Ternary Blog

How to Monetize a Discord Community: A Starter Plan

Jason Lee — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Discord began as a chat app for gamers and became the default home for online communities built around a hobby, a skill or a market. Many of those communities now earn money. This starter plan is for owners who have members and want a first income stream, not a list of every possible idea. For the full list, see our pillar guide on how to monetize your Discord server, and for the wider topic, our paid Discord memberships and monetization hub.

First, check that people would pay

Money follows value. Before you build anything, answer three questions:

What do members come back for? Look at which channels are busiest and which posts get the most replies.
What do they ask you for that you have not offered? Repeated requests are demand.
Who would pay first? Name five active members and ask them directly.

If nobody would miss the community, charging will not fix that. Spend a few more weeks making the free version useful.

Choose one of three starter models

Model 1: A subscription community

Put part of the server behind a paid role and charge monthly. It is the most reliable model because income repeats. When we first published this guide in December 2024, our example was Let’s Talk Investing, a trading community that sold access to its server through Ternary, with daily trading signals, market updates and educational videos for members.

You can run it with Discord’s Server Subscriptions if you are a US-based owner, or with a Stripe checkout and a tool that assigns roles. Our Discord paywall guide explains how to structure the paid channels.

Model 2: Digital products for your free members

Keep the server free and use it to sell products: e-books, templates, digital art, stock photos or recorded courses. The community is where people discover and discuss the product, which makes each launch easier. A one-time purchase can also grant a role for a buyers-only help channel.

Model 3: One-on-one coaching

If you have expertise but no product yet, sell your time. Share free advice in public channels and offer paid sessions to people who want more. Discord’s private channels and voice and video calls mean the whole relationship can stay in one place, without a separate video tool.

A four-week starter plan

Week 1: Prepare. Pick the model, write the offer in two sentences and set a price. Create the paid role and channels, or the product page.
Week 2: Pre-sell. Tell your most active members first and offer them a founding price. Their response tells you whether to continue.
Week 3: Launch. Announce to the whole server, pin the offer in a channel everyone can read, and answer every question in one thread.
Week 4: Measure. Count buyers, ask the ones who did not buy why, and decide what to change before the first renewal date.

Resist adding a second model in the first month. One clear offer that members understand earns more than three half-built ones.

Setting up the payments

If you have no server yet, creating one is free: choose Add a Server, then Create My Own or a template, name it and press Create.

For a subscription or product sold outside Discord’s own tools, Ternary connects your website, Stripe and Discord. Buyers sign in with Discord, pay through Stripe and get their role automatically; when a subscription ends, the role is removed, and every member is listed in a CRM. Basic is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% fee. You can create your account and connect Stripe yourself.

The full setup walkthrough is in set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary.

How Big Brands Use Discord for Business Growth

Jason Lee — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Big brands have huge audiences on social media but little real conversation with them. A post reaches whoever the algorithm chooses, and replies scroll away. A Discord server offers the opposite: a smaller group of the brand’s most engaged fans, talking to the brand and to each other every day. This guide covers how brands use it and how to run one well. It is part of our Discord for business and creators topic.

Why brands are on Discord

Direct engagement

Members see the channels they joined, so a brand’s announcement reaches the fans who chose to be there. Fans can reply, ask questions and talk in voice channels during events. The brand hears its community in its own words.

A place fans own together

Fans meet each other in a server. They share setups, trade tips and help newcomers. That peer activity keeps the server alive between brand posts and builds loyalty a feed cannot.

Real-time feedback

Product teams can post a question and read dozens of answers within an hour, or run a feedback channel that surfaces requests and bugs early.

Five plays brands run on Discord

Early access. Members hear about launches, restocks or betas first, in an announcements channel.
Exclusive drops. Role-exclusive channels make some offers visible only to members with a given role, such as verified customers or long-time members.
Live events. Q&As with designers or developers, watch parties and launch streams in stage or voice channels.
Loyalty roles. Roles for long-time members, top contributors or verified buyers give recognition and access at the same time.
Co-creation. Contests, fan art channels and votes on future products give fans a stake in the brand.

How to run a brand server well

Set it up for scale

Enable Community features. Discord then requires a verification level, an explicit media filter and a rules channel, and adds raid protection, rules screening and onboarding. Use onboarding questions so new members choose their interests and see only the channels they care about.

Keep the structure simple

A brand server needs fewer channels than you think: announcements, rules, introductions, general chat, help, feedback and one or two topic channels. Add more only when a topic outgrows its channel.

Staff it

Assign a community manager, moderators across time zones and subject experts. An unanswered help channel does more harm than no server at all.

Write clear rules

Short, specific rules applied consistently protect both fans and the brand’s reputation. Pin them and link them in onboarding.

Be human

Fans can tell a press release from a person. Let staff speak in their own voice, admit mistakes and thank people by name. When something goes wrong with a product, say so in the server first; fans forgive problems far more readily than silence.

Turning the server into revenue

Most brand servers are free and earn indirectly through loyalty and launches. Some add a paid membership for superfans: early access, exclusive content or members-only drops. When the purchase happens on the brand’s own website, a membership tool can link it to Discord. Ternary, for example, signs buyers in with Discord, takes payment through Stripe, assigns the member role automatically, removes it on cancellation and records each customer in a CRM.

Measuring results

Watch weekly active members, first-week posts by new members, response times in help channels and, where you sell, revenue from members. Discord’s Server Insights reports activity for eligible Community servers.

For the full business case, read our pillar guide, why use Discord for business. For examples of paid communities, see 8 paid Discord communities and what they offer.

Stripe Discord Integration: How to Connect Payments

Jason Lee — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Stripe is one of the most widely used payment platforms for online businesses, and Discord is where many of those businesses keep their community. Connecting them means one thing in practice: when someone pays, they get access in Discord, and when they stop paying, the access goes away. This pillar guide explains how that works and the three ways to set it up. It anchors our Stripe and Discord topic.

How the integration works

Every Stripe-to-Discord setup has the same four parts:

Identity. The buyer signs in with Discord, so you know their Discord user ID.
Payment. The buyer pays on a Stripe checkout page. Card details stay with Stripe.
Access. A Discord bot gives the buyer a role that opens the paid channels.
Lifecycle. Stripe sends events to your system when things change, and the bot reacts. The events that matter for access are customer.subscription.created, customer.subscription.updated, customer.subscription.deleted, invoice.paid and invoice.payment_failed.

If any of the four is missing, the integration leaks: people pay and wait, or cancel and keep access. Stripe keeps the receipts, invoices and refunds, so the Discord side never needs to store payment data at all; it only needs to know who should hold which role.

Option 1: A membership tool

A membership tool runs all four parts for you. Ternary, for example, gives you a branded checkout and signup page, signs buyers in with Discord through a signup gate, takes payment through Stripe for subscriptions or one-time purchases, assigns the Discord role on sign-up and removes it on cancellation. Each member appears in a CRM with their payment status, and dashboards show revenue and growth. Basic is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee.

Best for: owners who want it working today and do not want to host code. Setup steps are in connect your website, Stripe and Discord in 3 steps.

Option 2: A no-code automation

Automation services such as Zapier connect Stripe and Discord with triggers and actions, for example posting a message in a channel when a new payment arrives. They are quick for notifications. They are weaker at access control, because matching a Stripe customer to a Discord user and removing roles reliably needs the Discord identity step that a simple automation does not have.

Best for: alerts and reporting alongside another setup.

Option 3: Build it yourself

Developers can build the integration directly:

A web page that signs users in with Discord’s OAuth2 and stores their user ID.
Stripe Checkout or Payment Links, passing the Discord ID along as metadata.
A webhook endpoint that verifies the Stripe-Signature header and handles the subscription events above.
A bot with the Manage Roles permission, whose role sits above the paid roles, that adds or removes the role.

Best for: teams with unusual rules and the time to maintain it. Budget for edge cases: refunds, chargebacks, people leaving the server, and webhooks that arrive out of order.

Security checklist

Never handle card numbers yourself; use Stripe’s hosted checkout.
Verify webhook signatures and reject anything unsigned.
Give the bot only the permissions it needs.
Keep the bot’s role above paid roles but below staff roles.
Store API keys as secrets, never in code or channels.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
Buyer paid, got no role	Bot’s role is below the paid role, or the buyer used another Discord account
Member canceled, kept access	Subscription-deleted events are not handled, or failed
Duplicate roles or messages	Webhook retries processed twice; make handlers safe to repeat

For why Stripe suits communities in the first place, read why use Stripe for Discord community payments. To compare the native alternative, see how to set up Discord memberships and subscriptions.

Discord Subscription Management: Complete Guide

Jason Lee — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A paid Discord community has two sides of subscription management: members who need to see, change or cancel what they pay for, and owners who need billing to run without daily attention. This guide covers both, for Discord’s built-in Server Subscriptions and for communities that sell through Stripe. More on the topic is in our paid Discord memberships and monetization guides.

For members: managing a Server Subscription

See what you pay for

Open User Settings with the cog next to your username.
Select Subscriptions on the left.
Press Manage Membership. You will see every server membership you hold, what each costs and when it renews.

Cancel

On the same page, press Cancel Subscription next to the membership and confirm. Your perks last until the end of the period you paid for. Leaving a server also cancels its auto-renewal.

Change tiers

If you subscribed on desktop or in a browser, pick the new tier from the server’s subscription page. If you subscribed in the iOS app, Discord cannot change the tier mid-cycle: cancel, wait for the current period to end, then buy the tier you want. Subscriptions cannot be bought on Android.

Ask for a refund

Contact the server owner first, because they provide the perks. If that does not resolve it, Discord’s refund policy explains when it will step in. For technical billing problems, Discord’s help article points to its billing support form.

If you paid but cannot see the channels

Check that you are signed in to the same Discord account you subscribed with; a second account is the most common cause. Then contact the server’s staff with your receipt, since only they can check the role you were given.

For owners: running native subscriptions

Tiers and perks live in Server Settings > Server Subscriptions. Admins can edit tier details; only the owner sees payout information.
Free trials can be switched on per tier. Members enter a payment method and are charged when the trial ends unless they cancel.
Payouts arrive monthly once you have earned $100 for the first payout and $25 for later ones.
Turning it off requires that no active subscribers remain and that you delete every tier, including drafts and archived ones.

For owners selling through Stripe

When you sell memberships through your own checkout, Stripe holds the subscription and a membership tool keeps Discord in step with it.

Self-service: Stripe’s customer portal lets members update their card, see invoices and cancel without messaging you.
Cancellation timing: Stripe can cancel immediately or at the end of the billing period. Ending at the period end is fairer and avoids refunds.
Access: the tool watches the subscription and removes the Discord role when it ends. With Ternary, roles are given on sign-up through a signup gate with Discord login and removed on cancellation, and each member’s record sits in a member CRM.
Failed payments: Stripe can retry declined cards automatically before a subscription is canceled. Our guide on subscription management for online communities covers renewals and retention in depth.

A monthly checklist for owners

Compare active members in Discord with active subscriptions in your billing system. Anyone with a paid role and no subscription is free riding.
Read cancellation reasons and reply to the ones you can fix.
Check failed-payment recoveries and follow up personally with long-time members.
Review tier descriptions so they match what members actually get.

Which approach fits you

Native subscriptions keep everything inside Discord and suit US owners who want minimal setup. A Stripe-based setup suits owners who sell from a website, operate outside the US or want member records they control. Our pillar guide on how to monetize your Discord server compares the models, and how to set up Discord memberships and subscriptions shows the setup steps for each.

