Posted by ty on Apr 16, 2025
Today we’re so excited to launch our Beta update! You can see more about this announcement on our new Comradery News page. Here I am going to talk more about the new features and fixes found in this update.
Free Newsletter Support
The big feature we are launching is support for free newsletters for your supporters. Now those interested in following along with your project and getting updates can sign up for a free email newsletter with just an email address. This was a major requested feature by our Alpha Creators who were used to a feature set from other platforms like Substack or Ghost.
Users who sign up for a free newsletter who already have an account will have that free subscription associated with their account. Users who don’t have an account will be invited to make one, but a full account is not necessary to be subscribed to an email newsletter. Users who subscribe to a free email newsletter will also see a page inviting them to upgrade to one of your project’s paid tiers to support you financially, and if they say yes to that they will be taken to the normal checkout flow.
For the time being, there are no limits to the number of supporters who can subscribe to your email list, and there are no add-on fees. We do request that you have a paid tier available so when users subscribe to your paid tiers, some of that will be collected in dues to help cover the cost of sending emails.
To get started with this, enable the ‘Email Newsletter’ option on your Tiers configuration page in your Project Dashboard. There are two main ways that email newsletters can display on your Project Page, and this can be controlled with a toggle in the Configure Page menu. The toggle is called Newsletter-Style Project Page and is selected by default. When this option is toggled on and your newsletter is enabled, your Memberships will be hidden until a user types in their email address into the newsletter box. Once they do that, the paid memberships will show up in a modal window. If you toggle this box off, then both your memberships and the newsletter input box will be displayed side-by-side on your Project Page.
We are very excited about this feature, and will be continuing to improve it in the coming weeks and months. Plus, I am starting my own newsletter about co-ops and organizing if you would like to test out what the subscription flow looks like!
Overhauled Account Creation and Checkout Experience
A major element of getting subscribers to sign up and support your work financially is an intuitive and seamless account creation and checkout experience. We observed during the Alpha there were some significant points where users got confused or dropped off from supporting your project because the checkout process was unintuitive under certain circumstances. We took this information along with lots of feedback to redesign the checkout backend and flows. This affects both free subscribers to newsletters and also paying supporters who need to input payment information, and since making this change we have observed a significantly better experience for your customers.
Project Page Design Improvements
Design improvements across the site continue, the biggest area of improvement in this update is the Project Page and the various modes it can appear in. This is a huge landing page and the way that most new users interact with the site, so our testing on the user experience with this page will lead to changes across many parts of the site. In Beta we can support a lot of customization to fit your project, as well as various configuration options that can hide and display parts of the page that fit your project the best.
Other Improvements and Bug Fixes
Below are a variety of changes and improvements, several have been made in preparation for updates we will be announcing in the near future.
Better subscriber numbers
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Comradery will now track if subscriptions are not active and notify users on the site how to reactivate their subscription.
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Project subscription amounts will be reflected more accurately now. We are capturing more information so that we can better articulate subscriber numbers, amounts and other details that have to do with project supporters. This problem would affect your supporter and total payment numbers if a supporter's subscription lapsed or the invoice was unpaid, and certain other conditions around cancelled subs.
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Supporter lists on project dashboards now do not show redundant entries. Instead it will show the most recent subscription by a single person. If there are repeated entries, let us know, but this should not happen as it previously did.
Billing updates
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Re-subscription invoices will run a couple of checks before adding a subscription to an invoice. We check to see if the project has a connect account and other things. We also do a comparison check just in case there are any errors and the webhook needs to rerun again.
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We fixed "receipt" being misspelled in the invoice email - oops!
Checkout experiences
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Now if a project doesn't have a Stripe connect account associated to it, or if it's detached for what ever reason, you will not be able to subscribe to that project, or get billed for it. We now do a check to make sure that a project has all the checks before a subscription can go through. This better allows people to delete their Stripe accounts without worry.
Donation tiers
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Donation tiers are now taxable to align with Stripe compliance. This means all existing donations will now be taxed upon re-billing and new subscriptions.
New user experience for non-account holders
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Non-account holders are able to subscribe to Newsletters and subscribe (monetarily) to tiers. Both an account email and confirmation email is sent to them.
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Once a user without an account inputs their email, it is saved briefly so they can do more subscriptions across the site if they choose to.
Reset password page
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Reset password page renamed to "Set password" to allow non-account holders to "claim" their account as well if they haven't already. If an account exists, it will send a "reset password" email.
Post page
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No longer shows tiers on the post page.
Bug fixes
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Numerous small bug fixes around the site.
If you've been on the fence and think you're ready to join comradery, you can apply here!