How to Build a Membership Site on Bubble.io
Courses, community, gated content, and recurring billing — membership sites are a natural fit for Bubble. This guide covers the complete data model, access control pattern, and Stripe billing integration for a production membership product.
The Four Defining Features of a Membership Site
A membership site is any product where access to content, community, or features is gated behind a recurring payment. The defining features are: access control (members see content, non-members see a paywall), content delivery (courses, articles, videos, downloads), community (forums, member directories, messaging), and recurring billing (monthly or annual subscriptions).
Access Control
Privacy rules gate every content data type behind an active membership check. Non-members attempting to access member URLs see a paywall prompt — not an error. The paywall is a conversion surface, not a dead end.
Content Delivery
Courses, modules, lessons, articles, PDFs, videos — each is a data type in Bubble with a membership tier requirement field. Premium content requires a higher membership tier. Content is served directly from Bubble or via a CDN for video.
Community
Forum posts, discussion threads, member directories, and direct messaging — all requiring active membership to access. The community is often the stickiest feature: members stay for the content, but they stay longer for the people.
Recurring Billing
Stripe subscriptions at the User level (for individual membership sites) or Workspace level (for team memberships). Trial periods, annual vs monthly, tier upgrades, and cancellation flows — all managed via Stripe and webhooks.
Progress Tracking
For courses: track lesson completion per user. A LessonProgress data type with user, lesson, and completed_at fields. The course overview page shows a completion percentage from a count of completed lessons divided by total lessons.
Email Sequences
Onboarding drip emails triggered by membership creation, nudge emails for incomplete course modules, renewal reminders. All via SendGrid with Bubble’s Scheduled Workflows firing timed emails after specific events.
Membership Site Data Model
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