How Does Discord Make Money? Its Revenue Explained

Jason Lee — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Discord is free. You can create servers, talk, stream and call without paying, and there are no ads in your channels. So where does the money come from? The answer matters to anyone running a community there, because it explains which features Discord invests in. This article breaks down its revenue streams as of late 2026 and what they mean for server owners. It is part of our Discord for business and creators topic.

1. Nitro subscriptions

Nitro is Discord’s paid membership for individual users. In the US, Nitro Basic costs $2.99 a month and adds custom emoji anywhere, 50 MB uploads and custom app icons. Full Nitro costs $9.99 a month and adds custom profiles, 1 GB uploads, HD video streaming, app themes and, in select regions, Xbox Game Pass perks. Nitro also comes with two Server Boosts. This is Discord’s core consumer product.

2. Server Boosts

Boosts are paid upgrades that members apply to a server. Two boosts reach Level 1, seven reach Level 2 and fourteen reach Level 3, each adding perks such as more emoji slots, better audio quality and higher upload limits for everyone in the server. Some extra perks can also be bought with boosts. Boosting turns a community’s fans into Discord’s customers, and a server that loses boosts drops back a level after a 72-hour grace period, so owners have a reason to keep fans engaged.

3. The Shop

The Discord Shop sells cosmetic items, such as avatar decorations and profile effects, that users buy for themselves or as gifts. Discord gift cards, sold through retailers in the US, can be spent on Nitro and on Shop items, which gives Discord a way to sell to people without a credit card.

4. Quests and advertising

Quests are Discord’s ad format, built mostly for game publishers. A user accepts a Quest, completes an action such as watching a video or playing a game, and earns a reward like an in-game item or an avatar decoration. Formats include Play Quests, video Quests and interactive Missions. Users opt in, which makes this very different from banner ads, and Nitro subscribers earn extra rewards from Quests, which ties the ad business to the subscription business.

5. Fees on creator sales

When server owners sell Server Subscriptions inside Discord, Discord deducts payment processing fees and keeps a 10% platform fee. The more communities charge through Discord’s own tools, the more Discord earns.

What Discord no longer does

Discord ran a game store and a Nitro games library from 2018. In September 2019 it announced that the library would close on October 15, 2019, because few subscribers played the included games. Games already bought through Discord were not affected. Today, game publishers pay Discord through Quests instead.

What it means for server owners

Discord’s incentives favor engaged communities. Boosts, Nitro and Quests all depend on people spending time in servers, so tools for running communities keep improving.
Discord will not pay you for activity. Your income comes from your members, through Discord’s Server Subscriptions or your own checkout.
Native selling has a price. Discord’s 10% platform fee plus processing is the cost of selling inside the app. Owners who sell through their own Stripe checkout pay processing and their tool’s fee instead.

Ternary is built for that second route: a branded checkout, sign-in with Discord, Stripe payments, roles granted and removed automatically, and a member CRM. Basic is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus 3%.

For how owners earn on the platform, read how to make money on Discord. For why businesses build there in the first place, see our pillar guide, why use Discord for business.

8 Paid Discord Communities and What They Offer

Jason Lee — Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In May 2024 we published a roundup of eight Discord communities that charge for membership. The point was never that they are the biggest servers on Discord; it was to show how different paid communities can be. We have rewritten the roundup in November 2026, describing each community as it presented itself in 2024 and noting whether its website still loads today. Explore more in our Discord for business and creators topic.

1. OptionsSwing

A member-only options trading community that put education ahead of stock tips: daily watchlist levels, a pre-market newsletter, on-demand technical analysis and live trading sessions with several mentors. Its website did not load when we checked in November 2026.

2. Rippy Club

An e-commerce community led by experienced store operators, offering ad creative examples, email and SMS strategies, introductions to suppliers, weekly calls and guest speakers. Its Discord invite link was working in November 2026.

3. Wealth Empire

An education-based live trading community for new and experienced traders, built around live streams and learning resources. In November 2026 its website promoted daily live trading sessions, a course and a free Discord.

4. Dropship Agent

A fulfillment service for online store owners that ran a Discord community of store operators sharing how to launch and run a store. Its old community link no longer works.

5. Waters & Acland Fine Furniture Workshop

A bespoke furniture workshop in England’s Lake District that also runs the Waters & Acland Furniture School, with courses for beginners and experienced woodworkers. A reminder that paid communities are not only about money markets. Its school website was loading in November 2026.

6. Impact Bulgaria

A community initiative focused on personal growth, connection and skills, with an emphasis on members helping each other. Its website was loading in November 2026.

7. MMM Investment Group

In 2024 this listing promoted a seven-phase mentorship program on short-term rentals and real estate investing. By November 2026, its website described the company as a corporate housing business.

8. Stealth Wealth Investing

An investing education platform with a private group offering courses, live Q&As, watchlists and trade alerts covering stocks and real estate. Its website was loading in November 2026.

What the successful ones have in common

A clear niche

Each community serves one kind of person with one kind of goal. “Options traders who want to learn” sells better than “people interested in finance”.

Education over shortcuts

The strongest trading communities sell skill-building and process, not just picks. That is also the safer offer: it does not promise results nobody can guarantee.

Live sessions

Regular live trading, calls or workshops give members a reason to show up at a set time each week and make the membership feel like a group.

A free door in

Most of them let people join a free tier, newsletter or public channel before paying. People pay more readily once they have seen the community from inside, and a free tier keeps a pool of future buyers close at hand.

Starting your own

If you are building a paid community, start with the free version and a single paid tier, as our pillar guide on why use Discord for business explains. To charge, you can use Discord’s own Server Subscriptions if you are US-based, or sell from your own website through Stripe. Ternary handles the second route: a branded checkout, sign-in with Discord, roles added automatically after payment and removed on cancellation, and a member CRM. Basic is free with no transaction fee.

For the step-by-step setup, see set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary, and for more examples of communities that have used Ternary, read Ternary customer stories.

Discord Paywalls: How to Gate Channels and Charge

Jason Lee — Wed, 29 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A paywall on Discord is not a separate product. It is a permission setting plus a way to sell a role. Once you see it that way, building one takes an afternoon. This guide is part of our paid Discord memberships and monetization series.

How a Discord paywall works

Every channel has permissions per role. To make a channel private, you deny the View Channel permission to @everyone and allow it for one role, for example Premium. Members without that role do not see the channel at all. Discord’s role-exclusive channel setup does this for you: create the channel, tick the role that may see it, and Discord adjusts the permissions.

The paywall is then just the question of who gets the Premium role and when they lose it.

Step 1: Decide what goes behind the wall

Sort your channels into three groups:

Free: rules, announcements, a general chat and a taste of your best content. This is how new people judge whether to pay.
Paid: the content people come for, such as daily analysis, templates, feedback, live sessions or archives.
Staff: moderation and planning, visible to your team only.

Put the paid channels in their own category so permissions stay consistent, and keep the free side active. A paywall in front of an empty server converts nobody.

Step 2: Build the role and channels

Open Server Settings > Roles and create the paid role. New roles sit at the bottom of the list, just above @everyone.
Create the paid category and its channels, and choose the paid role as the only role with access.
Check the result with Discord’s “View server as role” option before you announce anything.

Step 3: Sell the role

You have two choices.

Discord Server Subscriptions. If you are a US-based owner aged 18 or over, you can make chosen channels or the whole server exclusive and sell one to three tiers inside Discord. Discord keeps 10% after processing fees and pays out monthly once you pass $100.

A Stripe checkout with a bot. A membership tool sells the role on your own branded page. Ternary, for example, takes the payment through Stripe, signs the buyer in with Discord through a signup gate, assigns the paid role straight away and removes it when the subscription ends. It works outside the US and keeps your member list in a CRM you control. Setup is covered in set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary.

Step 4: Price it

Choose between three models:

Subscription: a monthly or yearly price for ongoing content. Best for communities that publish every week.
One-time payment: a single price for lasting access, such as a course archive. Simple, but it does not fund ongoing work.
Tiers: two or three levels with clear differences. Add them once one tier is working.

Look at what similar communities charge, then price for the value of the outcome rather than the hours you spend. Raising prices for new members while keeping early members on their original price rewards the people who backed you first.

Step 5: Keep people inside the wall

Say exactly what each tier includes, and deliver it on a visible schedule.
Give members a channel for feedback and answer it.
Expect failed payments: Stripe can retry them automatically, which saves members who never meant to leave.
Review what paid members use most each month, and move unused perks out.

Which setup fits you

Choose the native option if you are in the US and want the least setup. Choose a Stripe-based tool if you are outside the US, sell from your own website, or want member data you control. Either way, the role-and-permission design above is the same. For the bigger picture, read our pillar guide on how to monetize your Discord server and how to set up Discord memberships and subscriptions.

Ternary vs Other Discord Membership Platforms

Jason Lee — Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Choosing a membership platform for a Discord community is mostly a decision about three things: what it costs at your revenue, who holds your customers and their payments, and how dependably access follows payment. This comparison puts Ternary next to the common alternatives with their published prices as of November 2026. It is the starting point of our Discord membership platforms compared topic. We make Ternary, so we have kept to facts you can check on each provider’s own pages.

The options

Ternary. Connects your website, Stripe and Discord. Buyers sign in with Discord through a signup gate, pay through Stripe for subscriptions or one-time purchases, and get their role automatically; roles are removed on cancellation. Includes a member CRM, member tracking and dashboards. Basic is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. Payments go to your own Stripe account.

LaunchPass. A paid-community tool that works with Discord, Slack and Telegram. Its help center lists $29 a month plus 3.5% per transaction, with Stripe’s fees on top.

Whop. A marketplace and checkout platform for digital products and communities. Its fee page lists card processing at 2.7% + $0.30 per domestic card transaction, with separate fees for payouts and optional features. Check its page for the fees that apply to your product type.

Discord Server Subscriptions. Discord’s own paid tiers inside the app. Owners must be 18 or older and based in the US. Discord deducts a payment processing fee, 6% for desktop and web purchases, then keeps a 10% platform fee.

What each costs at $5,000 a month

Assume 250 members paying $20 a month with US cards, before taxes:

Option	Platform cost	Payment processing	Approximate total
Ternary Basic	$0	Stripe, about $220	about $220
Ternary Premium	$100 + $150 (3%)	Stripe, about $220	about $470
LaunchPass	$29 + $175 (3.5%)	Stripe, about $220	about $424
Discord Server Subscriptions	$470 (10% after processing)	$300 (6%)	about $770

Stripe’s figure is 2.9% of $5,000 plus 30¢ on each of 250 charges. Whop is left out of the table because its total depends on fees that vary by product; use its fee page with your own numbers.

Beyond price

Data ownership. With Ternary and LaunchPass, payments run through your Stripe account. Marketplaces and Discord’s native subscriptions hold more of the customer relationship.
Where it works. Discord’s native option is US-only. Stripe-based tools work wherever Stripe operates.
Member records. A CRM with one record per member, as Ternary includes, matters once you need to know who pays, who left and why.
Platforms supported. If you also run Slack or Telegram groups, a multi-platform tool may suit you better than a Discord-focused one.

How to test a platform before you commit

Open the cheapest account the platform offers and connect a test server.
Buy your own product with a second Discord account and a real card.
Check that the role arrives, then cancel and check that it is removed when the period ends.
Look at what you can see about that test member afterwards: email, payment status and history.
Refund yourself and note how the refund affects fees.

An hour of testing tells you more than any comparison page, including this one.

