Membership.io, the new name for Searchie, is where Searchie pricing now lives: 3 plans at $49, $119 and $219 a month for Start, Grow and Scale. Paid yearly, they cost $490, $1,190 and $2,190, shown rounded as $41, $99 and $183 a month. Membership.io takes no cut of sales on its paid plans.
The pricing page stops at Scale, but Membership.io’s help center lists 2 more plans: Unlimited at $5,000 a year and Enterprise at $5,995 a year. Every plan caps uploads by total hours, 50 on Start, 250 on Grow and 500 on Scale, and deleting old videos does not give hours back. Extra hours cost $7 to $9 a month per 50.
You searched for Searchie and ended up on a site called Membership.io. Nothing went wrong. The company changed its name in 2024 and pointed the old address at the new one.
The reviews ranking under that page have not all caught up. Of the 7 on page 1 of Google when I checked, 4 quote plans Searchie stopped selling, and a fifth prices a different product that shares the name.
Below is Membership.io’s price list now, on both billing cycles. It covers the 2 plans its pricing page does not price, the upload limit that decides your tier, and what the same membership costs on Heartbeat, Podia, Circle and Kajabi.
Key Takeaways
- Searchie is Membership.io now. The company renamed in 2024, searchie.io forwards to the new site, and the 3 main plan prices did not change.
- 3 plans on the pricing page. Start, Grow and Scale cost $49, $119 and $219 a month, or $490, $1,190 and $2,190 a year.
- 2 plans off it. The help center prices Unlimited at $5,000 a year and Enterprise at $5,995 a year, and neither price appears on the pricing page.
- Hours decide your tier. Start includes 50 upload hours in total, deleting videos frees none, and each extra 50 hours costs $9 a month.
- No cut, still card fees. Membership.io takes 0% of member payments, and Stripe still takes 2.9% plus 30 cents per US card payment.
- Budget for email. Membership.io sends no marketing campaigns, so a newsletter or an email sequence needs a separate email tool on top.
Searchie became Membership.io in 2024, and most reviews missed it
Searchie renamed itself Membership.io in 2024, announcing the change on August 9 and following it with a press release on September 5.
Same company, same software, same login. Existing users were told to keep signing in with their current email and password, and both searchie.io and searchie.io/pricing now forward to membership.io.
A renamed product is an easy trap to walk into. If you would rather spot the costlier ones before you sell anything, a free 5-day email course covers the 5 mistakes that cost solo sellers the most: the Online Selling Mistakes Challenge.
The reviews ranking under Membership.io’s own pricing page are a mixed bag. I read all 7 on page 1:
- A review last updated in 2021 says Searchie costs $99 a month, with no plan names at all.
- A comparison marked as updated in April 2026 says plans start at $8 a month and that there is a free plan. Neither is true today.
- A review last updated in 2024 says you can start for $7 a month on a Creator plan, and that upload hours are capped each month. The Creator plan is gone, and the hours are an all-time total.
- Another 2024 review lists a $0 Creator plan and says pricing starts at $29 a month. Its Start and Grow prices are right.
- G2’s Searchie page describes a different product altogether: an AI video interviewing tool for hiring, priced per interview.
- The 2 current reviews name Membership.io and get the 3 main plans right. Neither prints a price for the 2 plans above Scale.
None of the 4 older reviews mentions the new name.
The prices they quote were real once.
The archived December 2023 pricing page shows a Creator plan at $8 a month for the content library only, a link to a separate free plan, and Start, Grow and Scale at $49, $119 and $219 a month. The August 2024 copy, taken between the rename announcement and the press release, shows the same numbers. So the 3 plans you can buy today have cost the same since at least December 2023. Since the rename, the 2 cheap options have gone and the 3 main prices have stayed put.
Membership.io plans and prices on monthly and yearly billing
Membership.io sells 3 self-serve plans, Start at $49 a month, Grow at $119 and Scale at $219, or $490, $1,190 and $2,190 if you pay for the year.
Every one of them includes unlimited members, the AI chat and Copilot tools, and 0% transaction fees.
Start costs $490 a year for 1 Hub and 50 upload hours, Grow $1,190 for 3 Hubs and 250 hours, Scale $2,190 for 10 Hubs and 500 hours, and Unlimited $5,000 for 100 Hubs and 5,000 hours.
| Plan | Monthly | Yearly | Hubs | Upload hours | Team seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | $49 | $490 | 1 | 50 | Owner only |
| Grow | $119 | $1,190 | 3 | 250 | 5 |
| Scale | $219 | $2,190 | 10 | 500 | 10 |
| Unlimited | Yearly only | $5,000 | 100 | 5,000 | 100 |
The yearly view on the pricing page shows $41, $99 and $183 a month. Those are rounded. $490 spread over 12 months is $40.83, and $2,190 is $182.50. Membership.io’s pricing FAQ says every price on the site is rounded to the nearest whole number, so an invoice can differ slightly from the card.
Paying yearly gets you 2 months free on each plan. That is $98 off Start, $238 off Grow and $438 off Scale, compared with 12 monthly payments.
