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About this tool
How many paying members you need after platform and processing fees to cover monthly production costs, plus churn replacement and time to get there.
Break-even membership count is your monthly production cost divided by what one member is actually worth after fees, where net per member equals price multiplied by (1 minus the platform rate minus the processing rate) minus the flat processing charge. This calculator blends several tiers by the share of members on each, then adds the churn replacements you must recruit every month just to stand still. Built for creators launching a membership and deciding whether the tier prices they picked can ever cover the work.
Open Break Even Subscribers Calculator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
Percentage and flat charges are both applied to the gross pledge, so the net figure is the one that lands.
A share-weighted average member value, not a guess based on the middle tier.
Shows the replacements per month needed to hold the number, which most launch plans forget.
Divide your monthly costs by the net value of one member and round up. At 40,000 of monthly costs and an average member worth 174 after fees, that is 230 members. Raise the average pledge and the number falls steeply.
Take the price, subtract the platform's percentage and the processor's percentage, then subtract the flat per-transaction charge. A 199 pledge with an 8% platform fee, 2.9% processing and a flat 3 leaves 174.31 — about 87.6% of the pledge.
The flat per-transaction charge is the same whatever the pledge. On a 999 tier a flat 3 is 0.3% of the pledge; on a 49 tier it is over 6%, on top of the percentage fees. Very low tiers can end up returning almost nothing after fees.
Churn is the share of members who cancel each month. At 5% monthly churn and 230 members you lose about 12 a month, so you must recruit 12 replacements before any growth at all. Growth targets should always be stated as net new after churn.
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