Which one fits you

Just starting, Discord only, want to keep costs at zero: Ternary Basic.
US owner who wants everything inside the Discord app: Discord Server Subscriptions, accepting the higher share.
Communities across Slack, Telegram and Discord: consider LaunchPass.
Selling to buyers who discover products in a marketplace: consider Whop.

For the general questions to ask about any community platform, read how to choose an online community platform. For how payments and roles connect, see Stripe Discord integration.

How to Make a Good Discord Server Members Stay In

Jason Lee — Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Anyone can create a Discord server in a minute. Making one people return to every week is the hard part. Whether you are a gamer, an artist, a musician, a trader or a hobbyist, the same few things decide whether a server thrives or goes quiet. This guide walks through them in order. It belongs to our running a Discord server topic.

1. Define the purpose

Write one sentence: who the server is for and what they get there. “A place for beginner woodworkers to share projects and get feedback” is a purpose. “A cool community” is not. Use the sentence in your server description, your welcome message and every invite you share. Members who know why they joined know what to post.

2. Keep the structure simple

Start small and group channels into categories:

Start Here: welcome, rules, announcements.
Community: introductions, general chat, off-topic.
Topics: one channel per main subject.
Voice: one hangout channel and one for events.

A small server with many channels looks empty. Add channels only when a topic keeps crowding another one. If you are building from scratch, follow how to create a Discord server.

3. Make the first five minutes easy

New members decide quickly whether to stay. On a Community server, use onboarding to pick default channels and ask one or two questions that assign interest roles. Post a welcome message that says what to do first: introduce yourself, read the rules, try this channel. Then reply to introductions personally in the early weeks.

4. Set clear rules and enforce them

Short, specific rules beat long, vague ones. Pin them in a rules channel and point to them during onboarding. Turn on AutoMod’s keyword and spam filters so the worst messages never post, and apply consequences the same way for everyone, including long-time members.

5. Empower moderators

Recruit moderators from active, level-headed members. Give them a private staff channel, written guidelines and the permissions they need, but not Administrator. Thank them in public. Moderators who feel trusted stay; moderators who feel used burn out.

6. Create a rhythm

A weekly schedule gives people a reason to return: a Monday question, a Wednesday voice hangout, a Friday showcase. Events can be small. What matters is that they happen when you say they will.

7. Encourage members to create

Showcase channels, contests and member-led sessions turn members into contributors. Highlight good posts in announcements. People invest in communities where their work is seen.

8. Use bots with restraint

A moderation bot and a role menu are often enough. Each extra bot adds commands and notifications that can clutter the server. Our list of the best Discord bots covers the ones worth adding.

9. Ask for feedback

Run a short poll or a feedback channel every month or two, and tell members what you changed because of it. That loop is one of the strongest reasons people feel ownership.

10. Promote steadily

Share your invite where your audience already is: your social profiles, your website, newsletters and related communities that allow it. Steady promotion beats one big push followed by silence.

If you plan to charge later

A good free server is the foundation of a paid one. Once members ask for more depth, you can add a paid tier behind a role. Ternary handles that part: a branded checkout, sign-in with Discord, payment through Stripe, and the paid role added and removed automatically, with every member in a CRM. Its Basic plan is free with no transaction fee.

For the day-to-day running of a busy server, read our pillar guide, Discord server management tips for paid communities.

How to Make Money on Discord: Ideas That Work

Jason Lee — Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Discord does not pay anyone for running a busy server. Money on Discord comes from the people in it: members who pay for access, products or time. That changes the question from “how do I get paid by Discord” to “what would my members pay for”. This guide matches common offers to the kind of person who usually succeeds with them. It sits in our paid Discord memberships and monetization topic.

If you are an expert: sell ongoing access

Traders, coaches, developers and analysts usually do best with a paid membership. Members pay monthly to read your analysis, ask questions and learn alongside others. The membership is a Discord role that opens private channels, and it renews until the member cancels.

Discord’s own Server Subscriptions handle this inside the app for US-based owners and keep 10% after processing fees. Everyone else uses a checkout such as Stripe with a tool that assigns the role. Our guide on how to set up Discord memberships and subscriptions compares the two.

If you make things: sell digital products

Designers, writers and educators can sell templates, presets, guides or recorded courses. Use your server to show work in progress, answer questions and announce launches, then sell the product through a one-time checkout. Buyers can get a role that opens a support channel for that product, which turns a single sale into a relationship.

If you offer a service: sell your time

Reviews, coaching calls, portfolio critiques and done-for-you work all fit Discord well, because the follow-up conversation happens in the same place. Keep a free channel where you give useful general advice, and a booking path for paid one-on-one work. Price by the outcome for the client, not by the minute.

If you run events: sell tickets

Workshops, tournaments, masterminds and live Q&As can be paid one at a time. A ticket can be a one-time purchase that grants an event role, which you remove when the event ends. Recordings can then become a product of their own.

If you have reach: sponsors and affiliates

Larger communities can earn from brands. Sponsors pay to reach a defined audience, and affiliate links pay a commission on sales. Both depend on trust: label sponsored posts, recommend only what you use, and keep promotions in one channel. Note that Discord’s Monetization Policy does not allow its own selling features to be used mainly to advertise third parties.

Pick one offer first

Running a membership, a shop, events and sponsorships at once spreads you thin, and members get confused about what they are paying for. Start with the offer that fits your strengths, get ten paying members, and then add a second income stream that supports the first, such as a one-time course for people not ready to subscribe.

Mistakes that cost paying members

Charging before people have seen your value, changing prices without notice, and going quiet after launch are the three ways new paid communities lose members fastest. Publish a schedule, keep to it, and tell members early about any change that affects what they pay or what they get.

Tools that handle the payments

Need	Option
Native subscriptions in the Discord app, US owners	Discord Server Subscriptions
Your own checkout, roles granted automatically	A membership tool on Stripe, such as Ternary
One-off product sales	A one-time checkout that grants a role

Ternary connects your website, Stripe and Discord: buyers sign in with Discord, pay, and receive their role automatically, and you see every member in one CRM. The Basic plan is free with no transaction fee. You can create an account and connect Stripe yourself.

For the full list of income streams, see our pillar guide on how to monetize your Discord server. For how influencers move fans onto Discord first, read how influencers make money using Discord.

How to Add Roles in Discord and Assign Them

Jason Lee — Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Roles are how Discord decides who can see and do what. A role carries a name, a color and a set of permissions, and every member can hold several. Get roles right and your server organizes itself: new members see the right channels, moderators have the tools they need, and paying members reach paid content. This pillar guide covers creating, assigning and automating roles. More guides are in our Discord onboarding, signup gate and roles topic.

How to create a role

Open the menu next to your server name and choose Server Settings.
Select Roles, then Create Role.
Name the role after what it means, such as Moderator, Member or Supporter.
Choose a Role Color from the presets or the custom color picker. Members display the color of their highest colored role.
Open the Permissions tab and switch on only what this role needs.
Press Save Changes.

Every new role starts from the permissions of @everyone, the default role all members share, and is placed at the bottom of the list, just above @everyone.

How to assign a role

From the member list: in the role’s settings, open Manage Members and add people.
From a profile: click a member’s name or avatar, press the plus sign under their roles and pick the role.

The change applies immediately. To remove a role, open the same place and press the cross next to it.

Understand the hierarchy

Roles are ordered top to bottom, and the order matters:

A member can only affect members and roles below their own highest role, even if they have the right permission.
Members with Manage Roles can create and edit roles below their own, and can only grant permissions they hold themselves.
Bots follow the same rule: a bot can only assign roles that sit below its own role.

Drag roles in Server Settings > Roles to reorder them. Put staff roles near the top, member and paid roles in the middle, and cosmetic roles at the bottom.

Set permissions safely

Give each role the smallest set of permissions that does the job. Administrator grants everything and skips every channel restriction, so keep it for very few people. Use channel permissions for fine control: they override server-wide permissions, which is how you create channels only one role can see.

Automate role assignment

Assigning every role by hand stops working quickly. Three ways to automate:

Community Onboarding. On Community servers, new members answer questions you write, and each answer can assign channels and roles. It suits interest roles such as regions, games or topics.
Role bots. Reaction or button menus let members pick self-service roles at any time.
Paid roles. For roles people pay for, use a membership tool. Ternary signs buyers in with Discord through a signup gate, assigns the paid role on sign-up and removes it when the subscription ends, so nobody has to manage paid access by hand.

Common mistakes

Generous @everyone permissions. Every new role starts from @everyone, so check it first and keep it minimal.
Too many roles. If nobody can explain what a role is for, delete it.
A moderation bot above your staff roles. The bot can then act on your moderators. Keep staff above bots that moderate.

A starter role set

Role	Purpose
Owner and Admin	Full control, two or three people
Moderator	Message management, timeouts, kicks
Bots	Below staff, above every role they assign
Member	Verified or paying members; opens member channels
Interest roles	Chosen in onboarding; open topic channels

For paid communities, the next step is Ternary’s Discord bot for automated membership access. For the channel side, see how to customize a Discord server.

Why Use Discord for Business? Benefits and Setup

Jason Lee — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Discord is known for gaming, but many of its busiest servers now belong to businesses: trading desks, software companies, course creators, studios and consumer brands. They use it because their customers are already there, and because a live community does things a website or a social feed cannot. This pillar guide covers the benefits, the limits and how to set up a business server. More guides are in our Discord for business and creators topic.

The benefits

Real-time conversation, in one place

Customers can talk to your team and to each other by text, voice or video, in channels organized by topic. Questions get answered in minutes, and other customers often answer before staff do.

It costs nothing to start

Creating a server is free, and it scales from a few people to very large communities. Optional extras, such as boosts for perks, are paid, but a business community does not need them to run.

Structure that grows with you

Channels and categories keep topics apart. Roles decide who sees what, so you can have public channels for everyone, private channels for customers or paying members, and staff-only channels for your team.

Built-in safety tools

Community servers add Server Insights, raid protection, rules screening, a welcome screen and Community Onboarding, where new members answer questions that give them the right roles and channels. To turn Community on, Discord requires a verification level, an explicit media filter and a rules channel.

What businesses use it for

Customer community: a place to share tips, show results and meet other customers.
Support: a help channel where staff and experienced members answer questions in public, so answers help everyone.
Product feedback: a channel for requests and bug reports, read by the product team.
Launches and events: announcements, live Q&As and workshops for your most engaged fans.
Paid membership: premium channels for customers who pay monthly.

The limits

Audience fit. People who have never used Discord may not sign up for it just for you.
No customer records. Discord shows aggregated statistics, not a list of who your customers are or what they paid.
Not a workplace tool. It is built for communities, not for internal compliance needs.
Moderation takes people. A public server needs active moderators from day one.

How to set up a business server

Create the server with the “For a club or community” option and your brand’s name and icon. See how to create a Discord server.
Enable Community and set the verification level, media filter and rules channel.
Build a small channel list: announcements, rules, introductions, general chat, help and feedback. Add more only when a topic outgrows its channel.
Set up roles for staff, members and customers. Our guide on how to add roles in Discord covers permissions.
Set up onboarding so new members choose their interests and land in the right channels.
Name moderators and post short, specific rules.

Where paid memberships fit

Once the free community is active, a paid tier often follows: deeper content, direct access to experts or early product access, behind a role. US owners can use Discord’s Server Subscriptions. Businesses that sell from their own website, operate elsewhere or want customer records use a Stripe-based tool. Ternary connects your website, Stripe and Discord: customers sign in with Discord, pay, and get the role automatically, and you see each one in a member CRM. Basic is free with no transaction fee.

