Nobody Wants to Build on Rented Land Anymore

The fear is always the same, whether you run a yoga studio with a mailing list, a comedy podcast with a cult following, or a trade association with 40,000 dues-paying members. You open the account that quietly holds your entire audience, and it is still there. You exhale. Then you go back to building on land you do not own.

That fear - not features, not design, not even price - is the engine under a whole category of software most people never think about. Call it community software, membership software, or the slightly evangelical "own your audience" software. The names are dull. The numbers behind them are not.

Put eight of these companies in a row and they look like they belong in different stores. Patreon is where a musician collects a few dollars a month from a few thousand fans. Higher Logic is where a professional society runs the members-only forum nobody outside the industry has heard of. Discourse is a piece of open-source software a developer installs on a server. ToucanTech runs the alumni network for a boarding school in Surrey. They almost never mention one another.

Squint, though, and every one of them is selling the same sentence: the room is yours, not the feed's.

The pitch that connects strangers

The reason these companies rarely name each other is that they answer the same question for different buyers. A creator, an association director, a university advancement office and an open-source developer would never sit at the same conference table. But each has watched reach on a borrowed platform evaporate after a policy tweak, and each has drawn the same conclusion: renting attention is not the same as owning a relationship.

It helps to sort the field into camps. The tidy thing about this market is that once you see the groupings, the whole category stops looking like chaos and starts looking like a spectrum, running from "help me make money from fans" to "help me control every byte."

Where the money actually is

Start with the loudest camp, because that is where the totals stop sounding like software marketing and start sounding like an economy. Kajabi, the all-in-one platform for courses, memberships and email, said in August 2025 that creators on its platform had earned more than $10 billion, a milestone reached only a few months after crossing $9 billion. More than $2 billion of that was earned in a single year. The detail worth pausing on: Kajabi takes no commission on those sales. Every dollar of the $10 billion went to the creators, and Kajabi still runs a business on subscription fees alone.

Patreon reached its own $10 billion in early 2025, but the number means something different. That figure is lifetime payouts - money moved from fans to more than 300,000 creators across over 25 million paid memberships. Patreon does take a cut, which is roughly the point: it built a durable business by making the unglamorous tip jar into recurring, predictable income.

Patreon exists because of a mismatch its founder lived through. The musician Jack Conte was watching his YouTube videos pull millions of views while returning almost nothing in income, and the gap between the attention and the money became the entire company. That is worth sitting with, because it is the origin story of the whole category in miniature: attention on someone else's platform is not the same as a relationship you can bank. One is a number that goes up and down at the platform's discretion; the other is a list of people who chose to pay you.

Here is the Matt-Levine-shaped observation hiding in those two ledgers. Kajabi and Patreon report the same round number and mean almost opposite things by it. One is bragging that it keeps nothing; the other is proud of the flow it takes a slice of. Both are true, and both are marketing. When two competitors converge on "$10 billion" as the headline, you learn less about their finances than about which story the creator economy wants to be told: that the money is real, and that it is going to the people who make the work.

The forum that refused to die

Now walk to the far end of the spectrum, where nobody talks about payouts at all. Discourse was launched in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward and Sam Saffron - Atwood having already co-founded Stack Overflow. The legal entity has one of the better company names in software: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. The goal, in Atwood's telling, was to bring thoughtful conversation back to the internet, favoring clarity and civility over quick reactions.

NodeBB sits beside it, built on Node.js and able to run on Redis, MongoDB or PostgreSQL, using web sockets so discussions update in real time. Both are free and open source. Both companies make money the same slightly counterintuitive way: they give the software away and charge for managed hosting. What the customer is really buying is not code - the code is public - but the promise that someone else will keep it patched, updated and online. Peace of mind turns out to be the product.

There is a straight line from the 1990s bulletin board to today's paid creator community. Same instinct, better engine.

The boring middle is the sticky part

Between the creators and the coders sits the least fashionable and possibly most durable part of the market. Higher Logic runs online communities for more than 3,000 customers - trade associations, professional societies, nonprofits - which it says is the most in the association space. ToucanTech serves a narrower slice still: alumni and community teams at schools and universities, folding a database, a website builder, email, events and donations into one system, and quietly running communities for hundreds of institutions across the US, UK and Australia.

Nobody is going to write a breathless thread about association software. That is exactly why it works. An alumni office or a professional society is not chasing a growth curve; it needs the member directory to be there next year, and the year after that. Switching costs are brutal, contracts are annual, and the buyer values reliability over novelty. Niche, in other words, is a moat.

There is a pattern here that repeats across every camp. The flashy end of the market competes on features and vibes; the durable end competes on not letting you down. A school does not renew ToucanTech because it added a shiny feed. It renews because twelve months of alumni data, donations and event history live inside it, and moving all of that somewhere else is a project nobody wants to run. The stickiness is not a trick. It is the natural result of holding something the customer cannot afford to lose.

Patreon

25M+ paid memberships

Circle

17,000+ creators

Higher Logic

3,000+ customers

ToucanTech

300+ schools

Owning the deed

Circle and Disciple occupy the design-conscious middle. Circle, used by more than 17,000 creators, educators and brands and reported to have reached a valuation near $250 million after raising over $30 million, sells a premium, all-in-one home for paid communities. Disciple, founded in the UK in 2013 by Benji Vaughan, sells something more specific: a white-label, mobile-first app that carries your brand rather than the platform's. When a member opens it, they see you, not a logo bar reminding them whose software they are using.

That distinction - whose name is on the door - is the whole emotional pitch of the category, dressed in different clothes each time. A branded app, a self-hosted forum, a members portal, a course library: all of them are ways of answering one question. Who actually owns the room?

What you can take from all this

If you are building anything with an audience, the useful lesson is not "pick platform X." It is that the moat these companies dug for their customers is the same one worth digging for yourself: hold the direct relationship. The member email, the payment record, the space itself. When your reach depends on a feed you do not control, you do not have an audience so much as a lease, and leases end.

The second lesson is quieter, and it is the one operators tend to miss. The most enduring business in this whole landscape may be the one that sells peace of mind rather than growth. Discourse gives away the software and charges for the hosting. Higher Logic wins on retention, not virality. Kajabi grows by refusing to touch its creators' money. In a market built on the fear of losing your audience overnight, the durable product is the one that removes the fear - and that is a need which does not go out of style.