Yes! The community feature is available on all of our plans, including the 30-day free trial.

You can read more about it here: www.podia.com/pricing

Podia's Community feature allows you to have your audience and your content in the same place.

Where most other community platforms have separate logins and websites for your users, by creating a Podia Community, your audience only needs to log in once to have access to both your community and products!

You will be able to charge your members on a monthly and/or annual basis.

Stripe needs to be connected so you can set up subscription payments for your community.

You can add team members with community permissions to help you with your community.

There are several options available for customizing your community page, including adding a banner and default topic!

There are no currently extended options for customizing the look and feel of the page, such as through custom CSS.

Every Community comes with an open and default topic called General that is accessible to anyone in your community and automatically followed by everyone.

You can choose the name and setting on this default topic and add more topics if you would like.

When creating new topics, consider these 3 criteria:

Access to posts is controlled at the topic level as opposed to the post level and can only be assigned to a single topic.

When editing your topic, scroll down and check the "Default topic" box.

This ensures that members with access to the topic will automatically follow it when this option is enabled.
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We encourage you to find an over-arching topic that would cover multiple topics per post. For example, try using a topic with the name "Animals" as opposed to two separate ones like "Cats" and "Dogs".

That said, if you need to share the same post on more than one topic you can simply re-create it in the second topic.

When a new topic is added, everyone who has access can view and follow the topic for notifications. If the topic is set to "default", all members that have access.

We encourage you to post on any newly created topic to introduce your members to your new topic.

If a topic is deleted, all posts on that topic will be permanently removed and the Community will no longer be able to view any posts or replies on that topic.

You can customize the settings for each topic to allow members to post or restrict posting so only you, as the admin, can share updates.

You can also use the Pin feature to surface your most important posts at the top of the topic to all of your members.

Yes! You can control the privacy for each topic.

You will be able to add specific community members to private topics and limit topic access to members on specific plans.

Only those who are part of a subscription plan will be able to be added to a topic.

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 topics where those posts were shared.

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

If a community 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 be default for your members for each topic (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 topic you want to receive notifications for.

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

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

If you want members of a certain plan to automatically follow a topic, you will can edit that topic and make sure you turn it into a default topic.

Yes! Members can upload directly 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!

Absolutely! They can access from their customer menu and swap bettwen community and products.

Members are able to communicate with each other in the comments section of your posts. At this time, we do not support member to member messaging.

If a community member is manually removed, or their subscription cancels, their posts and comments will remain. Clicking on their profile, however, will direct them to a "Page not found" error until they resubscribe.

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 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

Changing the URL of your community can be done directly from the Site builder.

Yes! If a product isn't included in a subscription 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.