Is it the right time for you?

If your customers already use Discord and you can staff the community, start now with a small server and a clear purpose. For a closer look at the trade-offs, read should your business move to Discord? and how big brands use Discord.

Ternary Discord Bot: Automated Membership Access

Jason Lee — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Running a paid Discord community by hand means checking payments, adding roles, chasing people whose cards failed and removing people who left. It takes hours each week and it is error-prone. Ternary’s Discord bot automates that work. This article explains what it does, how to set it up and how it fits with other bots. It belongs to our Discord onboarding, signup gate and roles topic.

What the bot does

Verifies who is paying

Before checkout, buyers sign in with Discord on your branded signup page. That login, through Discord’s OAuth2, tells Ternary exactly which Discord account belongs to the buyer. It removes the most common failure in paid communities: someone paying with one email and joining with an account nobody can match to it.

Grants access on purchase

When the payment succeeds in Stripe, the bot gives the member the role for what they bought. A monthly membership, a yearly plan and a one-time course can each grant a different role, and the role opens the channels you chose.

Removes access when membership ends

When a subscription is canceled or ends after failed payments, the bot removes the role. Nobody keeps paid access after they stop paying, and nobody on your team has to remember to check.

Keeps records in sync

Every member has a record in Ternary’s member CRM: Discord account, email, purchase, status and join date. Dashboards show members and revenue over time. Because the bot acts on the same records, the CRM and the roles in your server agree.

How to set it up

Create an account at admin.ternarydev.com/register and connect your Stripe account.
Add the bot to your server.
In Server Settings > Roles, drag the bot’s role above every role it will assign. Discord only lets a bot manage roles below its own, so this step matters.
Create the paid roles and hide the paid channels from @everyone.
Create a product for each offer and choose the role it grants.
Test with a second Discord account: buy, check the role, cancel, and check that the role is removed.

Full walkthrough: set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary.

What changes for your team

Before automation, someone compares the payment dashboard with the member list every few days, adds roles for new buyers and removes them for people who left. After it, that work disappears. Staff time goes back to the community: answering questions, running events and talking to members who are thinking about cancelling. The member records also make support faster, because staff can see a member’s status before they reply.

How it fits with your other bots

Keep one bot responsible for each kind of role:

Job	Typical owner
Paid access roles	The membership bot
Interest and topic roles	Discord’s Community Onboarding or a role-menu bot
Levels and rewards	An engagement bot
Moderation	A moderation bot or Discord’s AutoMod

Two bots changing the same role will undo each other’s work, and members will see their access flicker. Write down which bot owns which roles in a staff channel, so the next moderator does not add a conflicting one.

When you might not need it

If your community is free, Discord’s Community Onboarding and a role-menu bot cover role assignment without a membership tool. If you are a US owner happy with Discord’s own Server Subscriptions, Discord manages access for those tiers itself. The bot earns its place when you sell through your own checkout and need payments, roles and member records to stay in step.

For the basics of roles and permissions, read our pillar guide on how to add roles in Discord. For why member records matter, see Discord CRM vs bots.

Connect Your Website, Stripe and Discord in 3 Steps

Jason Lee — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Selling Discord access from your own website keeps the sale on a page you control: your brand, your words, your pricing. The challenge is connecting that page to a payment and to a role in your server. This guide does it in three steps and focuses on the website side; the account setup itself is in set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary. More on the topic in our Stripe and Discord hub.

Step 1: Connect the accounts

Create a Ternary account at admin.ternarydev.com/register, connect your Stripe account and add the Ternary bot to your Discord server. Move the bot’s role above the roles it will assign, because Discord only lets a bot manage roles below its own.

At this point nothing is for sale yet, but the three systems can talk to each other: payments will land in your Stripe account, and the bot can change roles in your server.

Step 2: Create a product for each offer

Each thing you sell becomes a product with a price, a billing period or a one-time payment, and the Discord role it grants. Keep the list short. Two clear offers, for example a monthly membership and a yearly one at a discount, convert better than six similar ones.

Every product gets its own branded checkout and signup page. That page is what your website will link to.

Step 3: Put the checkout on your website

You do not need a plugin or code. Add ordinary links or buttons that open the product’s checkout page:

On your pricing page: one button per product, under a short description of what it includes.
On your home page: one clear call to action near the top.
In your navigation: a “Join” link that leads to the pricing page.

When a visitor clicks, they sign in with Discord through the signup gate, pay through Stripe and get the role straight away. They land in your server already in the right channels.

Test the whole journey

Before you announce anything, buy your own product:

Open your website in a private browser window.
Click the button, sign in with a second Discord account and pay with a real card.
Check that the role appears and the paid channels are visible.
Cancel the subscription and check that the role is removed when it ends.
Refund yourself in Stripe.

Fixing a broken link costs a minute now and lost buyers later.

What happens after launch

Renewals are charged by Stripe on schedule. When a subscription ends, Ternary removes the role. Each buyer appears in the member CRM with their Discord account and payment status, and the dashboards show sign-ups and revenue over time, so you can see which page or post drives sales.

Common website mistakes

Linking the button to a server invite instead of the checkout. Visitors join the free side and never see the offer. Send the paid button to checkout, and keep the free invite as a smaller second link.
Different prices in different places. Update the website whenever you change a product, or buyers feel misled at checkout.
No path for current members. Tell existing members which button to use if they want to move to a higher plan.

Tips for a page that sells

Lead with the outcome members get, not the list of channels.
Show real screenshots of the community, with private details blurred.
State the price and how to cancel plainly; hidden terms create refund requests.
Answer the three questions people ask most, right next to the button.

Basic is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. For the full picture of how payment and access connect, read our pillar guide, Stripe Discord integration: how to connect payments.

Ternary Customer Stories: Paid Discord Communities

Jason Lee — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ternary was built for one job: running the paid side of Discord communities so their owners can focus on members. Since 2020 the platform has processed 182K transactions and more than $13.2M for over 100 clients. This page introduces the kinds of communities that use it and what they rely on it for. We describe each one as it was presented on our own customer pages; we do not publish customers’ revenue figures. More stories are in our Discord for business and creators topic.

Communities we have featured

Trading and investing education

77Trades: a trading community aimed at college students learning to use the stock market.
Applied Forex: a forex trading community that formed during the pandemic lockdowns.
Trading Alphas: a trading community of like-minded people sharing tools and ideas.
Stock Dads: a community helping dads build long-term wealth through trading and investing.
Apex Alliance: a community of traders guided through education.
OptionsSwing: an options trading community focused on education, led by Ternary’s CEO, Jason Lee.
Cash Cow Capital: one of the client communities featured in the original 2024 version of this article.

Gaming

PlayBit: a gaming community that used Ternary for paid membership access.

In our December 2024 guide to monetizing a Discord community, we also described Let’s Talk Investing, a trading community that sold access to its server through Ternary, with daily signals, market updates and educational videos for members.

What they use Ternary for

Selling memberships on their own terms

Each community sells through branded checkout and signup pages, with payments going through Stripe into the community’s own account. They can sell recurring memberships and one-time purchases.

Access that follows payment

Buyers sign in with Discord through a signup gate, so every payment is tied to the right Discord account. The paid role is added automatically on sign-up and removed when a subscription ends. That replaces the weekly ritual of comparing a payment list against the server and fixing roles by hand.

Knowing their members

The member CRM keeps one record per member with their Discord account, purchase and status, and the dashboards show members, sign-ups and revenue over time. Owners can see growth and cancellations instead of guessing.

A common setup for a trading community

Paid trading communities often take a similar shape, and it makes a good template if you are starting out:

Free channels: announcements, rules, introductions and a general market chat, open to everyone.
Paid channels: daily analysis, watchlists, a live-session voice channel and a Q&A channel, visible only to the paid role.
Two products: a monthly membership and a yearly one at a discount, each granting the same role.
One checkout link pinned in the free channels and on the community’s website.

New members see the free side first, decide, pay on the checkout page and land in the paid channels a moment later.

Patterns across these communities

A tight niche. Each serves a specific group: students, dads, forex traders, options traders.
Education first. The trading communities sell learning and process, not just alerts.
Live interaction. Regular live sessions and active channels give members a reason to renew.
Automation behind the scenes. Owners spend their time teaching, not reconciling payments.

Start your own

Ternary’s Basic plan is free with no transaction fee, and Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. You can create an account, connect Stripe and your Discord server, and test the buying journey yourself.

For more examples of paid communities across niches, read 8 paid Discord communities and what they offer. For the step-by-step setup, see set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary. For the wider business case, read our pillar guide, why use Discord for business.

Set Up Paid Discord Subscriptions With Ternary

Jason Lee — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This is the hands-on version of our paid Discord memberships and monetization guides: the exact steps to sell a Discord subscription with Ternary, from an empty account to the first paying member. Set aside about an hour, most of it spent on writing the offer rather than on settings.

Before you start

You need three things:

A Discord server where you have the Manage Server permission, ideally as the owner.
A Stripe account in your name or your company’s, able to take payments in your country.
An offer: what members get, how often, and the monthly or one-time price. If you are still deciding, read Discord paywalls: how to gate channels and charge first.

Step 1: Create your account

Sign up at admin.ternarydev.com/register. The Basic plan is free and has no transaction fee. Premium costs $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee; you can start on Basic and move up later.

Step 2: Connect Stripe

Connect the Stripe account that should receive member payments. Money from your sales goes to your Stripe account, and Stripe’s own processing fees apply: 2.9% + 30¢ per successful domestic card charge in the US.

Step 3: Connect your Discord server

Add the Ternary bot to your server. Then open Server Settings > Roles and drag the bot’s role above every role it will hand out. Discord only lets a bot or member manage roles below its own position, so this one step prevents most “I paid but got nothing” messages.

Step 4: Create the paid role and channels

Create the role your buyers will receive, for example Member, and make your premium channels visible only to it. New roles are placed at the bottom of the list, just above @everyone, so check the order again after you create it.

Step 5: Create a product

In the Ternary dashboard, create a product:

Type: recurring membership or one-time payment.
Price and billing period: for example $25 every month.
Role: the Discord role the product grants.
Name and description: what buyers see on the checkout page.

Write the description for a stranger. Say what they get, how often and in which channels.

Each product gets a branded checkout page. Buyers sign in with Discord through the signup gate, pay through Stripe and are given the role straight away. Post the link in your free channels, your website and your social profiles. Test it yourself with a real card and a second Discord account before you announce it.

Step 7: Watch the first month

The dashboard shows members, revenue and sign-ups over time, and the member CRM keeps one record per buyer with their Discord account and payment status. When a subscription ends, Ternary removes the role, so nobody keeps paid access after they stop paying.

Common mistakes

Charging before the paid channels have content. Post at least a week of material first, so the first buyers see value on day one.
Leaving hand-assigned roles in place. Remove the paid role from anyone who got it manually before launch, or paying members and free riders get mixed together.
Changing a product’s role after people bought it. Create a new product instead, so existing members keep exactly what they paid for.

A launch checklist

The bot’s role sits above every paid role.
Premium channels are hidden from @everyone.
The checkout page describes the offer in plain words.
You tested a purchase and a cancellation end to end.
A welcome message in the paid channels tells new members where to start.

For the bigger picture of income models, read our pillar guide on how to monetize your Discord server. If you want to compare this setup with Discord’s own Server Subscriptions, see how to set up Discord memberships and subscriptions.

