If you are charging for access to a community, exclusive content, or a premium feature set, you have two real options: pay a hosted platform a cut of your revenue forever, or own the stack.
Platforms like Circle, Kajabi, and Mighty Networks get you live in under an hour. The catch: most take 2-5% of revenue on top of a monthly fee, your branding lives inside their interface, and if they change pricing, you absorb it.
Building your own gives you full control and zero platform cut. The setup cost used to be a week of work on auth, subscriptions, gating, and email before you touched the actual product. With a Next.js SaaS starter kit, most of that is already done.
Use Circle, Kajabi, or a similar platform when:
Build on your own stack when:
If you are in the "build" camp, a Next.js SaaS boilerplate already handles the hard parts.
A working membership site has four core requirements. Here is what comes pre-built vs. what you write yourself:
Authentication -- pre-built. Members need accounts, sessions, and password resets. The boilerplate ships with JWT-based auth including register, login, token refresh, and email verification. See JWT auth in Next.js App Router for the full pattern.
Stripe subscriptions -- pre-built. You need to charge monthly or annually and revoke access when someone cancels. Stripe subscriptions are wired up with checkout session creation, webhook sync that updates the user's plan in the database, and a self-serve customer portal. You do not write a single line of Stripe boilerplate.
Content gating -- you write one function. This is a service-layer check that reads the user's current plan and throws a 403 if they are not subscribed. Because it lives in the service layer, you can reuse it across any route or page.
Email -- pre-built. Welcome emails, payment failure notices, and renewal reminders run through Resend and react-email templates already in the repo. Add a WelcomeMember template, wire it to the subscription webhook, and you are done.
Content gating looks like this:
// modules/content/content.service.ts
async function getExclusiveContent(userId: string) {
const user = await userRepo.findById(userId);
if (user.plan !== 'member') throw new HttpError(403, 'Membership required');
return contentRepo.findAll();
}Call it from your route handler. The route stays thin, the check is one line, and the pattern works identically for gating API endpoints, page sections, file downloads, or any other resource.
For server-rendered pages, pass the subscription status down from a server component and conditionally show gated content or an upgrade prompt -- no client-side flash, no extra fetch.
A hosted platform at 5% revenue share on 200 members at $20/month costs you $200 every single month. Over two years: $4,800 paid to the platform.
With your own stack, you pay Stripe's standard processing fee -- roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. On $4,000 MRR, that is about $145. Nothing else goes anywhere. As membership grows, the platform cut would have grown with it; your Stripe fee stays proportional.
The boilerplate is a one-time cost. The math improves at every membership tier above your first paid member.
With auth and payments already wired:
Most of your time goes to the content itself and the onboarding experience -- which is exactly where it should go.
If you are charging for access to something you create -- a community, a course library, a premium tool -- you should own the stack. Get the Next.js SaaS boilerplate and launch your membership site this weekend. Auth, Stripe, and email are already handled. You focus on the content. You keep the revenue.