Kajabi Memberships Explained: Is a Model Like The Nest Right for Your Business?

Memberships come up in nearly every strategy conversation I have with clients, usually somewhere around the question "should I build a course, or should I build something people pay for monthly?" It's a genuinely good question, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you're trying to create and how you want to run your business day to day.

Rather than explain memberships in the abstract, I thought it would be more useful to walk you through how one actually works, using my own membership, The Nest, as the worked example.

What a Kajabi membership actually is

At its simplest, a membership is a space that people pay to access on an ongoing basis, usually monthly or annually, rather than paying once for a fixed piece of content. Kajabi handles memberships through the same product structure as courses, but the content inside is generally designed to be added to over time rather than completed in one go.

The key distinction that matters most is the difference between drip content and evergreen content. Drip content releases on a schedule, week by week, similar to a course. Evergreen content is simply available, all at once, for members to explore in whatever order suits them. The Nest is built entirely on the evergreen model, and that was a very deliberate choice.

Why I chose evergreen over drip

I've watched plenty of practitioners build membership products on a drip schedule, releasing something new every single week, and I've also watched how quickly that pace becomes a source of pressure rather than joy. The content calendar starts to run the business owner rather than the other way round.

For The Nest, I wanted the opposite experience, both for my members and for myself. Members can drop in for five minutes or five hours, work through the resources in whatever order feels right for where they are, and never feel like they're falling behind a schedule they didn't choose. And I can add genuinely valuable new content when I have something worth adding, rather than because a calendar is demanding it.

What to weigh up before choosing a membership model

If you're wondering whether a membership would suit your own business, a few honest questions are worth sitting with.

Do you have, or can you build, a genuine library of ongoing value, rather than one single transformation that's better delivered as a course with a clear beginning and end? Memberships tend to suit practitioners with an evolving body of work, rather than a single, linear teaching.

Can you sustain the model without resentment creeping in? This is the question I'd want every practitioner to ask themselves honestly. A membership that exhausts you will eventually show up in the quality of what you're offering, no matter how good your intentions were at the start.

And practically, does recurring monthly revenue suit your business rhythm better than the larger, one-off payments of a course or a premium offer? Both are entirely valid business models. The right one is simply the one that matches how you actually want to work.

Setting one up on Kajabi

The practical build itself is fairly straightforward. You'll create a product, choose the membership access type, decide whether content is drip or evergreen, and set your pricing structure, whether that's monthly, annual, or both with an incentive to choose annual. Kajabi's community features can sit alongside your membership too, if connection between members is something you'd like to build in.

The part that takes real thought isn't the technical setup, it's getting honest with yourself about what kind of ongoing relationship you actually want with the people inside it, and building the structure around that answer rather than around what you assume a membership is supposed to look like.

Curious what it looks like from the inside?

Start Here: Welcome Home is the free taster for The Nest, and it's genuinely the easiest way to see how an evergreen membership feels in practice before you decide whether to build one of your own.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a Kajabi membership and a Kajabi course? A course typically has a clear beginning, middle and end, often completed once. A membership is an ongoing relationship, paid for on a recurring basis, giving continued access to a growing or evolving body of resources.

Should my membership use drip content or evergreen content? Evergreen content suits practitioners who want members to explore freely and want a sustainable pace for themselves as the creator. Drip content suits situations where a structured, sequential journey genuinely serves the material, similar to a cohort based course.

How much should I charge for a Kajabi membership? Pricing depends heavily on the depth and ongoing value of what's inside, as well as your specific audience and niche. Many practitioner memberships sit somewhere between modest monthly access fees and higher tiered options with added support, so it's worth researching comparable offers in your specific field before settling on a figure.

Is a membership harder to maintain than a one-off course? It can be, particularly if it's built on a drip schedule that demands constant new content. An evergreen model, built with sustainability in mind from the outset, tends to be far easier to maintain over the long term.