How to Monetize Your Discord Server: 8 Ways

Jason Lee — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Discord started as a chat app for gamers. Today it hosts trading desks, study groups, fitness programs and creator fan clubs, and many of them earn money. This guide covers the eight income streams we see work, starting with the one that pays most reliably. For the full topic, see our paid Discord memberships and monetization guides.

Start with what your members would pay for

Before you pick a model, list what your server gives people that they cannot easily get elsewhere: analysis, feedback, a schedule, access to you, or a group they trust. Then ask a few active members directly what they would miss if it disappeared. Their answers tell you what to charge for and what to keep free. A server that charges for content nobody asked for loses its free members and gains no paid ones.

1. Paid memberships

A paid membership is a role that opens private channels. Members pay monthly or yearly, and the role goes away when they stop paying. You have two ways to run it:

Discord Server Subscriptions. Built into Discord. You create one to three tiers, and Discord handles checkout. It is only available to owners who are 18 or older and based in the United States, and Discord keeps 10% after processing fees.
Your own checkout through Stripe. A membership tool such as Ternary takes the payment through Stripe, gives the buyer the right role through a signup gate with Discord login, and removes the role when the subscription ends. This works wherever Stripe works and leaves you with the customer list.

How to set up Discord memberships and subscriptions walks through both setups.

2. Merchandise

Shirts, stickers and prints work when your community has an identity people want to wear. Use a print-on-demand shop so you hold no stock, and announce drops in the server rather than selling all the time.

3. Sponsors and partnerships

Brands pay to reach an engaged niche audience. Keep sponsored posts labeled, limit them to one channel, and only accept partners you would recommend anyway: one bad sponsor costs more trust than it earns.

4. Premium bot features

If you built a bot your members love, a paid tier with extra commands or higher limits is a natural add-on. Check Discord’s developer terms before you charge for bot features.

5. Paid events and workshops

Live sessions, AMAs and workshops can be sold one at a time. A one-time purchase that grants an event role for a set period is simple to run and easy for members to understand.

6. Affiliate links

Recommending tools you already use, with an affiliate link, pays a commission per sale. Disclose every affiliate link and keep them in a resources channel instead of dropping them into conversations.

7. Coaching and consulting

Experts can sell one-on-one or small-group sessions inside private channels or voice calls. It earns the most per hour of any model here, but it does not scale past your own calendar.

8. Donations and tips

Some communities run on goodwill. A tip jar or a supporter role covers server costs without putting anything behind a paywall, though it rarely becomes a real income.

What to watch out for

Discord’s Monetization Policy governs its own selling features, Server Subscriptions and the Server Shop, and lists what may not be monetized there: other people’s intellectual property, sexually explicit content, online dating, political campaigns and charity drives, among others. Discord’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines apply to every server, however you take payment. Read both before you launch.

Fees add up, so compare them on your own numbers. On a $20 monthly membership, Discord’s native route deducts processing fees and then 10%; a Stripe checkout costs 2.9% + 30¢ per US card charge plus your tool’s fee. Our Discord paywall guide compares the setups in more detail, and how to make money on Discord covers the creator side.

Where Ternary fits

Ternary runs the paid-membership model for you: branded checkout and signup pages, Stripe payments for subscriptions and one-time purchases, automatic Discord roles on sign-up and removal on cancel, and a member CRM with dashboards. The Basic plan is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. If you only need Discord’s built-in subscriptions and you are in the US, you may not need a tool at all.

How to Customize a Discord Server, Step by Step

Jason Lee — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A customized server feels intentional: members know where to go, what each channel is for and who is who. You can do almost all of it for free in an afternoon. This step-by-step guide starts with purpose and ends with branding, because the order matters. It is part of our running a Discord server topic.

Step 1: Decide what the server is for

Before you touch settings, write one sentence about who the server serves and what they get. Every later choice, from channel names to roles, follows from it. A server for paying members of a trading course needs different channels from a fan server for an artist.

Step 2: Set the basics

In Server Settings > Overview, set:

Name: your brand or community name, as people would search for it.
Icon: a simple, recognizable image that reads at small sizes.
Description and rules: on Community servers, a short description and a rules channel.

An animated icon needs Server Boost Level 1, which takes two boosts.

Step 3: Organize channels into categories

Categories keep the channel list scannable. A common layout:

Category	Channels
Start Here	welcome, rules, announcements
Community	introductions, general, off-topic
Topics	one channel per main subject
Members	paid or verified-only channels
Voice	lounge, events
Staff	moderators only

Keep each category to a handful of channels and archive the ones that go quiet.

Step 4: Name channels consistently

Use short, lowercase names in one style. One emoji per name at most, or none. A new member should understand every channel from its name, without asking.

Step 5: Create roles and permissions

Roles control what members can see and do, and they give members a visible identity. Create a few:

Staff: owner, admins and moderators, at the top of the list.
Members: verified or paying members.
Interest roles: chosen during onboarding, each opening a topic channel.

Give each role a distinct color; members show the color of their highest colored role. Then make private categories visible only to the roles that should see them. Discord removes the View Channel permission from @everyone and grants it to the roles you pick. Our pillar on how to add roles in Discord explains the hierarchy rules.

Step 6: Add custom emoji and stickers

Custom emoji give a server personality. Every server gets 50 emoji slots for free; boosting adds more, up to 250 at Level 3. Use them for reactions that mean something in your community, such as an approval emoji in feedback channels.

Step 7: Set up the welcome and rules channels

The welcome channel tells newcomers what to do first. The rules channel lists short, specific rules. On Community servers, set up onboarding with default channels and one or two questions that assign interest roles, so each new member sees a server tailored to them.

Step 8: Add branding extras (optional)

With Server Boosts you can add a static banner at Level 2 and an animated one at Level 3, custom role icons at Level 2, and a custom invite link at Level 3. Nice to have, but not what makes members stay.

Step 9: Review monthly

Check which channels are busy and which are not, ask members what is confusing, and adjust. Customization is never finished; it follows how your community uses the server.

For paid communities

If some channels are for paying members, the paid role must follow payment. Ternary gives the role automatically when someone pays through your Stripe checkout and removes it when their subscription ends, with each member recorded in a CRM. Basic is free with no transaction fee.

For the running side of a server, read our pillar guide, Discord server management tips for paid communities, and for a fresh start, how to create a Discord server.

Best Discord Bots for Your Server (Updated List)

Jason Lee — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Bots do the work that would otherwise fall on moderators: filtering spam, handing out roles, rewarding activity and running games. The right three or four make a server feel organized; the wrong ten make it noisy. This list was first published in April 2024 and fully updated in November 2026, after checking that each bot is still running. It is part of our running a Discord server topic.

Before you add any bot

Check the bot in the Discord App Directory or on its official site.
Read the permissions it asks for and grant only what its features need.
Keep each bot’s role below your staff roles; bots can only manage roles below their own.
Turn on Discord’s built-in AutoMod first. It handles keyword and spam filtering without any bot.

Moderation and roles

Dyno

A modular bot with a web dashboard for moderation, anti-spam, auto roles and custom commands. A good single choice for servers that want one bot to cover the basics.

Carl-bot

Known for reaction roles, plus automod, logging and custom commands. Pick it when members should choose their own roles from a menu.

YAGPDB

“Yet Another General Purpose Discord Bot”: self-assignable roles, join and leave messages, custom commands and fast feeds from Reddit, YouTube, Twitch and RSS. Powerful for admins who like to configure things in detail.

Levels and engagement

MEE6

A long-running general bot best known for its leveling system, which rewards active members, alongside moderation tools. Levels work well when you tie them to small perks, such as a role or a channel.

Tatsu

An engagement bot built to make communities fun: experience points, profiles and rewards. Its site says it is used by more than 1,350,000 servers.

Games

Dank Memer

An economy and collecting game: members earn virtual coins, collect items, go fishing and raise pets. Great for social servers; consider a dedicated channel so it does not drown out conversation.

Pokétwo

Catch, level, evolve and trade Pokémon, and battle other players. Pokétwo was created in 2020 as a replacement for the defunct Pokécord, which earlier versions of this list recommended.

Paid memberships

Ternary

For servers that charge, Ternary ties Discord roles to payments. Members sign in with Discord on a branded checkout page and pay through Stripe; the paid role is added automatically and removed when a subscription ends, and every member appears in a CRM with dashboards. Basic is free with no transaction fee. Read how it works in Ternary’s Discord bot for automated membership access.

Bots that shut down

Earlier versions of this list included bots that no longer work:

Groovy, a popular music bot, was forced offline by YouTube in August 2021.
Rythm, another music bot, followed in September 2021.
Pokécord was discontinued; Pokétwo now fills that role.

If you still have one of these in your server, remove it.

How to judge a bot that is not on this list

Is it maintained? Look for recent updates and an active support server.
Does it explain its data use? A privacy policy should say what it stores and for how long.
Does it ask for more than it needs? A game bot has no reason to ban or kick members.
Can you remove it cleanly? Check what happens to its roles and data when you do.

A simple starter set

Server type	Bots
Small friend server	AutoMod (built in) plus one game bot
Public community	Dyno or Carl-bot, plus MEE6 or Tatsu
Paid community	One moderation bot, plus Ternary for paid roles

For how bots fit into running a server, read our pillar guide, Discord server management tips for paid communities. For why a bot is not a substitute for knowing your members, see Discord CRM vs bots.

How to Set Up Discord Memberships and Subscriptions

Jason Lee — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A Discord membership is a paid role. Members pay on a schedule, the role opens the channels they paid for, and the role goes away if they stop paying. Everything else, from tiers to perks, is built on top of that one idea. This guide shows both ways to set it up and how to keep members paying. It belongs to our paid Discord memberships and monetization series.

Option 1: Discord Server Subscriptions

Server Subscriptions are Discord’s own paid memberships. Members buy them inside the Discord app, and Discord collects the money and pays you out.

Who can use them

The server owner must be 18 or older, based in the United States with a US bank account, and have two-factor authentication and a verified email. The account must be in good standing. Owners outside the US cannot turn the feature on.

How to set them up

As the owner, enable monetization for the server and accept Discord’s Monetization Terms.
Open Server Settings > Server Subscriptions.
Under Basic Info, choose whether to make some channels exclusive or the whole server.
Under Tiers, create one to three paid tiers, each with a price, a description and the perks it includes.
Publish, then announce the tiers in a channel everyone can read.

What it costs

Discord keeps a 10% platform fee. Before that, payment processing fees come off: 6% for purchases made on desktop or the web, and Apple’s fee for purchases started in the iOS app (members cannot buy on Android). Your first payout comes once you have earned at least $100, and after that each time you pass $25.

Option 2: Your own checkout through Stripe

If you are outside the US, want your own branded checkout, or want to know who your members are, sell the membership yourself. A membership tool connects three things: your sales page, Stripe for payment, and a Discord bot that assigns roles.

How the Ternary method works

Create an account at admin.ternarydev.com/register and connect your Stripe account and Discord server.
Create a product: choose a recurring membership or a one-time payment, set the price and billing period, and pick the Discord role it grants.

Share the branded checkout page. Buyers sign in with Discord through the signup gate, pay through Stripe, and get the role automatically.
When a subscription ends, the role is removed without anyone on your team touching it.

Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ per successful US card payment. Ternary’s Basic plan is free with no transaction fee; Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. The full walkthrough is in set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary.

Designing tiers

Start with one paid tier. A single clear offer converts better than three similar ones, and you can split it later once you know what members value. When you add tiers, make each step up obvious: more access, more frequent content, or direct time with you. Keep a free area with real value so new people can see what the community is like before they pay.

