Membership setup
Sample viewThree tiers, each with its own entitlements and usage ceiling.
- Starter$19 / mo
500 generations included
Used 42% - Pro$49 / mo
2,500 generations, full prompt library
Used 78% - Studio$149 / mo
Unlimited generations, 5 seats
Used 61%
The problem
AI services sell once. Then the revenue stops.
Merchants selling AI services have the hardest version of the retention problem: real delivery cost on every request, expectations that move every quarter, and a customer who can walk the moment a single task is finished.
Revenue restarts at zero every month
One-off sales mean the first of the month is always a blank page. Forecasting is guesswork, and growth depends entirely on finding new buyers faster than you lose old ones.
Everyone gets the same access
Without tiers you have one choice to make about your best prompts, models and templates: give them to every buyer, or hide them from all of them. Neither is the right answer.
Unmetered usage eats the margin
AI delivery has a real per-request cost. When nothing caps what a plan includes, your heaviest customers quietly become the ones you lose money on.
Billing is manual and it breaks
Re-sending payment links, chasing invoices and fixing expired cards is admin that grows with every customer you sign, and it is the first thing to slip in a busy month.
Customers leave before they learn the product
The advanced workflow that would have kept them is the one they never reached. Most cancellations happen before a customer has seen what your service can actually do.
Cancellations arrive without warning
The signal was there weeks earlier in falling usage, an unopened resource, a plan nobody upgraded from. Without a dashboard built for membership, none of it is visible.
None of these are marketing problems. They are all the same structural gap: nothing in the store connects what a customer pays to what a customer gets, on a repeating schedule.
The solution
Membership turns your AI service into a plan people stay on
Membership is the recurring layer of Subi. You define the tiers, attach entitlements and usage limits to each one, and the platform handles billing, access and the member experience from there.
Revenue you can forecast
Plans renew on their own schedule. Recurring billing, proration, trials and retries on failed cards all run without you touching them, so next month starts from a known number instead of zero.
Access that matches the plan
Every tier carries its own entitlements: which services are included, which resources unlock, how much usage is covered. The difference between Starter and Pro is enforced at the point of access, not on trust.
A member experience that earns renewal
Guided onboarding, member-only resources and a portal where customers can see exactly what they are paying for and what they have used. Value that stays visible is value that keeps getting paid for.
Retention you can see coming
Active members, usage against limits, upgrades, downgrades and cancellation reasons in one dashboard. You get to act on a drop in usage weeks before it turns into a cancellation.
How it works
Five steps from one-off sales to a running membership
The order matters. Each step depends on the one before it, and the whole sequence is configuration rather than development work.
Map your services to tiers
Start from what you already sell. Group your AI services, prompt packs, model access and support levels into two or three tiers where the reason to upgrade is obvious at a glance.
Attach entitlements and limits
Give each tier its own rules: which resources unlock, how many requests, generations or seats are included, and whether reaching the ceiling means a warning, a hard stop or metered overage.
Switch on recurring billing
Set price, interval and trial length. Subi handles renewals, proration when someone changes plan, automatic retries when a card fails, and receipts for every charge.
Publish the portal and onboarding
Members get a portal for their plan, usage and invoices, plus a guided first week that walks them into the parts of your service they would otherwise never find.
Read the retention signals
The analytics dashboard reports on renewals, upgrades, usage against limits and why people leave, so the next change you make to your tiers is an informed one.
Membership features
Everything a recurring AI service needs, in one feature set
Ten capabilities that work together. Billing sets the schedule, tiers decide the access, limits protect the margin, and the portal and analytics keep members and merchants looking at the same picture.
Recurring billing
Monthly and annual plans that renew on their own, with no billing logic for you to build or maintain.
Tiered access
Two tiers or ten, each carrying its own entitlements, enforced by the platform rather than by trust.
Member-only resources
Keep prompt libraries, fine-tuned models, templates, datasets and documentation behind the tier that pays for them.
Onboarding and education
Guided first-run paths that get a new member to a useful result before the first renewal comes around.
Usage controls and limits
Request, generation, seat and credit ceilings per tier, so AI delivery cost never outruns the plan price.
Payment management
Card updates, automatic retries, dunning notices and invoice history, handled without a support ticket.
