Set Up Recurring Billing for Memberships and Subscriptions

A membership earns money every month only if the billing behind it keeps working when cards expire, prices go up and members want a break.

Plenty of studios, coaches and small software businesses switch on subscriptions in an afternoon and meet the settings later, one surprise at a time. A price rise breaks the sign-up link. A free trial charges people who forgot about it, or quietly lets them go. A member's card expires, the retries run out, and the membership cancels itself before anyone notices.

This course goes through Stripe Billing setting by setting: products and prices, the three ways to sign people up, free trials and how they end, what a mid-month plan change really costs, the customer portal, pausing and cancelling, and the retries and emails that recover a failed payment. Every plan, fee, limit and setting was checked on Stripe's own pages in October 2026.

You practise on real offers along the way: six offers to set up, a member who wants the summer off, and one test member taken through a trial and a failed renewal in a sandbox before anything goes live.

You walk away with a product catalogue you can change safely, a sign-up route for each offer, trial, portal and recovery settings chosen on purpose, and a sandbox test that proves them.

Who it's for

Studio and gym owners: selling monthly and yearly memberships and tired of fixing billing by email.

Coaches and consultants: moving clients from one-off invoices to a monthly retainer that charges itself.

Small software teams: launching paid plans and wanting trials, upgrades and failed payments handled before the first customer.