Keeping members paying

Deliver on a schedule. Members renew when they can see the value every week.
Talk to new members early. The first two weeks decide whether someone renews.
Watch failed payments. Expired cards cause a share of cancellations nobody chose. Stripe’s automatic retries recover some of them.
Ask people who leave why. One question in a short form gives you the most useful feedback you will get.

For more on picking a model, read our pillar guide on how to monetize your Discord server, and for gating specific channels, see Discord paywalls.

Which option fits you

If you are in the US, want the simplest setup and are happy for Discord to hold the customer relationship, use Server Subscriptions. If you are elsewhere, sell outside the Discord app, want your own pricing page, or need a member list you control, use a Stripe-based tool.

How to Create a Discord Server: Step-by-Step Guide

Jason Lee — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A Discord server is a free, invite-only space for a group: friends, a study group, a customer community or a paid membership. Creating one takes a minute; setting it up so people stay takes an afternoon. This guide covers both, step by step. It belongs to our running a Discord server topic.

Before you start

You need a Discord account. You can register in the desktop app, on mobile or in a browser. Then decide what kind of server you want: a private space for people you know, or a community for a larger group. That choice affects the settings below.

Step 1: Create the server

In the Discord desktop app or browser, select the Add a Server icon in the left sidebar.
Choose Create My Own, or pick a template if one matches your use.
Choose For a club or community or For me and my friends.
Enter a server name and, optionally, upload an icon.
Select Create.

Discord creates the server with a few default channels and opens it.

Step 2: Set up channels

Text channels hold written conversations; voice channels are for talking, video and screen sharing. Create a short list to start:

welcome and rules, so newcomers know where they are.
announcements, for news from you.
general, for open conversation.
help or questions.
One channel per main topic.
One voice channel for hangouts.

Group them into categories such as Start Here, Community and Topics. You can add more later; too many channels at the start make a server look empty.

Step 3: Create roles

When you create a server, there is one role: @everyone. It defines what every member can do. Open Server Settings > Roles > Create Role to add more:

Moderator, with permission to manage messages and time out members.
Member, for verified or paying members.
Interest roles that open topic channels.

Then make staff or member channels private and choose which roles may see them. Our pillar guide on how to add roles in Discord covers permissions and the role hierarchy.

Step 4: Turn on Community features

For anything bigger than a friend group, enable Community in Server Settings. Discord asks you to set a verification level, turn on the explicit media filter and choose a rules channel. In return you get Server Insights, raid protection, rules screening and onboarding, where new members answer questions that give them the right roles and channels.

Step 5: Invite members

Right-click the server name or open its menu and choose Invite People to get an invite link. Share it with your first members personally: twenty people who talk beat two hundred who do not. Ask each of them to post once in the first day, so the next arrivals find conversation instead of empty channels. Post the link on your website and social profiles once the server has some activity.

Step 6: Get the community running

Post a welcome message that says what to do first.
Reply to every introduction in the early weeks.
Schedule a weekly event, even a small one.
Recruit a moderator from your most active members.

Step 7: Decide whether to charge

If the server is the home of a product or a paid membership, add a paid role and private channels for paying members. Ternary connects a branded checkout, Stripe payments and Discord, so buyers sign in with Discord, pay and get the role automatically, and lose it if they cancel. Basic is free with no transaction fee.

Next steps

Shape the server’s look and structure with how to customize a Discord server, then keep it healthy with our pillar guide, Discord server management tips for paid communities.

Ternary Integrations: Stripe, Discord and Your Website

Jason Lee — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A paid Discord community touches at least three systems: the page where people decide to buy, the processor that takes the money, and the server where they get access. Most problems in paid communities come from those three not agreeing. This page explains what Ternary connects today, what data it keeps, and how to get that data into the rest of your tools. It is part of our Discord member CRM and identity topic.

The three connections

Your website

Every product you create in Ternary gets a branded checkout and signup page. Your website links to it with an ordinary button, so it works with any builder. You keep your own design, domain and copy for the sales page, and the checkout matches your brand. The setup is in connect your website, Stripe and Discord in 3 steps.

Stripe

Payments run through your own Stripe account. Ternary supports recurring memberships and one-time purchases. Because the money and the customer records sit in your Stripe account, you keep them even if you change tools, and anything that already works with Stripe keeps working.

Discord

Buyers sign in with Discord through a signup gate before they pay, which ties each payment to a real Discord account. A bot then gives them the role for what they bought, and takes it away when a subscription ends. Your server’s channel permissions decide what each role can see.

The member data Ternary keeps

The member CRM holds one record per member: their Discord account, email, what they bought, their payment status and when they joined. Dashboards and analytics show members, sign-ups and revenue over time. This is what Discord does not give you on its own: Discord’s built-in Server Insights is aggregated and anonymized, by design.

Our pillar guide, Discord CRM vs bots, explains why that record matters once members pay.

Getting data into your other tools

Accounting and tax. Use Stripe. Every charge, refund and fee is in your Stripe account, with Stripe’s reports and exports, and most accounting tools connect to Stripe directly.

Notifications and light automation. Zapier’s Stripe and Discord connections can post a message in a staff channel when a payment arrives or a subscription is canceled, or add a row to a spreadsheet. Treat these as alerts; leave giving and removing roles to the membership tool.

Email and marketing. Members’ emails come with their records, and Stripe holds customer emails as well. Before you add anyone to marketing emails, make sure you have their consent under the rules that apply to you.

Custom builds. Developers who need something unusual can work from Stripe’s events and Discord’s developer platform directly, alongside Ternary, as long as only one system is responsible for each role.

A simple rule for clean data

Give every job one owner. Stripe owns money. The membership tool owns access. Your CRM records are the single list of who your members are. When two tools both try to assign the same role, or two lists both claim to be the customer list, they drift apart within weeks.

Questions to ask before you connect another tool

Which system will own this data after the change?
What happens to members’ access if the new tool is down for an hour?
Can you disconnect it later without losing records?
Does it need member emails, and do you have consent to share them with it?

If the answers are unclear, start with a notification-only connection and widen it once it has run cleanly for a month.

Plans

Ternary’s Basic plan is free with no transaction fee. Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. You can create an account and connect Stripe and Discord yourself. For the role side of the setup, see how to add roles in Discord.

5 Subscription Management Myths, Debunked

Jason Lee — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Recurring revenue is the steadiest income a community can have: you know what next month looks like, and members get a reason to show up every week. Yet many owners still sell one-off access or run on donations because of a handful of beliefs about subscriptions that were true years ago and are not anymore. Here are five, and what actually happens. More background is in our paid Discord memberships and monetization guides.

Myth 1: Running subscriptions is a full-time job

Subscriptions involve recurring charges, failed cards, plan changes and cancellations, and doing all of that by hand would be a job. Nobody has to. Billing systems such as Stripe Billing charge on schedule, retry failed payments and send receipts. A membership tool connects that billing to access, so a member who pays gets in and a member who cancels is removed. On Discord, Ternary does that through roles: assigned on sign-up, removed on cancellation, with each member in a CRM. What remains for you is the community itself.

Myth 2: You are stuck with one payment provider

Owners worry that once members save cards with one processor, switching means asking everyone to pay again. In practice, processors move card data between each other through secure imports, and Stripe documents how to request a payments data import from your current processor and how to bring subscriptions over from billing systems such as Zuora, Recurly, Chargify and Chargebee. Read your current contract for any notice period, and expect a handful of cards that need re-entering.

Myth 3: Lifetime customers cannot move to a subscription

If you sold lifetime access, switching models feels like breaking a promise. It does not have to be. A fair plan:

Keep every lifetime purchase valid for what it covered.
Introduce the subscription for new members and for new perks.
Offer lifetime buyers a discount on the subscription if they want the new perks.
Announce the plan in advance and answer questions in one thread.

Members accept change when nobody loses what they already paid for.

Myth 4: You can never change the price

Subscription prices can change. Most billing systems let you create a new price for new sign-ups while existing members stay on the old one, which is also a good way to thank early supporters. When you do raise prices for current members, give clear notice, explain what has improved, and make cancelling easy. A member who leaves on good terms may come back; one who feels trapped will not.

Myth 5: Renewals break all the time

Renewals fail for ordinary reasons: expired cards, bank declines, insufficient funds. Stripe Billing retries failed payments automatically on a schedule, using Smart Retries or one you set, although it does not retry hard declines such as a card reported stolen. Combine retries with a self-service page where members update their card, and a short reminder when a payment fails, and most of those renewals succeed.

What actually makes subscriptions work

The myths are about tools. The real risks are about value: charging for content you do not deliver, going quiet, or hiding how to cancel. Publish what members get each week, deliver it, and keep cancelling as easy as joining.

A simple test before you launch: write down, in one sentence, what a member gets each month that they would miss if they cancelled. If you cannot write that sentence, fix the offer before you spend any time on the billing.

To set up the plumbing, see subscription management for online communities and Discord subscription management. For the broader choice of income models, start with our pillar on how to monetize your Discord server.

How to Choose an Online Community Platform: 5 Tips

Jason Lee — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

An online community can sell your product, support your customers and keep people coming back, but only if it lives somewhere your members actually go. Picking the platform is the first decision, and it is hard to undo. These five questions, asked in order, make the choice clearer. They are part of our Discord membership platforms compared topic.

1. Where does your audience already spend time?

The best platform is the one your members will open without being reminded. A community of traders, gamers or developers is likely on Discord already. A professional audience may live in Slack or LinkedIn. A local audience may prefer a group on a social network. Ask ten of your best customers which app they open every day, and believe the answer over any feature list.

Moving people to a new app costs you members at every step, so meet them where they are unless the platform cannot do what you need.

2. How will the community make money?

Decide this before you choose, because it narrows the options:

Free community supporting a product: any platform works; pick for reach and ease.
Paid membership: you need a way to charge and to control access. On Discord, US owners can use Server Subscriptions, and anyone can sell through Stripe with a tool that gives and removes roles.
Courses or downloads: you may need a course platform alongside the community.

Our pillar, Ternary vs other Discord membership platforms, compares the paid options for Discord with their current fees.

3. What does it need to connect to?

List the systems the community must work with: your website, your payment processor, your email tool and your support process. A platform that cannot connect to your checkout forces manual work every time someone pays or leaves. On Discord, membership tools connect Stripe payments to roles, so access follows payment automatically.

4. How will you keep it safe and civil?

Growth brings spam and conflict. Check the moderation tools before you launch. Discord’s Community servers add Server Insights, raid protection, rules screening and onboarding, and require a verification level, an explicit media filter and a rules channel. Plan who moderates, write short rules and decide how you will handle the first serious incident.

5. Who owns the member data?

If the platform closes your account tomorrow, what do you keep? Keep your own record of members, their emails and their payments, outside the community platform. Payment processors such as Stripe keep customer records in your account, and a member CRM ties those records to each person’s community account.

Run a two-week trial

Before you announce anything, invite twenty of your most active customers to a small test space on the platform you prefer. Watch whether they come back without reminders, which features they use and what they complain about. Two weeks of real behavior settles debates that feature comparisons never will, and those first members become your hosts when you open the doors.

Putting it together

Question	If the answer is…	Lean toward
Audience	Gamers, traders, developers, creators’ fans	Discord
Money	Paid membership with automatic access	Discord plus a Stripe-based membership tool
Connections	Website checkout and email	A tool that links checkout, payments and roles
Safety	Large, public community	Discord Community server features
Data	Must own customer records	Your own Stripe account and a member CRM

Where Ternary fits

If you choose Discord and plan to charge, Ternary connects your website, Stripe and Discord: branded checkout pages, sign-in with Discord, roles added on payment and removed on cancellation, and a member CRM with dashboards. Basic is free with no transaction fee. For the step after choosing, read how to create a Discord server.

