Learning membership overview
Note: Learning membership is metered by plan — courses, video storage, streaming minutes and live-broadcast minutes all scale by tier, and it isn't available on Free or Starter. See pricing for each tier's allowance.
Learning membership turns your account into a paid course platform: a catalog of video lessons plus occasional live sessions, gated behind a recurring subscription and browsed by subscribers inside a real logged-in portal — closer to a Teachable or Podia than a single interactive email. It's a deliberately separate feature from the studio's Product block: Product is a one-time Buy Now checkout for a single item; Learning membership is an ongoing membership with its own catalog, video hosting, and billing that renews on its own.
The two sides
You (the creator/owner). From Courses in the dashboard (/dashboard/courses), you create courses and lessons, upload lesson video, and set up one or more recurring subscription plans. From Live (/dashboard/live), you schedule and run live sessions — either for your paying subscribers, or opened up as a public webinar with no subscription required. Ordinary MailInApp campaigns — a Countdown block, a button — announce new lessons and upcoming live sessions to your list, same as any other email you'd send.
Your subscribers. A subscriber never gets a MailInApp account in the sense a teammate would — no Firebase Auth sign-in, no password. They sign in to your portal at /learn/<slug> with a one-tap magic link emailed to them, browse your published course catalog, watch lessons, and join live sessions, all gated by whether their subscription is currently active.
This is the same "don't conflate recipient concepts that only superficially look alike" discipline the rest of MailInApp follows: a Subscriber is not a TeamMember (your own staff), not an InboxAccount (a recipient's own synced Gmail in the unrelated native inbox feature), and not a plain email recipient row. Each is its own identity, resolved by its own check.
What's built in vs. what you bring
| Piece | Built into MailInApp | You bring |
|---|---|---|
| Course/lesson catalog, ordering, lesson notes | Yes | Your own video files and written notes |
| Video upload → transcoding → private streaming | Yes (an in-house pipeline, not a 3rd-party video host) | — |
| Lesson comprehension checks | Yes — a scored quiz per lesson | Your own questions/answers |
| Per-subscriber watch progress | Yes | — |
| Member portal (catalog, lesson pages, sign-in) | Yes, at /learn/<slug> | Your own portal URL slug |
| Recurring billing | Yes — Stripe Subscriptions on your own connected account | A Stripe account connected under Settings → Payments |
| Live streaming with chat & Q&A | Yes — ingest via RTMP, HLS playback, moderated chat/Q&A | Your own streaming software (OBS or similar) pointed at the ingest URL |
| Public webinar registration | Yes — signup, waitlist, join links, reminders | — |
| Cross-instructor marketplace / discovery | Not built | — (each account runs its own private-label membership; there's no shared platform-wide catalog) |
Getting started
- Claim your portal URL under Settings → Membership — this is the
<slug>in/learn/<slug>, claimed the same way a sender profile handle is. - Create your first course and lessons under Courses, lessons & video, and publish it once it's ready — publishing is what makes it visible in the catalog, separate from just saving it.
- Set up at least one recurring plan under Member portal & subscription billing — this requires a connected Stripe account.
- Optionally schedule a live session under Live sessions & webinars, for your subscribers or opened to public registration.
- Announce it with an ordinary campaign — a Countdown block pointed at a live session's start time, or a button linking to
/learn/<slug>/subscribe?plan=<id>.