How membership tiers work on Prolaud: a course at one tier, community and live classes at a higher one

A membership tier on Prolaud is a Membership product that lists what it unlocks. Make one for each tier: the lower tier includes a course, the higher tier includes that course plus a paid community and the course your members-only live call is scheduled on. Each tier has its own price and interval, and access lasts while the member pays.

That is the whole model, and it is simpler than most "tiered membership" software, which is both its strength and its limit. There is no tier ladder to configure and no upgrade logic to learn. There is also no upgrade logic to lean on. This guide walks through building two tiers end to end, explains exactly how to keep a live call to the higher tier, and is plain about the three things you have to handle yourself: members moving up, members canceling, and payments that fail.

Prolaud has no separate "tiers" setting. A tier is simply one Membership product in your Storefront, and a membership is a product whose job is to grant access to other products. When you create one, a picker called What's included with the membership lists everything else you sell, and you tick what this tier unlocks.

So "Tier 1" and "Tier 2" are two Membership products that happen to share some of their ticked items. Prolaud doesn't know one is higher than the other. It knows that a member who pays for Tier 2 should get the products Tier 2 lists, for as long as they keep paying.

This has a practical consequence you should design around from the start: a higher tier does not include a lower tier by itself. If Tier 2 should give everything in Tier 1 and more, tick Tier 1's products inside Tier 2 as well. The upside is flexibility. Tiers don't have to stack at all; you can sell two side-by-side memberships for different audiences from the same courses.

Almost anything else you sell. The one rule is that a bundle or another membership cannot go inside a membership, which is what stops a tier from containing a tier. Everything else is fair game, and each kind gives the member something specific:

Here is a concrete two-tier setup for a coach, the kind most people mean when they ask about tiers. The names and prices are examples; use your own.

• Foundations (the lower tier): the self-paced course *Calm Mornings*.
• Inner Circle (the higher tier): *Calm Mornings*, plus a paid community, plus a second course called *Inner Circle Calls* that the weekly live call is scheduled on and where each week's recording is added as a lesson.

The order matters, because a membership can only include products that already exist: courses first, then a product for each course, then the community, then the memberships.

Step 1: build and publish the courses

Create *Calm Mornings* and *Inner Circle Calls* and publish both. The second course can start almost empty: a welcome lesson is enough, because its main job is to carry the live call and collect the recordings. When you publish a course, you can set its access to Membership only, which locks it to anyone who doesn't hold a membership that includes it. That is what you want for both courses here, so nobody buys the calls course on its own by accident.

Step 2: turn each course into a product

Open Storefront (add it from Add plugins if you haven't; it is free on every plan), press New product, choose Course access, pick the course and publish it. Do this once for each course. These products are the building blocks the memberships will tick.

Step 3: create the paid community

Press New product and choose Paid community. You can create the community from here. Give it a price too: that price is what someone pays to join the community on its own, if you also sell it separately. A member who gets the community through Inner Circle pays the membership, not the community's own price.

Step 4: create the lower tier

1. Press New product and choose Membership.
2. Under What's included with the membership, tick *Calm Mornings*.
3. Under the price, choose Subscription, enter the amount, and pick a Billing interval: Monthly, Quarterly, Every 6 months or Yearly.
4. Write the sales page and publish.

Step 5: create the higher tier

Repeat the same steps for Inner Circle, and this time tick *Calm Mornings*, the paid community and *Inner Circle Calls*. Ticking *Calm Mornings* again is the step people miss: without it, an Inner Circle member would have the community and the calls but not the course the lower tier is built on.

Both memberships now sit side by side in your shop, each with its own price. If you want to offer the same tier monthly and yearly, create one membership per interval; one product has one billing interval.

This is the part that needs the most care, because a live class link on Prolaud opens for anyone who has it unless you say otherwise. That default is deliberate: demo classes and open webinars are meant to be shared. For a members-only call you switch it off for that class.

1. Open Live Classes and schedule a class.
2. Under Course, choose *Inner Circle Calls*, the course only the higher tier includes. Everyone who holds that course is the class's audience.
3. Switch on Only these students can join. Members then sign in to enter, and the link does not let in anyone who isn't on the course, even if it is forwarded.
4. For a call every week, switch the form to Advanced and set it to repeat. Every class in the series shares one join link.

Because the call is tied to a course only Inner Circle includes, a Foundations member never sees it on their Live classes page, and couldn't enter with a forwarded link if they tried. An Inner Circle member sees it there with a button to join, in the browser, with no separate meeting app. The coaching membership guide shows this exact setup with screenshots, including a lower-level member's Live classes page without the higher-level call on it.

Two details are worth planning for. First, a class runs up to 90 minutes with 49 people in the room on Pro, and up to 180 minutes with 99 on Studio, so size the higher tier's call to your plan. Second, recordings: press Start recording in the room (it never starts by itself), and the recording lands on your Recordings page. Class recordings are kept for 90 days on Pro and 365 on Studio, so if the archive is part of what Inner Circle pays for, add each week's recording to *Inner Circle Calls* as a video lesson. A video you upload into a lesson is not deleted on that schedule, and the course becomes the tier's growing library of past calls.

