Can I vibe code Patreon?
Membership platform: fans pay monthly for exclusive content.
The machinery — Stripe subscriptions, gated posts, member emails — is a solid weekend build, and you keep the 8-12% platform cut. What you lose is everything around the machinery: discovery, the app your members already have installed, payment-failure recovery tuned over a decade, and the psychological ease of a familiar checkout. Strong choice for an existing audience; wrong choice for finding one.
Build a self-hosted membership site. Stripe Checkout + Billing for two monthly tiers, webhook-driven membership state in my database, and magic-link email login for members. Content: markdown posts with a tier requirement; non-members see a teaser and a join button, members see everything their tier unlocks. On publish, email the members who can read it (use a transactional email API). Include a members admin table (status, tier, since), Stripe customer-portal link for self-service cancel/upgrade, and clean handling of failed payments (grace period, then lock). Next.js, deployable to Vercel.
A membership site: Stripe-powered monthly tiers, magic-link member login, gated posts by tier, and an email to members on each new post.
- Discovery and recommendations inside the platform
- Their mobile apps, notifications, and member habits
- Dunning (failed-payment recovery) tuned over years
- Cross-creator gifting/promos and trust of a known checkout
Creators pay the cut for zero-ops billing and a membership experience fans already know. The platform is the path of least resistance on both sides.
A prompt is the first move, not the whole game. Course 01 teaches you to take a prompt like this one to a shipped, working app — reviewing, correcting, and steering the agent the whole way.
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