A Hub, in Membership.io’s own words, is a public or private space where you deliver 1 digital product, usually 1 course, membership or coaching program. So the Hub count is the number of separate programs you can run, each with its own branding and members.
Upload hours set your plan, and deleting videos gives none back
Upload hours are the limit that decides which Membership.io plan you need, because every plan allows unlimited members but caps the total hours you upload: 50 on Start, 250 on Grow and 500 on Scale. The cap is a lifetime total. Membership.io’s plan guide calls them “all-time limits” and says deleting content “will not free up more hours.” Its pricing FAQ adds that storage does not renew each month.
Customers notice. In a Trustpilot review titled “Leaving Membership.io after six years”, a customer who says they spent over $10,000 on the platform wrote that they had to ask Searchie for more hours many times because “DELETING FILES DOESN’T FREE UP SPACE.”
When you run out, 50 more hours cost $9 a month on Start, $8 on Grow and $7 on Scale. Searchie charged the same add-on prices in 2023, and they are cheap enough that hours alone do not justify Grow.
On yearly billing, Start plus 4 extra blocks gives you 250 hours for $76.83 a month, which is $40.83 for the plan and $36 for the hours. Grow gives you the same 250 hours for $99.17. The reasons to move up to Grow are the team seats and the extra Hubs.
I am probably the wrong person to worry about this cap. “Videos aren’t my thing,” I told my email list after a 1-minute demo video for the homepage of CartMango, the checkout platform I run, took me 8 hours to make. The voiceover is not even mine. It is an AI voice, and I joked that I wished I sounded half as good.
At that pace, 50 hours of finished video is a very long way off.
If you plan to import years of recorded coaching calls, webinars or podcast episodes, add up those hours before you pick a plan, because every one of them counts against the same total. And if you would rather keep long recordings somewhere else, our roundup of video hosting for courses compares 21 places to put them.
The 2 plans Membership.io’s pricing page does not price
Above Scale, Membership.io has 2 more plans whose prices appear only in its help center: Unlimited at $5,000 a year and Enterprise at $5,995 a year. Unlimited is sold yearly and includes up to 5,000 upload hours, 100 Hubs and 100 team members. Enterprise costs $5,995 a year and includes everything in Unlimited plus a done-for-you mobile app package.
The pricing page itself stops at Scale. Under the 3 plan cards sits an enterprise section with a demo button and no number, and the Unlimited plan is not named there at all.
The AI summary Google shows for this search lists Start and Grow, then says only that higher custom or enterprise tiers exist, with no price for Scale, Unlimited or Enterprise. None of the 7 reviews below it prints the Unlimited or Enterprise price either.
Unlimited becomes the cheaper route at about 2,200 hours. Scale costs $2,190 a year, and each extra 50 hours adds $84 a year at $7 a month, so reaching 2,200 hours on Scale would cost $5,046 against Unlimited’s flat $5,000. It is also the cheapest listed plan with more than 10 Hubs. The help center also offers to build a custom plan for anyone who needs more than 10 Hubs or 500 hours.
What Start leaves out: a teammate, a second Hub and marketing email
Membership.io’s Start plan is built for 1 person running 1 program: it has 1 Hub, no team seats beyond the Hub owner, and no marketing email. The first teammate you add, a virtual assistant or an editor, moves you to Grow at $119 a month or $1,190 a year. The Start card on the pricing page does not spell this out. The help center’s plan table does, listing Start’s team as “Only Hub Owner.”
A second branded program works the same way.
You can run several programs inside 1 Hub using segments, and Membership.io’s own guide says that is fine for similar products sold to the same people. A separate Hub, with its own look and its own members, starts on Grow.
The 2 official pages disagree on custom domains. The pricing card lists “Custom Branding & Domains” as a Grow feature, while the help center puts custom Hub domains on Start and adds custom email domains on Grow. If a domain on Start matters to you, ask Membership.io support before you buy.
Membership.io is not an email tool. Its help center says it handles transactional and basic member emails, such as welcome messages, password resets and Hub announcements, and that automated sequences, broadcasts and newsletters need a separate email service. Kit connects to it directly, and any email tool with a Zapier app connects that way, BirdSend included (I run BirdSend too).
Transaction fees: 0% to Membership.io, 2.9% plus 30 cents to Stripe
Membership.io takes no transaction fee on its paid plans, but Stripe still charges its card fee on every payment, which is 2.9% plus 30 cents on a US card according to Stripe’s pricing page. International cards add 1.5%, and currency conversion adds 1%. On a $30 monthly membership, Stripe keeps $1.17 of each payment and Membership.io keeps nothing.
Membership.io runs payments through a Stripe account connected to it. If your current Stripe account was connected to another platform before, Stripe may mark it ineligible and you open a new one. If it is in use elsewhere, Stripe creates a separate account just for the Membership.io connection. Either way, your membership income can land in a different Stripe account from the rest of your sales.
Moving paying members over from another platform is not automatic either. Stripe copies customer names and emails between accounts but not their subscriptions or saved cards, so Membership.io assigns a migration handler who moves active subscriptions by hand.
