Charging for access to a community usually means bolting a forum onto a membership plugin and then policing the door by hand. Someone subscribes and waits for an invite. Someone cancels and keeps posting for weeks. Access and payment drift apart, and you spend your evenings reconciling the two. This guide walks the whole path instead: decide what you are actually selling, pick the integration that matches it, gate a space, connect the plugin, and test that members join and leave on their own.
One thing to be clear about from the start, because it shapes everything below. Jetonomy provides the gate, not the till. Your membership, subscription, or LMS plugin decides who has paid or enrolled. Jetonomy reads that entitlement through its Access Rules permission engine and turns it into space access. You keep the billing tool you already trust, and you add the community gate on the same WordPress install rather than paying for and syncing a second hosted platform.
Step 1: Decide what you are selling
The model you choose decides which integration you reach for, so make this call first rather than picking a plugin and working backwards.
A recurring membership tier. You charge monthly or yearly for ongoing access, and the community is part of what members get. This is the most common shape, and it is the one Jetonomy supports for free. If you already run MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro, a paying member should land in your premium spaces the moment their subscription activates.
A one-off product or a store subscription. You sell through WooCommerce, either as a membership plan or as a subscription product, and access to a customer-only space is a benefit of the purchase. This path needs Jetonomy Pro.
Course-gated access. You sell courses and want each cohort in its own private discussion space that students enter automatically on enrolment. Jetonomy Pro adds adapters for LearnDash and Tutor LMS for exactly this.
You do not have to pick only one. Because Access Rules stack, a single space can accept a membership tier OR a product purchase OR a course enrolment, and a member who matches any one path is let in. Start with the model that matches your main offer, and add the others later if you need them.
Step 2: Pick the matching integration
Once you know the model, the integration follows directly. Here is the honest map of what is free and what needs Pro.
| Your model | Integration | Free or Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Membership tier | MemberPress | Free |
| Membership tier | Paid Memberships Pro | Free |
| Store product or subscription | WooCommerce Memberships or Subscriptions | Pro |
| Subscription level | Restrict Content Pro | Pro |
| Course enrolment | LearnDash | Pro |
| Course enrolment | Tutor LMS | Pro |
The two most common WordPress membership plugins, MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro, gate Jetonomy spaces without Pro. That is the “community plus monetization on one install” promise made concrete. If you sell through a store or an LMS instead, Jetonomy Pro widens the set to WooCommerce, Restrict Content Pro, LearnDash, and Tutor LMS. Every adapter is detected automatically when its plugin is active, so there is no connection to wire up by hand. You can see exactly what is in each tier on the pricing page, and the full capability rundown lives on the membership and monetization feature page.
One WooCommerce detail worth knowing before you plan around it: the WooCommerce adapter only activates when WooCommerce Memberships or WooCommerce Subscriptions is also present. A plain Simple or Variable product is not selectable as a gate. If you want a one-off product to unlock a space, tie it to a WooCommerce Memberships plan and gate on that plan.
Step 3: Create the gated space
With the model and integration decided, the build is fast. In Jetonomy, content lives in spaces, and each space carries its own visibility and access settings. Create the space you want to charge for the same way you create any other, then decide how non-members should experience it.
Space visibility controls who can find and read the space:
| Visibility | What it means |
|---|---|
| Public | Anyone can find the space and read it |
| Private | Anyone can find the space, but only members can read it |
| Hidden | Only members can find the space; it is invite-only |
To sell access, set Visibility to Private and Join Policy to Invite Only. Outsiders can still see the space exists, which is your upsell, but nobody can read or join it on their own. Plan holders get in through the membership rule you add in the next step. An Access Rule lets people in; it never locks anyone out on its own, so a Public space with an open join policy stays open to everyone whatever rules you add. Hidden suits a space that should be invisible to anyone without the entitlement.
Step 4: Connect the membership plugin with an Access Rule
This is where the gate gets wired, and the flow is the same across every integration. Open the space, add a rule, and choose what a matching member can do.
- Go to Jetonomy → Spaces and open the space you want to gate.
- Click the Access Rules tab in the space settings panel.
- Set Rule Type to your integration (your membership levels, products, or courses appear in the dropdown once that plugin is active).
- Pick the specific level, product, or course in the Value field.
- Choose what the rule Grants: Read, Participate, or Full.
- Click Add Rule. It appears in the table below the form.
For a standard paid space, set Grants: Participate. That lets members read, post, reply, and vote as ordinary participants. A rule never hands out moderation; to give one person a different role, change it on the space’s Members tab. There is no separate grant-versus-revoke switch: a rule always grants access to members who match it, and members who match no rule simply do not get in. To take a level’s access away, delete its rule.
If you want more than one way in, add more than one rule. Access Rules stack across integration types, so you can gate a “Premium VIP” space to a MemberPress VIP level OR a specific WooCommerce product OR a LearnDash course in the same panel. A member who satisfies any one of them is added. The full field reference, including what each Grants option means, is in the MemberPress integration guide, which is the canonical Access Rules walkthrough every other gating guide links back to.
