Straight answers about running a membership on Subi

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.