You do not have to take payments inside Membership.io at all. It can open a Hub to anyone added to a chosen Kit list or tag, and it connects to other carts through Zapier. CartMango adds each buyer to Kit automatically, so on paper that chain works: the buyer pays on the checkout, lands in Kit, and gets Hub access. Test it during the trial, including what happens when someone cancels.
Searchie pricing next to Heartbeat, Podia, Circle and Kajabi
Searchie pricing, now Membership.io pricing, comes out cheaper than the entry plans of Heartbeat, Podia, Circle and Kajabi once a membership is making money, because Membership.io takes no cut of member payments.
At $2,000 a month in member payments, Membership.io Start costs $40.83 a month in platform fees, against $129 for Circle Professional, $142 for Podia Mover, $143 for Kajabi Basic and $159.83 for Heartbeat Build with its video add-on.
| Plan | Monthly, billed yearly | Sales cut | Key limit | At $2,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Membership.io Start | $40.83 | 0% | 50 upload hours in total | $40.83 |
| Heartbeat Build | $40.83, plus $19 for video | 5% | No video hosting without the add-on | $159.83 |
| Podia Mover | $42 | 5% | 100 email subscribers | $142 |
| Circle Professional | $89 | 2% | 3 admins | $129 |
| Kajabi Basic | $143 | 0% on Kajabi Payments, 2% on other processors | 5 products | $143 |
| CartMango Platinum | $2.50 | 0% | Not yet, planned for October 2026 (member area) | $2.50, checkout only |
Card fees are left out of every row. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on a US card on the Membership.io, Heartbeat, Podia and Circle plans, Kajabi Payments charges the same on Kajabi Basic, and CartMango sellers pay Stripe or PayPal their usual fee directly.
CartMango sits in the table at $30 a year because that is the plan its course hosting and community are planned for, in October 2026. Today CartMango is a checkout with no cut and no member area, so all 5 other plans here do a job it cannot do yet.
Membership.io’s $40.83 also buys no email marketing. Kajabi Basic includes unlimited marketing emails and a website, and Podia Mover includes email for up to 100 subscribers, while a Membership.io member area needs a separate email tool on top. For the full breakdown on each rival, see Heartbeat pricing, Podia pricing, Circle.so pricing and Kajabi pricing.
Which Membership.io plan to choose
Pick the Membership.io plan by team size and Hub count first, and by upload hours second, since extra hours are cheap to add.
- Start, $490 a year: you run 1 program on your own, and your recordings fit in 50 hours or close enough that a $9 add-on covers the gap.
- Grow, $1,190 a year: you need a teammate, a second or third Hub, or content that only some members can see.
- Scale, $2,190 a year: you run up to 10 Hubs with up to 10 people, or you need the API and webhooks to connect other tools.
- Unlimited, $5,000 a year: you need more than 10 Hubs, or your library is heading past about 2,200 hours.
- Enterprise, $5,995 a year: everything in Unlimited, plus a done-for-you mobile app.
Whichever you pick, the 14-day free trial runs on Grow, and it switches to the plan you chose at signup when it ends unless you cancel first. If you are still deciding whether a membership platform is the right kind of tool, our look at the best course platform prices 6 others by what each keeps per sale.
FAQ
Is Searchie the same as Membership.io?
Yes. Searchie renamed itself Membership.io in 2024. The software, the plans and your login carried over, and searchie.io now forwards to membership.io. The Start, Grow and Scale prices are the ones Searchie charged before the rename, and the rename announcement quotes co-founder Stu McLaren, whose membership training program, The Membership Experience, comes from the same company.
Does Searchie have a free plan?
Not anymore. Searchie used to offer a free plan and an $8 a month Creator plan for its content library, and neither appears on the current pricing page. What you get instead is a 14-day free trial of the Grow plan, which turns into a paid plan unless you cancel.
How much is Searchie per year?
$490 for Start, $1,190 for Grow and $2,190 for Scale, which is 10 months of each monthly price. The help center also lists Unlimited at $5,000 a year and Enterprise at $5,995. Extra upload hours are billed monthly on top, at $7 to $9 per 50 hours.
Does Membership.io charge transaction fees?
No, not on its paid plans. You still pay your payment processor. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on a US card, plus 1.5% on international cards, and those fees come out of each payment before it reaches you.
Is the Wisdom AI chat extra?
No. Wisdom, Searchie’s AI chat, is listed under AI Tools on the Start plan, so every plan includes it.
Can you cancel Membership.io anytime?
Yes. Its pricing FAQ says you can cancel or change plans at any time, and its billing help says you can ask support to pause your plan instead. If you paid for a year, check the refund terms before cancelling partway through.
Paying for the member area and the checkout separately
Searchie pricing has not changed since at least 2023. What you end up paying depends on your upload hours, your team size, how many Hubs you run, the email tool you add and Stripe’s card fee.
If a hosted member area is what you need today, Membership.io, Heartbeat, Podia, Circle and Kajabi are where to look. If what you mostly need is to take the payment and keep every buyer in your email tool, CartMango does that with no cut on any sale.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
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