR — around $1,200–$1,350 after Stripe fees and typical 8% churn. Communities with strong positioning, multiple tiers, and good retention routinely reach $10,000–$50,000 MRR at a few hundred members. The calculator above shows exactly what your specific setup projects.

Industry average monthly churn for paid communities sits between 5–12%. Communities with strong engagement, exclusive content, and automated onboarding tend to land at the lower end (3–6%). Communities relying on manual management or lacking a clear ongoing value loop see higher churn (10–15%). Reducing churn by even 2 percentage points on a 200-member community at $19/month saves roughly $912 per year — and that improvement is almost entirely recoverable through better onboarding and faster access management.

Stripe's standard rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card transaction. On a $10 subscription that is $0.59 per month — about 5.9% effective rate. On a $49 subscription, it drops to approximately 3.5%. The $0.30 fixed fee makes low-ticket memberships proportionally expensive to process, which is why pricing above $10 often improves net margins meaningfully without significant conversion loss.

Zombie members are cancelled subscribers who still have access to your community because their Discord role or Telegram access was not removed immediately. Every day they retain access, they are inside a community they are no longer paying for. At 8% monthly churn on a 200-member community with an average price of $19, roughly 16 people cancel each month. If removal takes 7 days on average, those 16 members each get ~23% of a month's membership for free — adding up to about $70–$90 per month in zombie access. Multiply across a year and it becomes a meaningful number, especially as the community grows.

The only reliable solution is automation. When Stripe fires a customer.subscription.deleted or invoice.payment_failed webhook, your system should immediately remove the relevant Discord role or revoke the Telegram invite — within seconds, not hours. Manual processes break down because admins are unavailable, miss notifications, or simply forget. An automated Stripe → Discord integration handles this in real time, 24/7, without any intervention. This is one of the core systems ShipWorkflow builds for paid community owners.

Most community owners are surprised by the real number. At 4 hours/week of onboarding, role assignment, and access revocation, you are spending roughly 17 hours per month — 208 hours per year — on repetitive admin. At $75/hour, that is $15,600 in time cost annually, just on manual community management. That figure does not include the revenue lost to slow onboarding causing higher early churn, or the goodwill lost when new members wait hours for access to a community they just paid to join.

Paid Community Revenue Calculator

How to Read Your Community Revenue Results

What the Leak Numbers Mean

The Three Revenue Leaks Paid Communities Ignore

How to Price Your Membership Tiers

Common Questions

Ready to Plug the Leaks?