Publishers building paid communities face a common setup question: how do you connect your membership management tool to your content platform?
With tchop, the answer is usually: quickly.
tchop integrates with Memberful and Outseta out of the box. Both are Stripe-native membership platforms used by thousands of publishers for subscription management, member portals, and renewal workflows. The integrations are live and in use by tchop customers today.
But Memberful and Outseta are two tools among many. Publishers run Bloomerang, Wild Apricot, Neon One, MembershipWorks, and others — often because they have been on that platform for years and have no reason to switch. tchop’s open API means connecting a different tool is a matter of days, not a development project.
Why this matters for publishers
Your membership tool and your community platform do different jobs. The membership tool handles billing, subscriber records, and renewals. tchop handles the experience — content, communication, and the community layer where your subscribers actually spend time.
Treating them as separate systems connected by an integration is the right model. It means you can switch or upgrade either side without rebuilding the other.
Publishers who already run Memberful can connect tchop today. Those on Outseta get the same direct path. Everyone else gets an open API that speaks to any platform that exposes a standard webhook or REST endpoint — which is every serious membership tool on the market.
What the connection does
Once a membership tool connects to tchop, the flow is straightforward:
A subscriber joins or upgrades through your membership tool’s checkout. That event triggers tchop to grant or update access in real time. The subscriber opens the tchop app and finds the content and community that matches their membership tier. Renewals, cancellations, and plan changes propagate back the same way.
Your membership tool owns the billing relationship. tchop owns the experience. Neither gets in the way of the other.
A note on the membership tool market
We looked at seven tools commonly used by publishers: Bloomerang ($25/mo), Join It ($29), MembershipWorks ($35), Outseta ($47), Memberful ($49), Wild Apricot ($78), and Neon One ($109). They vary on transaction fees, member caps, and whether they include a built-in CRM.
The short version: Outseta has the lowest transaction fee (2%) and is worth serious consideration for growing membership programs. Memberful is the most mature choice for publishers who want a proven tool with a direct tchop integration. Wild Apricot’s transaction pricing — 20% of the monthly fee — gets expensive fast.
But if you are already on one of the others, or planning to be, that is fine too. tchop connects.
Getting started
If you are running Memberful or Outseta, the integration is ready. If you are on a different platform, talk to us — in most cases we can have it connected within a sprint.
