Methodology and disclosures

Solo creators and small teams starting, improving, or moving a paid membership: coaches, educators, community builders, writers, podcasters, and video creators. It is not built for enterprise associations, universities, or corporate communities, whose procurement, security, and governance needs are genuinely different. If that is you, this tool will give you a confident answer to the wrong question.

We research platforms that are genuinely built for recurring memberships. A platform only enters the recommendation pool when two objective conditions hold: at least one plan has a price we read on the vendor’s own page, and no more than 2 of its capabilities are unknown to us. Without a verified price we cannot tell you what it costs; with too many unknowns we cannot tell you what it does. Either way, a guess dressed as a recommendation is worse than an honest gap.

Right now 42 platforms are researched and 33 are eligible to be recommended. 9 were researched and deliberately left out; the reasons are published. No platform is ever added to reach a round number.

Every price, fee, limit, and feature comes from the platform’s own pricing page, product pages, help centre, or developer documentation. Third-party articles are used only to spot questions worth checking, never as the source of a fact. Each fact stores the source it came from and the date it was checked, and both are shown on the platform pages.

Where a platform does not publish something, we say so rather than filling the gap. Payment-processing rates are the common case: many platforms publish their own cut but not the processor’s, so those figures are labelled as estimates in the cost breakdown and are never presented as the platform’s published number.

• Supported
• Partially supported
• Add-on required
• Higher plan required
• Third-party integration
• Not supported
• Unknown

An unknown capability is dropped from the scoring maths entirely and its weight is spread across the others, so a gap in our research never quietly marks a platform down. There is a real difference between “we checked and it cannot” and “we have not checked”, and the scoring respects it.

Anything you mark as a must-have is checked against the specific plan you would be on, not the platform’s best plan. A platform that cannot do it at all is removed from the running and listed as ruled out, with the reason. A platform that can do it only on a higher plan or with a paid add-on stays in, and the extra cost is added to its estimate.

Everything else is a weighted preference. Preferences shift the ranking; they never eliminate anyone.

Certainty comes before score

Platforms are sorted into three groups before any score is compared. First, those that verifiably cover every must-have. Then those where at least one is verifiably limited. Last, those where we could not verify one at all. A platform from a lower group never outranks one from a higher group, however well it scores on cost or features.

This matters because must-have coverage is only 8% of the score. Without this rule, a platform we could not confirm could win on price and use-case fit and be presented as your best match, which would be the most damaging thing this tool could do. If nothing in the top group exists, the report says so and shows the closest options with the open questions named.

We split that total in two, because the halves behave differently. The recurring bill is what the platform invoices you whether or not anyone subscribes: the plan, add-ons, and per-member charges. Your stated budget is checked against that. Revenue fees are taken out of what members pay you and scale with success. Checking a budget against the combined figure would mark every platform down for payment processing you would pay anywhere.

We pick the cheapest plan that meets your must-haves and holds your member count, and we show which plan that is. This is where a $9 plan with a 10% cut turns out to cost more than a $99 plan with 2.9%, which is the single most useful thing this tool does.

Surviving platforms are scored across eight dimensions. These are the starting weights; your stated priorities and how much ownership and discovery matter to you adjust them before anything is scored.

The result is a score out of 100. We show it, but we lead with a plain label, because a precise-looking percentage implies a precision that no fit score has. 75 and above is a strong fit, 58 to 74 is partial, below that is weak. If the best available option does not reach 58, the report says so plainly instead of dressing up a poor match.

1. Verifiably covering every must-have, where the others could not.
2. A clearly higher overall fit score, meaning a gap of more than 1 point.
3. Covering more of your must-haves outright, without an add-on or a plan upgrade.
4. The lower estimated monthly cost at your own member count and price.
5. The more complete verified data record.
6. The more recently verified platform data.
7. Alphabetical order, so the result is stable rather than dependent on list position.

Scores closer together than 1 point count as tied, because a difference of a few hundredths is not real precision and both would display as the same number anyway. When that happens the rules below it decide, so a gap you cannot see never settles your recommendation. The report tells you which rule separated your best match from the runner-up.

AI does exactly one job: turning your description into structured fields, which you then see and correct. It never scores a platform, never ranks anything, never chooses a winner, and never supplies a platform fact. Every number and feature claim comes from the maintained dataset.

If the AI reader is unavailable, a deterministic keyword reader takes over and the page tells you it did. The step-by-step path does not use AI at all and always works. Your description is not stored on our servers, is not sent to analytics, and is not retained by the model provider on our behalf.

Pricing and fees are expected to be re-checked within 45 days; slower-moving descriptive facts within 180 days. A weekly data-watch run flags records that are past those windows or whose source pages appear to have changed. Nothing is published automatically: a person confirms every price and feature change against the official page before it ships.

• Prices are in US dollars and reflect US-facing pricing pages. Regional pricing, taxes, and currency conversion will change your real total.
• Payment-processing rates are estimates wherever a platform does not publish them, and your negotiated rate may differ.
• Ease of setup and technical flexibility are DD42 editorial ratings, not vendor claims. The reasoning behind each is published on the platform page.
• We cover platforms suited to solo creators and small teams. Enterprise community platforms are deliberately out of scope.
• A platform can change its pricing the day after we check it. The verification date on every page tells you how fresh the figure is.

If a price, fee, or feature here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than leave someone acting on a stale number. Send the platform name, the field, and a link to the official page that shows the correct value to DD42. Corrections to pricing are prioritised over everything else, and the verification date on the platform page updates when the fix ships.