Subsail lets you sell both subscriptions and memberships. They are both subscription products, meaning your customers are charged a recurring amount of money to buy your magazine. But there are a few key differences, and you may find one matches your business better than the other. Luckily you can sell both if you want!

Subscriptions

Subsail-powered subscriptions charge your customers based on the release dates of your magazine issues.

You choose the renewal date of subscriptions. There is no pressure to publish new issues, as your customers are only charged when you're ready to release new issues.

Subscriptions are best if:

• you want to charge customers based around the frequency of new issues being released

Memberships

Subsail-powered memberships charge your customers on a regular basis, usually monthly or yearly. You can choose to include or not include your magazine from memberships.

Memberships can be used to generate recurring revenue from your customers outside of the magazine, and as a great way to generate revenue from your magazine readers, if you do include the magazine.

If you choose to include the magazine in your memberships, every time you release a new issue, your customers will get a copy assigned to them in Subsail. Your fulfilment lists will update automatically.

Memberships are best if:

• you want to charge customers on a regular basis rather than per-issue
• you want to sell subscriptions that don't include magazine issues (i.e. a "Supporter" or "Patron" plan)

Selling subscriptions and memberships

Both subscriptions and memberships are sold in the same way. You create a product in Subsail, and then set the price.

For memberships, you set the billing frequency (monthly, yearly, etc.) and whether to include the magazine in the membership.

For subscriptions you specify how many issues are included in the subscription (i.e. after how many issues the customer will be charged again).

Both are sold through your hosted checkout or overlay checkout, and are managed from the same place in Subsail.

Access to other platforms or content

Both subscriptions and memberships can be used to grant access to other platforms or content, like a community, newsletter, PDFs of your issues or other digital content.

You can use CSV exports, integrations or the API to sync subscriber information between platforms, using Subsail as the "source of truth" for your subscriber access level.

Magazines as part of memberships and subscriptions

Every issue that is added to a subscription and memberships is manageable within Subsail, using simple lists of "who is owed this issue" and various export options for fulfilment.

When you set a new release date for an issue, Subsail will automatically add it to all memberships who have an active billing period on that date. (Subscriptions are billed specifically around issue release, so they always include them.)