Step 5: Test the join and leave flow
The whole point of gating is that it keeps working without you, so prove it before you sell a single seat. Access and revocation are driven by membership status events, not by you clicking buttons, and the only way to trust that is to watch it happen.
Test the join. Use a test account and grant it the membership, subscription, or enrolment through your billing plugin exactly as a real customer would get it. When the entitlement activates, the member gets into every space whose Access Rules grant the level. Confirm the account can now see and post in the gated space.
Test the leave. Now expire, cancel, or pause that same test entitlement. Jetonomy removes the member from any space gated exclusively to that level, while leaving everything they wrote in place. Confirm the account loses access and that its posts and replies are still there. For WooCommerce specifically, remember that access tracks the membership or subscription status, not the order: a subscription moving to on-hold, cancelled, or expired revokes access, while refunding a one-off order on its own does not.
Run both halves before launch. A gate you have watched open and close for a test user is a gate you can sell against with a clear conscience.
What Jetonomy does not do for a paid community
Knowing the limits saves you from buying the wrong thing. Jetonomy does not take payments, send invoices, run coupons or manage renewals. It has no billing screen of its own, so refunds, failed cards and tax are all handled in the plugin that owns your checkout.
It also does not build a sales page for you. The “which plan opens this space” link shown to a blocked visitor points at your own pricing or checkout page, and you write that page.
What members see when they pay, and when they stop
A new customer finishes checkout in your membership plugin. Within the hour, Jetonomy’s roster sync reconciles the plan against the space rules and adds the member, so the premium space appears in their list without you doing anything. The sync also runs when the plugin announces a plan change, which is why most people are in almost immediately.
A visitor who is not on the plan sees the space exists but cannot read it. Where the plugin can name the plan that opens the space, the blocked screen sends them to it, so the locked door doubles as a sales prompt.
When a plan lapses, the member is removed only from rows that the plan added. Someone who was also invited to the space directly keeps their place. Their old topics and replies stay in the thread, which matters for the rest of your members who rely on the history.
What it costs to run
The cost has three parts. The free Jetonomy plugin has no fee. Your membership or commerce plugin has whatever licence it already has. If you gate by WooCommerce, Restrict Content Pro or an LMS, add Jetonomy Pro, which starts at $69 a year for one site, and one Pro licence covers every extension.
Hosting is the usual WordPress hosting. Jetonomy keeps its data in its own indexed tables rather than in the posts table, so a growing community does not bloat your store’s posts. If your host offers Redis or Memcached, Jetonomy uses it automatically.
Your data, your members, your exports
Paying members are ordinary WordPress users with one login across your store and your community. The membership record lives in your billing plugin and the community content lives in your database, so you can export each with the tools you already use.
Privacy requests use the core WordPress export and erase tools, and Jetonomy registers its profile, topic and reply data with them. Members can also delete their own account. If you ever remove the plugin, deleting it from the Plugins screen drops its tables, so take a backup first.
A normal week running a paid space
Monday: check the billing plugin for failed renewals, then confirm nobody on a lapsed plan still shows on the space roster. The hourly sync should have handled it, so a mismatch is worth investigating.
Midweek: read the moderation queue. Paying members expect faster answers than a free audience, so set yourself a response window and keep to it.
Friday: post something members could not get anywhere else, such as a live Q&A summary or a members-only resource. A gated space that goes quiet is the quickest route to cancellations.
Your first 30 days
- Pick one offer and one space. Resist the urge to gate everything.
- Gate it with a single Access Rule and run the join and leave test.
- Seed the space with five or six useful posts before you sell a seat.
- After two weeks, read what members ask and add a second space only if a clear job appears.
Where the rest of the family fits
Jetonomy is the community, and other plugins from the same team can sit around it. Learnomy is the course plugin. With Jetonomy Pro, a space can be gated by a Learnomy course or membership plan, enrolling adds the member, expiry removes them, and their posts stay. See the Learnomy partner page.
BuddyNext adds profiles, an activity feed and groups, and its Pro membership tiers can gate a space through a Jetonomy Pro adapter. On a BuddyNext site, BuddyNext owns messaging, so do not sell private messages as a Jetonomy benefit there. The BuddyNext partner page explains the hand-over.
Other pieces, such as WP Career Board, Listora and Eventonomy, are separate plugins you can run on the same site. We make no claim that they gate through Jetonomy. Each one is a plugin you install, host and update, which is the trade against a hosted platform that bundles everything into one bill. For the plugin list, see partners.
Where to start
The model is simpler than the usual five-plugin tower makes it look. Decide what you are selling, pick the integration that matches, gate a space with an Access Rule, connect the plugin that owns your checkout, and test that a test member joins on payment and leaves on cancellation. Jetonomy is the community and the gate; your existing plugin is the till.
If you run MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro, you can gate your first space today with the free plugin, no purchase required. Install Jetonomy, create a premium space, add one Access Rule, and run the join-and-leave test this afternoon. Reach for Pro from $69 a year only when you want to gate by WooCommerce, Restrict Content Pro, or an LMS. If you are still weighing a hosted platform against owning this on WordPress, the Circle comparison lays out the trade-offs without spin.