Analytics dashboard
Membership metrics rather than order counts: active members, recurring revenue, upgrades, usage and churn.
Customer portal
One place where members see their tier, usage, invoices and resources, and change their plan without emailing you.
Plan changes and pauses
Upgrade, downgrade, pause and resume, with proration handled and access adjusted the moment it happens.
Member communications
Renewal reminders, limit warnings, welcome sequences and win-back messages tied to what a member is actually doing.
Pricing
Three plans, priced on the size of your membership
Membership is an add-on to your Subi store. Every plan carries the full feature set. What changes between them is how many members you can carry, how far the tiering and usage rules go, and how much support comes with it.
Starter
$49per month
For merchants launching their first membership tier alongside what they already sell.
Up to 250 active members, up to 3 tiers
Request Membership DemoWhat is included:
- Recurring billing with proration, trials and retries
- Up to three membership tiers with entitlements
- Member-only resources with tier-based locking
- Usage limits with soft warnings and hard caps
- Customer portal with invoices and self-serve plan changes
- Renewal reminders and limit warnings
- Core analytics: active members, recurring revenue, churn
- Email support
Growth
Most chosen$149per month
For AI services running more than one plan, with real delivery cost to keep under control.
Up to 2,500 active members, unlimited tiers
Request Membership DemoEverything in Starter, plus:
- Unlimited membership tiers, including invite-only
- Onboarding paths and education sequences with progress tracking
- Metered overage and per-tier usage policies
- Annual plans, paid trials and discount codes
- Cohort retention and cancellation-reason reporting
- Pause, resume and guided cancellation flows
- Win-back and activation message sequences
- Priority support
Enterprise
Customannual agreement
For high-volume AI merchants with entitlement, billing or compliance rules of their own.
Unlimited active members and tiers
Talk to salesEverything in Growth, plus:
- Custom entitlement, usage and billing rules
- Multi-brand and multi-region memberships
- Migration support from your current billing setup
- Dedicated onboarding for your team
- Named account contact and a regular review cadence
- Custom contract, invoicing and payment terms
- Security and procurement review support
- Support terms agreed in your contract
Prices are shown in USD and billed monthly. Membership is an add-on to your Subi store, and payment processing fees are charged separately by your payment provider. Ask us about annual terms when you book a demo.
Success stories
What a membership changes, in three familiar setups
Three shapes of AI business, the gap each one had, and how Membership was configured to close it.
The scenarios below are illustrative. They describe how merchants typically configure Membership and the kind of movement the feature set is built to produce. They are composites written as examples, not audited results from a named customer, and the figures are stated as approximate for that reason.
- Illustrative example
Prompt and template library
Digital catalogue, one-off downloads
≈ 20 ptsmonth-two retention- Before
- Prompt packs sold as one-off downloads. Launch weeks were strong, the months in between were flat, and a buyer had no reason to come back once the file was on their machine.
- What they set up
- Three tiers, with the full back catalogue and every new monthly drop published as member-only resources. A download ceiling on the entry tier gave the middle tier an obvious job.
- The change
- In a setup like this, Membership helped improve month-two retention by roughly 20 percentage points and moved the bulk of revenue off launch spikes and onto a predictable monthly base.
- Illustrative example
AI creative services studio
Client work, variable generation cost
≈ 9 hrsbilling admin saved monthly- Before
- Project-by-project work where generation costs swung wildly between clients, and every invoice was raised, sent and chased by hand at the end of the month.
- What they set up
- Retainer tiers with a monthly generation allowance, metered overage above the ceiling, and the customer portal handling cards, invoices and plan changes without the studio in the middle.
- The change
- In a setup like this, Membership helped improve margin per account by putting a price on heavy usage, and helped cut roughly nine hours of monthly billing admin down to near zero.
- Illustrative example
AI copywriting service
Credit-based, self-serve signups
≈ 15 ptsfirst-month retention- Before
- New customers bought credits, used the simplest feature once, never found the advanced workflows and cancelled inside the first month without ever saying why.
- What they set up
- A guided onboarding path on every tier, limit warnings sent before the ceiling rather than after it, and an upgrade prompt surfaced in the portal at the moment usage justified it.
- The change
- In a setup like this, Membership helped improve first-month retention by roughly 15 percentage points and helped lift the share of members who move up a tier within their first quarter.
