Members Area Free and Premium Tiers Built In
By Carl Riedel, Builder of CARL, Recovering WordPress Survivor
A few years ago, I went looking for a membership solution for one of my sites. I knew exactly what I needed: a simple free tier to build the list, a premium tier for paying members, clean login and logout, session management that actually worked, and content protection that didn't require a computer science degree to configure.
What I found was a plugin market that had turned a straightforward requirement into an annual subscription racket.
MemberPress: $179 a year at the basic tier. (I actually think it's closer to $199/year now) Paid Memberships Pro: $247 a year for anything beyond the crippled free version. Restrict Content Pro: $99 a year minimum. And that's before you factor in the WooCommerce integration you'd need to take payments, which is another plugin, another potential conflict, another thing to update, maintain, and worry about.
Every single one of them was charging you a recurring annual fee for the privilege of locking your own content behind a login on your own website.
I built CARL's members area because I just didn't want to help hostage, and I just didn't need all the "Bells and Whistles".
What's Included (Everything You Actually Need)
CARL's members area ships as part of the core system. No addon. No upgrade. No extra invoice arriving every January. It's just there, ready to use, from the moment you install CARL.
You get 2 membership tiers out of the box: free and premium. Free members get access to whatever content you designate for them. Premium members get everything free members get, plus whatever additional content you put behind the premium tier. The access levels are enforced at the file level, not by JavaScript that can be bypassed in the browser.
Every protected page gets a guard injected automatically when CARL generates the file. A visitor without a valid session gets redirected to the login page. A free member trying to access premium content gets redirected to your upgrade page. No configuration required. It just works.
Registration That Fits Your Business
CARL gives you 2 registration modes and you switch between them in Settings with a single dropdown.
Open registration creates the account instantly and marks it active. The member can log in immediately. This is the right mode for a free content site where low friction is everything. Someone lands on your page, clicks Join Free, fills in their details, and they're in. No waiting, no approval email, no friction between them and your content.
Approval mode creates the account as pending. The member can't log in until you approve them in the CARL admin. You get a notification, you review the application, you approve or decline. This is the right mode for a high-end training programme or a paid community where you want to vet who gets in.
2 modes. 1 setting. Switch anytime.
The Part That Took Me Years to Find Elsewhere
Here's what I could never get right with WordPress membership plugins: the subscriber and member systems were always completely separate. Someone joined my email list over here. Someone created a member account over there. They were often the same person but the systems had no idea. I was managing 2 lists, 2 sets of data, 2 sources of truth.
CARL connects them.
When someone registers as a member and their email matches an existing subscriber record, CARL links the 2 automatically. Your subscriber becomes a member. Your member is already on your list. One person, one record, one system managing both relationships.
That means when you're building your free tier, you're building your email list at the same time. Every free member signup is a subscriber. Every subscriber who upgrades to free membership is now trackable as a member. The list and the membership grow together because in CARL they're the same thing.
That's not a feature I've seen any WordPress membership plugin handle cleanly. Most of them treat it as an afterthought, a Zapier integration, or a £49/year addon.
Sessions That Actually Work
CARL's session management doesn't use PHP sessions. It uses a dedicated member_sessions table in your database, with SHA-256 hashed tokens stored server-side and a secure http-only cookie in the browser. Sessions last 30 days. Expired sessions are cleaned up automatically.
The practical result: members stay logged in across visits without having to sign in every time, logout actually works (the session is destroyed server-side, not just the cookie), and there's no session data floating around in PHP's default session handler where it can cause conflicts with other parts of your site.
NOTE: I must add here though, that your actual computer settings may change this behavior. For instance on MY machine, I have Windows, clear out ALL sessions when I shut down my machine.
It's the kind of session management you'd expect from a purpose-built system, not a plugin that was bolted onto WordPress as an afterthought.
The Templates Are Already Built
CARL ships with 5 members templates ready to go: login, register, dashboard, protected content layout, and logout. Each one handles its own logic. The login template processes the POST, validates credentials, sets the session cookie, and redirects. The logout template destroys the session and redirects to login. The dashboard template shows the member's name, their access level badge, and the members-only navigation bar.
You create the pages in CARL, assign the templates, generate the files, and your members area is live. The whole setup takes less than an hour on a fresh install.
Your Members, Your Data, Your Revenue
Every member record lives in your database on your server. Their email, their access level, their registration date, their last login. You own all of it. No platform holding your member list hostage, no percentage taken from your membership revenue, no terms of service that can change overnight and affect how you run your community.
When a member pays you, that's between you and your payment processor. CARL is not in that transaction. There are no platform fees, no revenue share, no per-member charges. You keep everything.
That's what membership should look like. Your content, your members, your rules, your revenue. Built in, from day one, at no extra cost.
Ready to build a site that can't be taken down by a student's plugin?
