As a food creator with a dedicated following on Instagram or TikTok, you’ve already done the hard part: building an engaged community that loves your content. Whether it’s your signature dishes, clever cooking tips, or fun kitchen moments, your fans can’t get enough. But if you’re ready to take things to the next level and actually get paid for the amazing content you’re already sharing, a membership platform could be the way to go.
Memberships and subscriptions are a fantastic way to offer your followers exclusive access to recipes, cooking videos, meal plans, or any content you’d exclusively like to deliver. It’s also a great way for your biggest fans to feel like the can support your content creation directly, and feel a bigger part of the community. The beauty of starting and owning your own real business with a subscription platform is it can really blossom into it’s own thing, generating revenue far greater than occasional brand deals.
Let’s take a look at some of the best membership platforms for food creators, breaking down the prices, pros, and cons of each.
The top and most common membership platforms are:
- Clubb
- Substack
- Patreon
- Member Kitchens
- Provecho
- Custom (like wordpress)
1. Clubb
Clubb is the go-to membership platform for food creators who want to offer premium, exclusive content to their fans. It’s specifically designed with food creators in mind, offering tools for step-by-step recipe guides, video tutorials, and a completely customizable experience so you can really grow your own brand.
Key Features
- Custom Design and Branding: Unlike other platforms like Substack or Patreon, Clubb allows you to create a fully branded experience that reflects your style with an easy custom theme editor.
- Built for Recipes: With Clubb, the experience is built around found. Easy step by step focus modes, ingredient check lists, shopping lists, step by step videos, meal plans - you name it, they’ve got it. And when your audience are really following you for your recipes - this is crucial. Not only that but you can build out your own search with custom filters and tags.
- Ease of Use: Clubb is incredibly simple to use, with easy customisation options too. Simply add your recipes, setup your custom theme and you’re away.
- Engagement Tools: Foster interaction through live cooking events, comments, and member Q&A sessions.
Pricing
- Clubb has a 10% revenue share for any revenue earned through the platform.
Pros
- Full control over your branding and design
- Specially designed for food creators with tools for search, step by step videos, meal plans, shopping lists. It gives you the ability to offer your fans the experience of the best cooking apps and websites.
- Extremely user-friendly, even for beginners
Cons
- Fewer third-party integrations compared to some other platforms
2. Substack
Substack is known for its newsletter-first approach, which can work well for food creators who want to monetize their content via email subscriptions. While it's not built for food creators specifically, you can still share recipes, tips, and personal stories through newsletters.
Key Features
- Newsletter-Based Model: Create subscription-based newsletters, sharing recipes or other content straight to your followers’ inboxes.
Pricing
- Substack takes a 10% fee on any paid subscriptions.
Pros
- Simple email tool
- Ideal if your audience is used to receiving email content
Cons
- Limited to newsletters, without a proper experience for cooking along with content or shopping from recipes and meal plans
- Very limited branding or design customization
- Limited website experience
3. Patreon
Patreon is one of the most popular platforms for creators of all kinds, including food creators. It allows you to offer tiered memberships, giving fans access to different levels of content, from recipes to live cooking classes. To offer any sort of decent recipe or meal plan experience, creators tend to have to create their own PDF files outside of the platform and then offer them for download. This can feel quite old school when there are so many great digital first cooking platforms now.
Key Features
- Tiered Memberships: You can offer different levels of access to your content, from basic recipes to premium perks like live events or private cooking sessions.
- Community Interaction: Patreon includes features for direct messaging and member engagement through comments.
Pricing
- Patreon takes between 8% and 12% of your monthly earnings, depending on the plan you choose.
Pros
- Tiered memberships offer flexibility for different content levels
- Strong community-building tools
- A well-established platform with a large user base
Cons
- Very limited design customization
- Not specifically designed for food creators
- Feels a bit clunky for sharing recipes or step-by-step instructions
4. Member Kitchens
Member Kitchens is a membership platform specifically geared meal plans that mostly works with Wordpress sites. The UX and design of the platform is a little old school, but it can be a solid option if your audience are less tech savvy and not as fussed about modern design. It can also get quite expensive.
Key Features
- Recipe-Specific Tools: Built for chefs and food creators, it makes sharing recipes, photos, and videos easy.
- Detailed Meal Planning Features: The platform is built around meal planning so they have lots of features around this.
Pricing
- Member kitchens is more expensive than platforms like Clubb, Substack and Patreon. For their launch plan, it costs $99 per month plus $0.99 per subscriber for your first 500 subscribers and $0.75 for your next 500 subscribers. That means at just 500 subscribers, you could be paying nearly $600 a month.
Pros
- Designed specifically for food creators
- Includes features for live cooking events and detailed recipes
- Easy to share multimedia content like videos and photos
Cons
- Limited customization for branding and site design
- Higher pricing tiers may not be suitable for smaller creators
5. Provecho
Provecho is another platform built specifically for food creators. It focuses on helping creators monetize their recipes and cooking content through personalized, recipe-focused experiences.
Key Features
- Recipe-Focused Platform: Provecho is all about food content, making it easy to share detailed recipes, cooking tips, and videos.
- Monetization Tools: Offer subscription-based access to your premium recipes and exclusive cooking videos.
- Mobile-Friendly Experience: Built with mobile-first in mind, it works great for audiences engaging on their phones.
- Additional features: Ability to add affiliate product links or downloads of ebooks helps you to keep things in one place.
Pricing
- Provecho has quite a high revenue share structure at 20% of revenue earned through the platform. Double that of Clubb, Substack or Patreon.
Pros
- Designed specifically for food creators
- Easy-to-use recipe tools for sharing step-by-step guides
- Focused on mobile-friendly experiences
Cons
- Lacks cooking focused features like checkable lists, shopping lists, meal plans, cooking modes and cookable videos.
- Expensive
6. WordPress & MemberPress (Custom Built)
For creators who want total control over their membership site, building a custom website using WordPress and MemberPress could be an option - just make sure it doesn’t get out of hand! By going custom, you get complete flexibility in terms of design, functionality, and user experience, but it does require more technical knowledge, time, effort and money to set up.
Key Features
- Complete Customization: With WordPress, you have full control over your site's design and functionality. MemberPress adds membership functionality to manage subscribers and payments.
- Plugins for Recipes: You can use plugins like WP Recipe Maker to create a recipe-friendly experience for your members.
- Ownership of Your Content: You own the site and all the content, with no platform restrictions.
Pricing
- WordPress is free, but you’ll need to pay for hosting (around $5-$50/month), and MemberPress starts at $179/year.
Pros
- Total design and functionality control
- Can integrate various plugins to create a custom food creator experience
- Full ownership of your platform and content
Cons
- More technical setup required
- Can be expensive depending on hosting and plugin costs as well as upfront and ongoing development costs
- Not a quick setup – requires time and effort to maintain
Conclusion: Which Platform is Right for You?
Choosing the best membership platform comes down to what’s most important for you as a food creator. Clubb offers the most food-focused tools, with easy-to-use features designed specifically for recipe creators.
If you want a very simple newsletter-style approach, Substack is a good option. If you're after tiered memberships and community-building with lots of engagement and chats, Patreon might suit your needs. And for complete control and flexibility, WordPress with MemberPress is the ultimate custom option, though it requires much more work and can be costly to get started and maintain if you’re not a developer.
If you want a platform that reflects your brand and is custom-made for sharing recipes and cooking videos, Clubb will be your best option..
Ready to take your food content to the next level? Check out Clubb to see how you can turn your passion for cooking into a thriving business today!
