3 Ways to Sell Access to Your Discord Server

Discord servers are the foremost community platform for all types of organizations, game, company, individual, or any public figure. One of the major methods companies and individuals use to monetize their Discord server is by selling subscriptions: whether it be partial access with a role or a fully pay-to-access server.

This is how you would turn your ordinary Discord server into a recurring revenue generating business in just minutes.

Whether you're running a community server for anime fans, or a fan club of your favorite game or TV show, once it reaches a certain point in growth, activity, and success, you remain at the point of making a decision of monetizing the effort. Charging members for access can be a great way to generate revenue off of your Discord community. However, you can't just charge and manage each individual's memberships'.

Luckily for us, there's already services like Whop, Patreon, and even a built in memberships feature by Discord.

Membership Services

Step 1: Create a Discord server: You would require a Discord account to complete the server creation process. You can either create a server from scratch or use a template found online.

Step 2: Log in to your Whop account: Visit the site and login using your Discord account, Twitter, wallet, or just email.

Step 3: Create your free company on Whop: I went with the Discord community option.

Step 4: After selecting your community, Whop Bot will join your server. Go to your role settings and make sure the Whop Bot role is at the top of your roles list – or at least higher than the role you want Whop to give access to upon purchasing your membership.

Step 5: Follow the steps and create a tier! And voila, you're already done. The process is one of the smoothest I've seen compared to any other platforms.

The best part about this is that Whop is completely free to use, takes only about a 3% cut, and it has amazing and advanced features – free trial period, event logging, secure payments using Stripe or any Crypto wallet, membership types, multiple tiers, visibility, stock, and tons more.

This method is best for anyone who's serious about building a profiting company and making it an income source professionally. And that too, for the lowest cost (basically free) amongst any other services. For example, Patreon takes an over 8-12% cut with nowhere as many community & membership freedoms.

YouTube Membership Access

Another great method for content creators on YouTube to sell access to their Discord server is by using the YouTube integration for Discord with their channel memberships tier. This of course has certain limitations – starting with having a partnered & monetized YouTube channel with over 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watchtime in the last 12 months.

In your YouTube Creator Studio dashboard, navigate to Monetization > Memberships. Follow the steps and set up your tiers. Back in your Discord server, go to your server settings, find Integrations, and connect your YouTube account there. Select the tiers and the role reward for each tier and there you go.

Cut percentage for YouTube channel memberships is 70% to the creator and 30% for YouTube after cutting all the taxes and fees. That is a huge margin for them but it is to be noted that YouTube covers all transactional costs such as credit card fees, etc.

Discord's Built in Feature (Soon)

If you've been following our articles lately, you may have seen that Discord is building a built-in premium membership subscription for Discord communities.

Here's a piece of content from Discord themselves, published a few months back about this topic.

Here's what the built in Premium Membership feature looks like.

The problems with the built-in feature starts right at implementation. There is a fat 10% cut for Discord with memberships on your server. Next, this feature is far from being out for everyone yet. For months now, it has been in development and right now it is a part of a closed experiment – after being tested on a few communities, users will have access to this feature without any strings or requirements attached. When that is exactly is a difficult question to answer.

Next, because this feature is built directly into Discord, your audience cannot check out the perks, server, or content without having a Discord account. Whereas with other more broader membership services, it's easy to link to. They are available to check for everyone with a internet connection as it is found on the web.

Can I get banned by selling paid roles on my Discord server?

Ans: No, Discord themselves are promoting this feature and creating something similar of their own. It is not a punishable offense to provide Discord access in exchange for real money.

That's all for today, hope you enjoyed today's article. Make sure to join our official Discord server to discuss further on this topic or suggest new articles!