You already have, by ticking the paid community inside Inner Circle and not inside Foundations. When an Inner Circle payment goes through, the member is added to the community. If the membership lapses, they are removed from it again, and paying again brings them back.

If you'd rather everyone has a community and the higher tier gets something extra inside it, run two communities: an open one included in both tiers, and a smaller one included only in the higher tier. Each community is its own space with its own wall, challenges and leaderboard, so the higher tier gets a room of its own rather than a locked corner of a shared one.

This is the part to be clear with your members about, because Prolaud does not do it for them. There is no automatic upgrade and no proration between memberships. Moving from Foundations to Inner Circle means two separate actions by the member:

1. They buy Inner Circle, which starts a new subscription and gives them everything it includes straight away.
2. They cancel Foundations, which keeps its access until the end of the period they already paid for, and then stops renewing.

Until the second step happens, both subscriptions renew, so a member who forgets is charged for both. Put the two steps in your upgrade email and on the Inner Circle sales page, in that order. A short line such as "Already on Foundations? Join Inner Circle, then cancel Foundations from Billing in your account" saves you a refund conversation.

There is no automatic credit for the unused part of the lower tier either. If you want to soften the switch, give movers a coupon for their first Inner Circle payment, or time your upgrade offer to land near the end of a billing period. Moving down a tier is the same in reverse: buy the lower tier, cancel the higher one.

How do members cancel?

It depends on which payment account bills the membership. A member billed through Stripe can't cancel from Billing on your academy site yet, so cancel the subscription for them in your Stripe dashboard; access then ends at the end of the period they already paid for. Members billed through Razorpay cancel from Billing themselves: the button is Cancel auto-renewal, and access stays to the end of the current period.

• A renewal goes through: everything the tier includes is extended to the next period, the courses and the community, not just the membership record.
• A renewal fails: your payment processor retries on its own schedule, and the member sees a notice in their account asking them to update their payment details. Access stays on for 3 days past the renewal date. If the payment still hasn't gone through, the included courses and the community close until it does.
• A member cancels: access continues until the end of the period they already paid for, then the included products close. Their course progress is kept, so if they rejoin, they pick up where they stopped.

None of this needs you to do anything; it runs on the payment events your processor sends. That is also why the payment connection has to be set up properly before you launch, which is the next section.

Members pay into your own account, never ours, and Prolaud takes 0% of each payment on every plan. Which account depends on the membership's currency:

• Priced in US dollars: billed on your own Stripe account, connected under Payouts by pasting your Stripe API key.
• Priced in another currency: instead of Stripe, your own Razorpay account bills it. This needs your Razorpay Key ID and Key Secret saved under Payouts; the one-click Razorpay sign-in can't take recurring payments. After connecting, check that the Razorpay webhook box says Set up, because members get access when Razorpay tells Prolaud a payment went through.

Your processor charges its own standard fee on each payment, as it would anywhere. The safest launch check takes five minutes: buy the lower tier yourself with a real card, confirm the course opens, and cancel. Then you know the whole loop works before a member finds out it doesn't.

Two, for most people, and three at most. Every tier is a promise you have to keep delivering, and a tier that nobody buys still needs its sales page kept accurate. A useful test is whether you can say in one sentence what the higher tier gets that the lower one doesn't. "Inner Circle adds the community and a weekly live call" passes. "Inner Circle adds more value" doesn't.

Build the difference around things that are genuinely scarce: your live time and access to other members. Self-paced content is cheap to give everyone, so it makes a good base tier. A live call has a room size and a length, and a small community is better than a big one for some audiences, so those are what people pay more for. If you find yourself wanting a third tier, it is often a one-on-one offer, and that usually works better as its own 1-on-1 session product than as a membership, because a membership would include one booking link, not a set number of calls each month.

Finally, price the gap honestly. If the higher tier is mostly the weekly call, a member is effectively paying the difference for four or five calls a month, so make sure the calls happen every week, on time, and that the recordings land in the calls course for anyone who misses one.

Said plainly, so nothing here surprises you after launch:

• No tier ladder: Prolaud doesn't know one membership is higher than another, and a higher tier doesn't include a lower one unless you tick its products.
• No automatic upgrade, downgrade or proration between tiers. Members buy the new tier and cancel the old one.
• No "everything in this tier" setting: when you add a new course to a tier, create its product and tick it in the membership.
• No monthly allowance of one-on-one calls. A 1-on-1 session product is one fixed booking link or room.
• No in-app cancel for members billed through Stripe yet; you cancel those in your Stripe dashboard.
• Live classes aren't a product you tick. They're scheduled on a course, and the course decides who can join.

A flat plan fee, and nothing per sale. Pro allows 50 storefront products and 25 published courses, which is plenty for two or three tiers and their courses; Studio removes both limits and adds transcripts of your recorded calls. Both plans take 0% of your membership revenue. Every new academy starts on a 14-day Studio trial with no card, which is enough time to build both tiers, run one members-only call and test a real payment. Current prices, in your currency, are on the pricing page.

For the reference version of everything above, the memberships help article and the coaching membership guide cover each screen. The storefront overview shows every product kind, and communities and live classes cover the two things a higher tier usually adds.