Why Use Stripe for Discord Community Payments

Jason Lee — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

When you start charging for a Discord community, the payment processor you choose decides how members pay, how renewals work, where your money lands and how much work cancellations create. Stripe is the processor most Discord membership tools are built on, and for good reasons. This guide explains them, with current prices, and how Stripe connects to Discord roles. It belongs to our Stripe and Discord topic.

Five reasons communities choose Stripe

1. Subscriptions are built in

Stripe Billing handles recurring charges, plan changes, invoices, trials and cancellations. You define a price once, and Stripe charges members on schedule. A failed renewal does not mean a lost member, because Stripe can retry the payment automatically.

2. One-time sales sit alongside subscriptions

The same account can sell a course archive, an event ticket or lifetime access as a one-time payment. Members see one checkout style, and you see all revenue in one place.

3. Members can pay the way they prefer

Stripe supports cards, digital wallets and local payment methods, and US bank debits through ACH at 0.8% capped at $5. Offering a familiar method at checkout is one of the simplest ways to reduce abandoned payments.

4. Pricing is pay as you go

There are no setup or monthly fees for standard payments. A US domestic card costs 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge; international cards add 1.5%, and currency conversion adds 1% where needed. If you use Stripe Billing on its pay-as-you-go plan, Billing adds 0.7% of the recurring volume.

5. Security and ownership

Stripe is certified as a PCI Service Provider Level 1, the strictest level in the payments industry, and its hosted checkout keeps card numbers away from your server and your bot. Payments land in your own Stripe account, so the customer records are yours even if you change tools.

How Stripe connects to Discord

Stripe knows who paid; Discord knows who has which role. Something has to link them. The usual pattern:

The buyer signs in with Discord on your checkout page, so their Discord account is known.
They pay through Stripe.
A bot gives them the paid role.
When Stripe reports a canceled subscription, the bot removes the role.

Ternary does this for you: a signup gate with Discord login, branded checkout pages, Stripe payments for subscriptions and one-time purchases, roles added on sign-up and removed on cancellation, and a member CRM with dashboards. Ternary is listed in Stripe’s Partner Directory. The detailed build options are in our pillar guide, Stripe Discord integration: how to connect payments.

Three settings to check in Stripe

Statement descriptor: use a name members will recognize on their card statement. Unrecognized charges turn into disputes.
Automatic retries: switch them on so a declined renewal gets more chances before the subscription ends.
Email receipts: send them, so every member has a record of what they paid and when.

When Stripe is not the right fit

If you are a US owner and want everything inside the Discord app, Discord’s own Server Subscriptions may be simpler, at the cost of a 10% platform fee and Discord holding the customer relationship.
If most of your members insist on a payment method Stripe does not offer in their country, check local coverage first.
If your business falls under Stripe’s restricted categories, you will need a different processor.

Quick comparison

Question	Stripe with a membership tool	Discord Server Subscriptions
Who holds customer data	You, in your Stripe account	Discord
Where it works	Wherever Stripe operates	US-based owners only
Platform cut	Your tool’s fee	10% after processing fees
One-time products	Yes	Server Products, in limited beta

To put this into practice, follow connect your website, Stripe and Discord in 3 steps.

Discord Server Management Tips for Paid Communities

Jason Lee — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A Discord server looks simple from the outside: some channels and some people talking. Running a busy one, especially one where members pay, is a real operation. These are the practices we have seen work in paid communities, grouped by the five areas that need attention. This pillar guide anchors our running a Discord server topic.

1. Channels: fewer than you think

A short, clear channel list makes a server feel active; a long one spreads conversation thin.

Start with announcements, rules, introductions, general chat, help and one channel per core topic.
Group channels into categories: Start Here, Community, Topics, Members (paid) and Staff.
Archive channels that have been quiet for a month, and merge topics that overlap.
Pin a short guide in each channel saying what belongs there.

Our guide on how to customize a Discord server covers naming and layout in detail.

2. Roles: match them to access

Roles decide what members see and do. Keep them few and meaningful: staff roles at the top, then bots, then member and paid roles, then cosmetic roles. Remember the hierarchy rule: anyone with Manage Roles can only change roles below their own highest role, and bots follow the same rule. When access and roles drift apart, members either lose channels they paid for or see channels they did not. See how to add roles in Discord for permissions.

3. Moderation: rules, people and tools

Rules: short, specific and pinned. “No promotion outside #self-promo” beats “be respectful”.
People: moderators on a schedule that covers your busy hours, with a private staff channel and a shared log of actions.
Tools: AutoMod blocks messages that match keyword lists or look like spam across text channels, threads and voice chat, and can send alerts to a private channel. Start with Discord’s ready-made lists, then add your own words.
Consistency: apply the same consequences to everyone, including long-time members.

4. Automation: take the repetitive work away

Repetitive tasks are where servers lose consistency. Automate them:

New members: Community Onboarding asks a few questions and assigns channels and roles from the answers, so newcomers see a relevant server, not a wall of channels.
Spam: AutoMod and a verification level appropriate to your server.
Paid access: a membership tool that gives the paid role when someone pays and removes it when they stop. Ternary does this with a signup gate using Discord login, Stripe payments and a member CRM. Read automate Discord server management with Ternary for the details.

Leave judgment to people: warnings, appeals and borderline calls.

5. Money: protect the paid experience

In a paid community, the paid area must feel worth it every week:

Publish a schedule for paid content and keep to it.
Answer paid members’ questions first.
Make the free side genuinely useful, because it is where new members decide to pay.
Watch cancellations and ask leavers one question about why.

A monthly review

Look at activity: which channels are busy and which are not. Server Insights covers eligible Community servers with aggregated statistics.
Read the moderation log for repeated problems and adjust rules or filters.
Check that paid roles match paying members.
Ask five members what they would change, and act on one answer.

The habit that matters most

Show up. Members stay where the people running the server are visibly present: answering, starting conversations and thanking contributors. Tools save time; presence builds the community. Even fifteen minutes a day of genuine replies does more for retention than any new channel or bot.

For the basics of a healthy free server, read how to make a good Discord server.

Subscription Management for Online Communities

Jason Lee — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Online communities that charge members run into the same problem sooner or later: the money and the access drift apart. Someone’s card fails and they keep their role. Someone cancels and still reads the paid channels a month later. Someone pays twice because they could not find where to update their card. Subscription management is the work of keeping those two things in step. This article is part of our paid Discord memberships and monetization topic.

What subscription management covers

A member’s life in a paid community has a handful of moments that need handling:

Sign-up: take the first payment and grant access.
Renewal: charge again on schedule.
Failure: handle a declined card without losing a member who meant to stay.
Change: move between plans or tiers.
Cancellation: stop billing and end access at the right time.
Record keeping: know who each member is, what they paid and when.

Payment processors such as Stripe handle the billing half. A new Stripe subscription starts as incomplete and becomes active when the first invoice is paid; later invoices renew it. The community half, granting and removing access, is where most do-it-yourself setups break.

Why doing it by hand stops working

With ten members, a spreadsheet and a weekly check is fine. With a hundred, the weekly check misses people for days, and each miss is either revenue lost or a paying member wrongly locked out. Manual work also hides patterns: you cannot see that most cancellations happen in the second month if nobody records when people leave.

Failed payments deserve their own plan

A share of every community’s churn is involuntary. Stripe Billing can retry failed renewal payments automatically on a schedule, using Smart Retries or one you configure, although it does not retry hard declines such as a reported stolen card. Pair retries with a page where members can update their card themselves, such as Stripe’s customer portal, and a short message telling them their payment failed.

What to look for in a platform

Billing tied to access. When a subscription starts or ends, the member’s access changes with no manual step. On Discord that means a role given on payment and removed on cancellation.
One record per member. Name, email, Discord account, plan, payment history and status in one place.
Self-service for members. Card updates, invoices and cancellation without contacting you.
Reporting. Active members, new sign-ups, cancellations and revenue over time.
Your own data. You should be able to export your member list.

How Ternary handles it

Ternary is built for paid Discord communities. Members check out on a branded page, sign in with Discord through a signup gate, and pay through Stripe. Ternary assigns their Discord role on sign-up and removes it on cancellation, and every member appears in a member CRM with dashboards and analytics. The Basic plan is free with no transaction fee, and Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. Since 2020 the platform has handled 182K transactions and more than $13.2M for over 100 clients.

Retention habits that help

Welcome every new member personally in their first week.
Publish a schedule so members can see what their money buys.
Ask people who cancel one question about why, and read every answer.
Reward long-time members, for example by keeping their original price when you raise prices for new members.

For the member and owner steps on Discord itself, see Discord subscription management. For common worries about switching to subscriptions, read 5 subscription management myths, and for models beyond subscriptions, our pillar on how to monetize your Discord server.

Automate Discord Server Management With Ternary

Jason Lee — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

When we first wrote about this in 2021, Discord had already grown far beyond gaming, and the owners of paid servers were spending hours each week on the same chores. That is still true for servers that run on spreadsheets. This guide lists the repetitive jobs in a paid Discord server and shows how to automate each one. It is part of our running a Discord server topic.

The five repetitive jobs

Checking payments. Who paid this week, whose card failed, who cancelled.
Adding roles. Giving each new buyer the paid role.
Removing roles. Taking the role away from people who stopped paying.
Keeping a member list. Name, email, Discord account, plan, start date.
Reporting. How many paying members, how many joined and left, what revenue looks like.

Add two jobs every server has, paid or free: filtering spam and setting up new members. Done by hand, these seven jobs fill an afternoon each week and still go wrong.

Automating the free-server jobs

Spam and unwanted messages: AutoMod

Discord’s built-in AutoMod blocks messages that match keyword lists or look like spam, across text channels, threads and voice chat, and can alert your team in a private channel. Turn on Discord’s ready-made lists first, then add words specific to your community. Our pillar guide, Discord server management tips, covers moderation in more depth.

New-member setup: Community Onboarding

On Community servers, onboarding shows new members a few questions before or after they join, and each answer assigns channels and roles. Members see the parts of the server that matter to them, and staff no longer hand out interest roles one by one.

Automating the paid-server jobs with Ternary

Ternary connects your website, Stripe and Discord, which covers jobs 1 to 5:

Payments run through Stripe into your own account, for recurring memberships or one-time purchases. Stripe reports every renewal, failure and cancellation.
Adding roles: buyers sign in with Discord through a signup gate and pay on a branded checkout page; the paid role is assigned automatically.
Removing roles: when a subscription ends, the role is removed automatically.
Member list: every buyer gets a record in the member CRM with their Discord account, email, purchase and status.
Reporting: dashboards and analytics show members, sign-ups and revenue over time.

The setup steps are in set up paid Discord subscriptions with Ternary.

Before and after

Job	By hand	Automated
New buyer gets access	Whenever someone checks	Right after payment
Cancelled member loses access	Often missed	When the subscription ends
Member list	Spreadsheet, often stale	CRM record per member
Monthly numbers	Assembled by hand	Dashboard
Spam	Moderators delete it after it appears	Blocked before it posts

Signs your server needs this

You find people in paid channels who stopped paying months ago.
A buyer waited hours for access and messaged staff about it.
Your member list and your payment list disagree.
Moderators spend more time deleting spam than talking to members.

If two or more sound familiar, the setup time pays for itself within the first month.

