When setting out to build a new membership site, you're faced with several options and it's difficult to know which is the best route to go. Some are really expensive and some aren't as user-friendly.

Get the scoop below on my 3 favorite ways for building a membership site at the lowest cost possible:

1. GhostGhost is an open-source CMS that allows you to easily set up a membership blog or publication with 3 tiers; public, free members and paid members. Ghost is probably the easiest to set up, so long as you buy a premium theme and sign up with Ghost.org. Everything is super optimized for SEO and the publishing experience is beautiful. The available themes are fairly limited since it's not as popular as say Wordpress but it's possible to convert any Webflow blog template into a Ghost theme using Udesly.com which gives you a lot more options.Since it is open source, you can install on your own server or a Digital Ocean droplet for as little as $5/mo. If you don't have the coding chops, you can subscribe at Ghost.org for $37/mo.That's what this site is built with actually. I highly recommend it.
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2. Podia.comI've used this quite a bit now and it offers a very simple, straightforward way to set up and manage a membership site with several tiers. It also lets you sell ecourses, digital downloads, webinars and put together a 'bundle' which is basically several products put together into a single offer.For those who aren't as tech savvy, this is probably the easiest solution for building it all yourself. While I've only helped clients with Podia so far and am not personally using it for my site, I do plan on using it in the future for when I release more digital downloads and ecourses.So for my situation, I'm using Ghost for the membership site and plan on using Podia for selling everything else.Podia has 2 pricing options; the basic is $39/mo and the premium is $79/mo.
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3. MemberstackMemberstack allows you to turn almost any site into a membership site for only $25/mo. I've used it with Webflow (aff link) and it works great. Webflow pricing starts at $15/mo. If you're looking for the cheapest route you can always use Memberstack with a basic HTML site hosted with Netlify. You can also use it with Carrd (aff link), which is the cheapest site builder I've come across, starting at only $20/year. I used Carrd to build my personal site here.

Update: Webflow now allows you to create a membership site directly without any use of a 3rd party!

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