Most designers reach for Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy — we went a layer deeper and own the whole checkout.
The Design Stack membership runs on Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro) connected directly to Stripe, hosted on WordPress.
No platform fees beyond Stripe’s standard 2.9% + 30¢. No third-party dashboard to log into. No lock-in.
The tradeoff is setup complexity — you need a WordPress install, the PMPro plugin, and a Stripe account in live mode with the keys wired up correctly. But once it’s running, the checkout lives on your own domain, the confirmation email comes from your own system, and member access is gated at the page level without touching any code.
The thing that trips most people up is the gateway mode switch — PMPro defaults to Stripe test mode and you have to manually flip it to live, then run a real $0.50 test transaction to confirm the webhook is firing.
Stripe’s dashboard makes this easy: you can see the exact event payload, the webhook response, and whether PMPro acknowledged it.
If you’re a designer building any kind of digital product business, understanding this stack means you’re not paying a platform 5–10% of every sale forever.
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