What to keep human

Automation should handle bookkeeping, not relationships. Keep these with people:

Welcoming new members personally in their first week.
Warnings, bans and appeals for borderline behavior.
Conversations with members who are thinking about cancelling.
Deciding what the community should offer next.

Getting started

Turn on AutoMod and onboarding this week; they are free and built in. For the paid side, Ternary’s Basic plan is free with no transaction fee, and Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee. You can create an account and connect Stripe and Discord yourself. To see how the bot behaves in detail, read Ternary’s Discord bot for automated membership access.

Should Your Business Move to Discord? Pros and Cons

Jason Lee — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Many businesses run a customer community somewhere: a social media group, a forum, a Slack workspace or an email list. Discord keeps coming up as the alternative, especially when customers ask for it. Whether to move is a real decision with costs. This guide sets out the pros and cons and a way to decide. For the case for Discord in general, see our pillar guide, why use Discord for business, and the wider Discord for business and creators topic.

The pros

Live conversation. Text, voice and video in one place, with channels per topic. Good for support, events and fast feedback.
Free to run. Creating and running a server costs nothing.
Control over the space. No feed algorithm decides who sees your posts; members see the channels they joined.
Roles and permissions. Separate public, customer, paid and staff areas cleanly.
Safety tooling. Community servers add raid protection, rules screening, onboarding and insights.

The cons

The sign-up step. People who do not use Discord must create an account to join. That costs members, especially older or less technical audiences.
It moves fast. Busy channels scroll quickly, which suits chat but not long, thoughtful posts.
No customer records. Discord shows aggregated statistics, not who your customers are or what they paid.
Moderation is ongoing work. A public server needs people watching it every day.

Signs you are ready to move

Your customers already use Discord, or ask you to be there.
Your community is conversational: questions, live sessions, quick feedback.
You can name at least two people who will moderate.
You have a reason for the move that members will feel, such as faster answers or live events.

Signs you should wait

Most of your customers have never opened Discord.
Your community is built on long posts that need to be found months later.
You need workplace features such as company-managed accounts.
Nobody owns the community day to day.

A five-step move

Build a small server. A short channel list, clear rules and roles. Our guide on how to make a good Discord server covers the structure.
Invite your core members first. Twenty active members make the server feel alive for everyone who follows.
Announce a date. Explain what members gain, post the invite link everywhere you are present today, and pin it.
Run both spaces briefly. Keep the old one read-only for a few weeks with a pointer to the new server.
Close the loop. Archive the old space and thank members who moved.

What it costs in time

Plan for a few hours a week from the person who owns the community, plus daily check-ins from moderators. The first month takes more: answering questions about the move, fixing permissions and welcoming people personally. Budget that time before you announce, because a quiet new server in the first week is a common reason members drift back to the old space.

If the community is paid

Moving a paid community is mainly about access. Members must keep what they paid for on day one. If you sell through Stripe, a membership tool can give each paying customer the right Discord role when they sign in with Discord, and remove it when their subscription ends. Ternary does this and keeps each member in a CRM, so you can check that every paying customer arrived. Its Basic plan is free with no transaction fee.

The decision in one line

Move when your customers are already on Discord and you can staff it; otherwise, start with a small pilot and let the numbers decide. Brands considering a larger rollout can read how big brands use Discord for business growth.

Discord CRM vs Bots: Why Member Data Matters

Jason Lee — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Discord communities run on bots. Bots welcome new members, moderate spam, hand out reaction roles and run games. They are excellent at actions. What they are not good at is knowing your members as customers. Once people pay you, that gap becomes expensive. This pillar guide explains the difference between bots and a Discord CRM, and why member data matters for paid communities. More in our Discord member CRM and identity topic.

Where Ternary came from

Ternary’s founder, Jason Lee, built his own paid Discord community to $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue in a matter of months. Running it, he saw community managers onboarding members with bots, tracking memberships in spreadsheets and taking payments through apps that knew nothing about Discord. Every tool did one job, and nothing connected them. Ternary started as the fix for that.

What bots do well

Moderation: filtering spam, warning or muting rule breakers, logging deletions.
Engagement: levels, games, welcome messages and reaction roles.
Automation inside Discord: scheduled posts, custom commands, role menus.

Our list of the best Discord bots covers the strongest options.

What bots miss

A bot sees Discord events. It does not see that a card was declined yesterday, that a member bought the yearly plan, or that someone who left last month was your longest-paying member. Discord’s own Server Insights will not fill the gap either: it shows aggregated, anonymized growth and engagement charts and deliberately prevents you from singling out individual members.

The result, in many paid servers, is three lists that disagree: the payment processor’s customers, the people with the paid role, and the spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays. Every gap between them is either a paying member who cannot get in or a former member still reading paid channels, and nobody notices until someone complains.

Three reasons to use a Discord CRM

1. You know who is paying, and who is not

A CRM keeps one record per member: their Discord account, email, plan, payment history and status. When billing and roles are connected, a member whose subscription ends loses the role, and a member who pays gets it, without anyone checking by hand. You stop giving away paid content and stop locking out people who paid.

2. You can see the business

With records in one place, the questions that matter become answerable: how many paying members you have, how many joined this month, how many left, and what revenue looks like over time. Dashboards built on that data show trends a channel’s message count never will.

3. You own the relationship

Discord accounts can be deleted or banned, servers can be lost, and members change their usernames often. A member list with emails and purchase history, kept outside Discord, means you can always reach your customers and move to another tool if you need to.

How to get one

Approach	Good for	Weak spot
Spreadsheet	A handful of members	Goes stale within weeks
General CRM (for example HubSpot)	Businesses with an existing sales process	Needs manual sync with Discord roles and payments
Discord-specific CRM	Paid communities	Built only for the Discord use case

Ternary’s member CRM is part of every plan, including the free Basic plan with no transaction fee. Members join through a signup gate with Discord login and pay through Stripe; Ternary gives the role on sign-up, removes it on cancellation and records the member. Premium is $100 a month plus a 3% transaction fee.

To see how member data flows between Ternary and your other tools, read Ternary integrations. If you are still at the free-server stage, start with how to make a good Discord server.

Why Creators Are Moving Their Fans to Discord

Jason Lee — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Creators have spent years building audiences on Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. Many now invite their most engaged fans to a Discord server as well. When we first wrote about this in 2021, we described Discord as a very well organized chat room, and that is still the heart of it. This article explains why creators make the move and what to know before you do. It belongs to our Discord for business and creators topic.

Reason 1: A space you control

On social platforms, an algorithm decides which followers see each post, and the rules change without notice. On Discord, members see the channels they joined. When you post an announcement, it reaches the people who chose to be there. You also decide the rules, the structure and who moderates.

Reason 2: Organized conversation

Think of the early chat rooms where hundreds of messages flew past every minute. Discord avoids that by splitting a server into channels and categories. A creator can have one channel for announcements, one for fan art, one for questions, a voice channel for hangouts and a stage for live Q&As. Fans find the conversation they care about instead of scrolling past everything else, and pinned messages keep the best answers from getting lost.

Reason 3: Fans meet each other

Comments under a video connect fans to the creator, rarely to each other. In a server, fans make friends, help each other, trade tips and create things together, often in channels the creator never planned. That community is what keeps people coming back on weeks when the creator posts nothing new.

Reason 4: A direct relationship

A creator on Discord can run a poll in a channel, hop into voice with fans, share work in progress and hear feedback in minutes. That closeness is hard to get in a public comment section with thousands of strangers.

Reason 5: Income from the fans who care most

Discord lets creators charge for closer access. US-based owners can use Discord’s Server Subscriptions, with up to three paid tiers and a 90/10 split after processing fees. Creators anywhere can sell membership through their own Stripe checkout with a tool that gives fans the right role automatically. Our guide on how influencers make money using Discord goes into the details.

What to know before you move

Discord is not a discovery engine. Keep growing on social platforms and point people to the server. Community servers that meet Discord’s requirements can be listed in Server Discovery, but most growth still comes from your own links.
It needs moderators. Recruit trusted fans early and give them clear rules.
First impressions matter. Use Community Onboarding so new members pick their interests and land in the right channels instead of a wall of options.
Keep it small at first. A busy server of a few dozen fans beats a silent one of thousands.

A simple starting setup

Create the server and enable Community features.
Make five channels: announcements, rules, introductions, general chat and one channel for your main topic.
Add a voice channel and schedule a weekly hangout.
Invite your most engaged fans first, then share the link publicly.
Decide later whether to add a paid tier, once the free server is active.

When you are ready to charge, Ternary connects a branded checkout, Stripe payments and Discord roles, so fans who pay get access automatically and lose it when they cancel. Its Basic plan is free with no transaction fee.

For a step-by-step build, read how to create a Discord server, and for the business case, our pillar guide, why use Discord for business.

How Influencers Make Money Using Discord

Jason Lee — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Influencers have built audiences on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat, but those platforms decide who sees each post and how much it pays. More and more creators move their most engaged fans to Discord, where they own the space and can charge for it. This guide covers how they earn there. It is part of our Discord for business and creators topic.

Why influencers bring fans to Discord

No feed in the way. Members see the channels they joined, so an announcement reaches the people who chose to follow you.
Real conversation. Fans talk to you and to each other in text, voice and video, which turns an audience into a community.
Income from fans, not ads. Platform payouts change with every policy update. A fan who pays monthly is a steadier source.

For the bigger picture of why creators make the move, read why creators are moving their fans to Discord.

Five ways influencers earn on Discord

1. Membership tiers

Fans pay monthly for a role that opens members-only channels. When Discord launched Server Subscriptions widely in December 2022, its example was Bella Poarch’s server, with three tiers at $2.99, $4.99 and $9.99 a month. Clear, cheap entry tiers with a step up for superfans are a common shape.

2. Exclusive content

Behind-the-scenes posts, early cuts of videos, drafts and process notes in paid channels. Fans value seeing how the work gets made.

3. Live sessions

Voice hangouts, Q&As and watch parties. They cost little to run and make members feel close to you.

4. Merch and drops

Announce limited merch to members first. A members-only window rewards supporters and creates real demand.

5. Brand partnerships

A defined, engaged community is attractive to sponsors. Label sponsored posts clearly and keep them in one channel.

How to set it up

Build the free server first. A welcome channel, rules, a general chat and one channel that shows what members get.
Choose how to charge. US-based creators can turn on Discord’s Server Subscriptions in Server Settings, with one to three tiers and a 90/10 split after processing fees. Anyone can sell through Stripe with a membership tool that gives each buyer a role.
Launch a founding tier. Offer early supporters a lower price for life. It fills the paid channels quickly.
Promote from your other platforms. Pin the invite in your bio and mention the community in content, with one concrete reason to join.

Ternary is one option for the Stripe route: a branded checkout page where fans sign in with Discord, pay, and get their role automatically, with the role removed if they cancel and every member listed in a CRM. Its Basic plan is free with no transaction fee.

Mistakes to avoid

Moving everyone at once. Start with your most engaged followers; a busy small server beats an empty large one.
Promising too much. If a tier includes weekly live sessions, run them every week, or change the tier before members notice.
Disappearing. Members pay for access to you. If you take a break, say so in advance and leave something for them in the meantime.
Blurring free and paid. Keep paid channels clearly separate, so members can see what their money buys.

Keeping fans paying

Post on a schedule, show up in voice regularly, and give members a way to shape what you make. Thank long-time members publicly. When someone cancels, ask one short question about why; the answers show you what to fix.

For more income ideas, see how to make money on Discord, and for the business side of running a server, our pillar guide, why use Discord for business.