Yes, community features are built into Podia and available on all plans, including the 30-day free trial.

You can learn more about what’s included on each plan here: www.podia.com/pricing

Podia’s community features let you keep your audience and your content in one place.

Unlike many community platforms that require separate websites or logins, Podia gives your customers a single account where they can access both your community and the products they’ve purchased.

Depending on your Podia plan, you can add assistants to help you manage your community.

Here are the limits for each Podia plan:

Every community includes a default General space that’s open to everyone in your account and automatically followed by all members.

You can rename this space, change its settings, and create additional spaces based on how you want to organize your account.

When creating new spaces, it helps to think about a few key things: what kinds of conversations you want to encourage, who should have access to each space, and whether the space should be public or private.

Spaces can be organized around discussion topics, or used to control access to specific content — for example, creating exclusive spaces for higher-tier plans or specific products.

Keep in mind that access is managed at the space level, not the individual post level, and each post can only belong to one space.

We recommend creating broader spaces that can support multiple related discussion topics. For example, a space called Animals may be more flexible than creating separate spaces for Cats and Dogs.

That said, if you need the same post to appear in more than one space, you can recreate the post in each space where you’d like it to appear.

When a new space is created, anyone with access to that space can view it and choose to follow it for notifications.

If the space is set as a default space, all members with access will automatically follow it.

We recommend making an introductory post in any new space so members know what it’s for and feel encouraged to participate.

If a space is deleted, all posts and replies within that space will be permanently removed and will no longer be accessible.

You can customize each space’s settings to control who can create posts, whether that’s allowing members to participate or limiting posting to admins only for announcements and updates.

You can also pin important posts to keep them at the top of the space so they’re easy for members to find.

By default, all community plans are displayed on your Plans page. Here's how to edit your plans page.

If you’d like separate sales experiences for different plans, you can create custom pages and link each one to a specific plan’s checkout. This allows you to design unique sales pages for different audiences or offers.

Yes, you can easily control access options for each space.

You will be able to add specific members to a private space and limit space access to members on specific products/events/plans.

If your community feed appears empty with no posts showing up, this guide will help you understand why and how to fix it.

If your home feed is empty even though you’ve published posts, it likely means you’re not following the spaces where those posts were shared.

Your home feed only displays posts from spaces you follow. To fix this:

If a member is logged in but not seeing the posts they expect on their home feed, here are a few things to check:

Are members saying they haven't gotten any emails about your recent posts? Or maybe it's you who hasn't gotten one?

Here are some steps you can take to determine what might be causing this!

Ask the member to check their email preferences. They may have turned off receiving post notifications.

This help doc will share how they can manage these preferences in their account.

These notifications will be set by default for your members for each space (but they can always change them later if they want and unsubscribe/re-subscribe).

You'll want to make sure your members and/or you are following the space you want to receive notifications for.

Members will only get notifications if they are following the space.

They can do this by logging in and clicking on Browse from the left-hand menu. From there, they can view the spaces they are following and those they are not.

Yes! Members can upload files and images directly to Podia when creating a new post or embed links.

They can also decide to embed from over 1,900 websites, including Google Drive, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, TypeForm, and many, many more!

Yes. Members simply need to access the Products tab on their home feed to view any products they have access to.

Members can interact with each other by replying to posts and comments, reacting to content, and participating in discussions throughout your community.

Depending on your community privacy settings, they may also be able to start direct chats with other members.

If a member is removed or their subscription is canceled, their existing posts and comments will remain in the community.

However, clicking their profile will lead to a Page not found error unless they rejoin the community.

By default, members can view a list of other people in your community.

Here’s how to adjust your community privacy settings if you’d prefer to hide the full member list from members.

While you can offer both payment plans and communities by connecting a Stripe account, we do not support PayPal as a payment option for both. We have no plans to add it at this time. Why is that?

The short answer: PayPal’s API — what we use to make payments work — does not offer this functionality in a way where it would function properly for creators. Despite a lot of work on our end, we’ve ultimately realized that we wouldn’t be able to offer an experience for you or your customers that’s up to our standards.

The longer answer: We’ve spent hundreds of hours working with PayPal to get it to work for payment plans and communities. While we’ve gotten it to “work”, we’ve decided not to release it because of all of the future problems it could cause for both you and your customers.

It felt very un-Podia for us to release this feature, as we pride ourselves in keeping Podia simple to use and in making sure it “just works” for you and your customers — especially when it comes to billing.

Here are the issues and what would be required to make PayPal work. Let’s take a look at payment plans:

Those are the big drawbacks, but also it will slow down every other future payment-related update we want to add to your account moving forward.

In the end, PayPal makes the entire payment plan and subscription payments process a mess, and we feel as if it would cause a lot more harm than good for our creators.

We know this is frustrating for some of you, because Stripe is not available in your country yet. The good thing is is that Stripe is now available in 44 countries around the world, and new countries are being added every year. It’s only a matter of time before it’s available everywhere. You could also explore Stripe Atlas if you're in a non-supported country.
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If you're on the lookout for Stripe and PayPal alternatives, consider an external checkout. You could set up an automation to enroll via Zapier, or manually add your customers.

If a member cancels before their yearly subscription ends, they won’t automatically receive a refund for the unused time.

This follows industry standards since yearly plans usually come with a discounted rate.

If you want to issue them a partial refund, you will need to do it directly through Stripe. Log in to your Stripe account and issue a partial refund through there.

To avoid confusion, we recommend clearly outlining your refund policy on your terms page.

Following industry standards, members receive an email notification after their monthly or yearly payment is processed.

They won’t receive a reminder before the charge goes through, but you can enable reminder directly through your Stripe account.

Whatever price people are charged when they sign up for the plan is their price for life. This is an industry standard and also how Stripe functions automatically.

You won't be able to change or lower the price for a member unless you or they cancel their subscription and sign up for a new one.

We recommend that all Podia users to create their own terms & conditions for their own businesses.

These will display during checkout and are a perfect spot to list any refund policies you may have. You can find out how to set those up here: Customize your Terms & Conditions/Privacy Policy

Plan change behavior depends on the type of change being made.

If a member switches between two different plans, the change happens immediately. If they move to a higher-priced plan, they’ll be charged the prorated difference for the time remaining in their billing cycle. If they switch to a lower-priced plan, any unused amount they’ve already paid will be added to their account as credit.

If a member switches from a monthly plan to an annual plan, the change will also take effect right away, and they’ll be charged the prorated difference.

If they switch from an annual plan to a monthly plan, the change won’t happen immediately. Instead, it will take effect at the end of the current annual billing cycle, and they’ll remain on their annual plan until then.

The lightning bolt signifies new activity in a space. This could be the creation of a new space itself, or a post inside the space. It is followed by a timeframe (ie, 4hr) that shows when the last update in that space was made.

Yes! If a product isn't included in a plan, members can still purchase it from your site.

If you don't want this to happen, you can consider hiding and closing the products for enrollment.