As you know, my main goal when choosing membership software was an integrated, easy to use, hosted solution. Even though I am a software developer I wanted to focus on the business – marketing, creating content, interacting with members, testing new products, email marketing, etc.

At the time I chose Extreme Member (within the last year), there weren’t a lot of great options out there. The one option I wanted to avoid was downloading all the individual software products (membership software, forums, affiliates, email autoresponders) and trying to get them to work nicely together. Extreme Member (EM) has all this built in which is very cool.

I originally was paying $99/month and with only a few members I was losing money every month. Then I discovered EM had set up different levels and so I downgraded to $49/month but lost the affiliate package. Nothing much had been happening with affiliates and no one was using the forums I had created. Lesson learned – you don’t necessarily need all the bells and whistles up front.

I also started wanting to sell individual products. Not everyone likes the idea of paying every month so I wanted to provide this option. Unfortunately, EM creates a subscription in paypal for individual products (a one time 5 year subscription) which works but is technically not what I want. It also creates a username/password which is often unnecessary for one-time purchases.

Then a couple months ago, I noticed my site was down. After emailing support and waiting a few hours I heard nothing. I checked the time in Australia (where EM is based) and it was during the sleeping hours. So then I tweeted the founder to get attention (some people don’t respond to emails and support was off duty). Eventually, the next morning they went to work to solve the problem. I got an email saying they would make sure it didn’t happen again and created some systems to monitor the servers.

A few weeks later it was down again for a shorter period of time. At some point the founder must have discovered my original tweet because I got scolded for trying to contact him via Twitter about the issue. Probably because this is a publicly accessible tweet that might make EM look bad. Lesson learned – make sure the company you hire has ’service-level agreements’ guaranteeing a certain level of service. Also many of these software companies are not true development shops, but entrepreneurs who have created software for their own purposes and decided to offer it to the general public. Managing software development releases is tricky business, but in general there haven’t been any other major problems.

After the scolding for trying to get my website back up and running which really angered me, I decided to find another solution. I took a look at Wishlist Member and it is a plugin that works with wordpress. Since EM was based on wordpress and I am very familiar with Wordpress, this would be an excellent choice. The beauty of WL is that it’s a one-time purchase. I have much less fear about wordpress plugins (from a maintenance perspective) because plugins usually work very well with no issues.

WL integrates with getresponse.com so the email is covered. I’m not too concerned about forums or affiliate software. For any product requiring affiliates you can either add your product to clickbank (or other affliate networks), or set up an affiliate program using 1ShoppingCart.