Communities and the creators who build them are at the heart of what we do at Discord. We want to create space for people to find belonging, and the creators, admins, and moderators who build and run the communities where people can find that are central to our mission. 

We’ve been hard at work over the past couple of years building more tools for communities to better serve members with new features like Stage Channels and more recently a new feature Scheduled Events. We’ve also been increasing efforts to help reduce spam and will be releasing even more tools for moderators to help run and manage a community easier. 

As we’ve been chatting with more and more creators we wanted to ensure that they can not only build, but maintain and sustain these amazing communities. And we’re already seeing that members of these communities are willing to pay creators for the value that is created. That’s why we’re starting to build new tools to make this monetization process more seamless so communities can have direct ways within Discord to offer premium experiences. 

Introducing: Premium Memberships on Discord

Today, we’re excited to announce a brand-new feature that we’re currently testing with a small group of communities: Premium Memberships. Yep, you read that right! With Premium Memberships, creators and community owners will have the ability to gate part or all of their server behind a paid subscription. This is one of the most requested features from creators and we’re already seeing many of our communities offering this type of experience through third parties. We’re excited to now allow a select handful to test this experience natively on Discord. 

Premium Memberships introduce a streamlined and simple way to offer premium experiences, content, and interactions within your community. You can set it up, devise tiered perks, and view analytics on member engagement directly on Discord. And with a quick and seamless process members can subscribe and immediately access benefits with payments and support all happening directly within Discord. 

While we are currently only rolling this out as a closed experiment, we’re really excited by the feedback we’ve received so far and the potential for this feature, and others like it, to empower users to continue to sustainably create belonging on Discord.

So, What’s Next?

Over the coming weeks, don’t be surprised if you see some of your favorite communities testing out this new feature. If you do, as always, we’d love to hear your feedback! Let us know what’s working, what’s not, and how to best make this feature live within your own communities. After all, Discord is a place for everyone to find belonging, and we believe that Premium Memberships will help communities sustainably create that belonging for the long run. Though we’re not accepting new communities into the test just yet, be on the lookout next year for more information about when and how we may expand the feature to more communities on Discord.  

As Premium Memberships evolve, we’re excited to see what creativity is sparked, how communities are strengthened, and discover ways that our communities can deliver even more value to their members using these native tools. If you have feedback or think of something that could help within your own server, let us know on our feedback site or hit us up on Twitter.