FAQ
Twelve questions merchants ask before switching on Membership
If the answer you need is not here, the sales form at the bottom of this page reaches a person who can give you a straight one.
Prefer them grouped by topic? Open the full FAQ page.
What does Membership add to my Subi store?
Membership is the recurring layer of Subi. It adds paid plans on top of the products and services you already sell, along with everything a plan needs to work: tiered entitlements, usage limits, member-only resources, onboarding, a customer portal and a dashboard built around retention rather than orders. Your existing catalogue stays exactly where it is.
Is Membership a good fit for AI services specifically?
It is built for the shape of the problem AI merchants have. Selling AI carries a real per-request delivery cost, which means access and usage need to be tied together rather than handled separately. Membership lets you attach a usage allowance to a tier, enforce it automatically, and price the overage, so an unusually heavy customer does not quietly turn into an unprofitable one.
How long does it take to launch, and do I need a developer?
Setting up tiers, prices, entitlements and limits is done from your Subi dashboard and needs no code. Most of the work is deciding what belongs in each tier, which is a pricing decision rather than a technical one. If your AI service runs on your own infrastructure and you want usage counted against a limit there, that part uses the Subi entitlement check and is a small piece of developer work.
How many tiers can I run at once?
Starter covers up to three tiers, and Growth and Enterprise are unlimited. Most AI merchants do best with two or three to begin with, because the value of tiering comes from the difference between plans being immediately obvious. You can add tiers later without disturbing members already on an existing plan.
Can I keep resources member-only?
Yes, and this is where a lot of the retention comes from. Prompt libraries, fine-tuned models, templates, datasets, documentation and recordings can all be attached to specific tiers. Publish once, choose who sees it, and non-members get a locked state naming the tier they would need rather than a broken link.
Can members upgrade, downgrade or pause on their own?
All three, from the customer portal. Upgrades and downgrades are prorated automatically and access changes the moment the plan does. Pausing lets a member hold their plan for a set period instead of cancelling, and their history, settings and resources are waiting when they come back. You choose which of these to offer per tier.
How do usage controls and limits work?
Each tier carries allowances you define: requests, generations, credits or seats, measured over a rolling or calendar-aligned period. Membership counts usage against that allowance and enforces it at the point of access, so the limit applies wherever the member is using your service rather than only in one place.
What happens when a member reaches their limit?
Whatever you decide it should. A soft limit warns the member and keeps service running. A hard cap stops further usage until the period resets or they upgrade. Metered overage lets them keep going and bills the difference at a rate you set. Members are warned as they approach the ceiling in every case, so it is never a surprise.
What does the analytics dashboard report on?
Active members and recurring revenue over time, cohort retention grouped by signup month, movement between tiers including upgrades, downgrades and pauses, usage measured against limits per tier, and the reasons members select when they cancel. It is a membership view rather than an order view, so the questions it answers are about who is staying.
How are failed payments handled?
A declined card is retried automatically on a schedule, and the member gets a dunning email with a direct link to update their payment method in the portal. You set the grace period, which decides how long access continues while the payment is being resolved. Failed payments are the quietest kind of churn, so recovering them is handled by default rather than left to you.
What do members see in the customer portal?
Their current tier and exactly what it includes, how much of their allowance they have used this period, their full invoice and payment history, controls to update a card or change plan, and direct links to every resource their tier unlocks. It exists so the value of the membership stays visible between renewals instead of only at the point of sale.
How does onboarding and education work for new members?
You build a sequence of steps, lessons or checklists that a new member works through, and you can vary it by tier. Progress is tracked per member, which means you can see the exact step where people stall and fix that step rather than guessing at why activation is low. Members who stall can be prompted automatically to pick up where they left off.
Contact sales
Request a Membership demo
Tell us what you sell and how customers pay for it today. We will show you how tiers, usage limits and the member portal would be set up around your AI services, using your catalogue rather than a demo store.
We read it and reply
Every request reaches a person on the Subi team, and we aim to come back to you within one business day.
A 30 minute working call
We map the AI services you sell today onto tiers, entitlements and usage limits, using your real catalogue rather than a demo store.
A written setup outline
You keep the tier structure we sketch out together, whether or not you go ahead with Subi.