This guide walks you through setting up a recurring membership, step by step.
1. Before you start — what you need in place
Check that you have:
The Ultimate plan or a trial. The feature isn't available on any plan below Ultimate (including the Expert plan). If you're on a lower plan, you can upgrade in Subscription management (in the left-hand menu).
A connected Stripe account under Settings → Payments (the Payment methods section). You can't create recurring memberships without Stripe — every payment runs through it. You connect Stripe separately for each studio — even within a single organization, each studio has its own Stripe account, and therefore its own separate list of clients.
The feature switched on — Use recurring memberships under Settings → Passes and memberships.
The Administrator role. Only an Administrator can create and edit recurring memberships and manage individual client memberships (pausing, resuming, cancelling, switching variants, retrying a payment). A Manager can see the section in the admin area, but the system won't let them actually carry the action out. The basic instructor role has no access to these settings.
2. Switching the feature on
Go to Settings → Passes and memberships.
On that page you'll find the Recurring memberships section (below the Passes and Credits sections).
If it isn't switched on yet, flip the Use recurring memberships toggle.
Important: If you don't have a connected Stripe account, Zenamu shows a warning when you try to create a group, with a link to Settings → Payments (the Payment methods section). You can't create a recurring membership without Stripe.
3. How it's structured — groups and variants
Recurring memberships in Zenamu work on two levels:
Group (e.g. "Monthly membership") — defines the general properties: name, description, booking limits, visibility.
Variant (e.g. "Standard" or "Premium") — defines the specific price and billing interval.
A group must have at least one variant, but you can create several. The client then picks the one they want and can switch between them.
Examples:
Group | Variant | Price | Interval |
Monthly membership | Standard | €60 | every 1 month |
Monthly membership | Premium | €90 | every 1 month |
Yearly membership | Yearly | €600 | every 1 year |
4. Creating a group
In the Recurring memberships section, click Add your first recurring membership. The Add membership window opens.
Fill in the form:
Name — required. Clients see this in your public offer. For example, "Monthly membership".
Short description — required. Briefly explain what the membership includes (max. 255 characters).
Billing day — an important setting; see the separate article on the billing day.
Maximum number of bookings per day / week / month — optional. Fill these in only if you want to limit how many classes a client can attend with this membership. Leave them blank and it shows No limit.
Visible to admins only — tick this if you want to take the offer down temporarily. A membership hidden this way doesn't appear in the public offer and can't be bought. Existing members keep it. If you want to offer a membership to a few selected clients only, it's better to create a separate variant for them and archive it after they buy.
You fill in the first variant in this same window (see step 5 below), then click Save.
Tip: Booking limits (the maximum per day/week/month) are optional. Leave them blank to allow unlimited attendance. Limits are set at the group level — a client can only ever have one active membership within a group, and the limits apply to that one.
5. Filling in a variant
You fill in the first variant right in the window where you create the group (every group must have at least one variant). You add further variants later with the Add another validity duration button (see the section on edits below).
For a variant, fill in:
Renew every — required. How many intervals. For example, 3 + month = every 3 months. Most of the time you leave this at 1.
Interval — the dropdown next to the "Renew every" field: day / week / month / year.
Price — required. The amount you'll charge the client each billing period.
Currency — choose the currency (your studio's default is preselected).
Under the Advanced settings section, you'll find a few more optional fields:
Name — optional. If you leave it blank, the variant shows with just its price. Fill it in when you offer several variants in a group and want to tell them apart (e.g. "Standard", "Premium").
Short description — optional. A short summary of what makes this variant different.
Visible to admins only — tick this to hide just this one variant (the others in the group stay visible).
Click Save.
Interval example: Renew every 1 month means a monthly membership. Every 3 months means quarterly (the client pays once every three months). Every 1 year means yearly. Every 2 weeks means once a fortnight.
Limitations
Recurring memberships don't support a free trial period (a no-charge period before the first billing). Buying has two steps: first the client picks a variant and confirms the agreements (the Buy button), and only in the second step do they enter a payment card and pay (the Pay button) — so the first payment isn't taken until the card has been entered (or a prorated amount, if your billing day is set to a fixed day of the month). If the client's bank requires 3D Secure verification, the payment is taken only after the verification is complete — until then the membership sits in the Waiting for payment status.
Free variant (€0): If you set a variant's price to €0, the membership activates immediately when the client clicks Buy, and the card step never opens (there's nothing to charge). With a 100% discount code, the first payment is also €0 — but there the second step does run and the card is saved for future (full) payments; nothing is charged right now.
If you want to offer a "first month free" or a discounted first payment, use a discount code with a 100% discount (percentage discount = 100). For a recurring membership, a discount code applies to the first payment only — from the second payment on, the client pays the full price. This gives you a similar effect to a classic trial period. For the code to work with a recurring membership, it must have Recurring memberships ticked in the Valid for field — it's a separate checkbox, and ticking One-time memberships isn't enough for recurring memberships. More in the article Discount codes and recurring memberships.
6. Limiting a membership to selected classes
Just as with one-time memberships, you can decide which classes a recurring membership is valid for — for example, "This membership is valid for morning classes only" or "Only for classes with instructor Jan".
This restriction is set on the individual class, not on the membership.
7. Using a membership as a pricing option for a class
Once created, a recurring membership is available as a pricing option for classes — just like any other membership:
Open a template or a specific class.
In the Pricing options section, add a "Membership" price.
Pick your recurring membership from the list.
Optionally add a surcharge (e.g. "there's an extra €5 to pay for this class").
8. Order in the public view
You can drag and drop the groups of recurring memberships to order them however you want clients to see them on your profile. The new order saves automatically and shows to clients straight away.
Variants within a group are ordered automatically by the order they were created. You can't reorder them by dragging.
9. How memberships appear to clients
Once published, recurring memberships show to clients:
On the studio's public profile, in the passes and memberships section (unless they're hidden).
When buying a class, as a pricing option (if you've added a "Membership" price).
In the client's account after they buy — here the client sees the status and the next renewal date, and can manage the membership.
10. Editing an existing membership
Name, description, visibility, booking limits — you can edit these anytime. The change takes effect in the app immediately. The membership name shown in Stripe and on invoices syncs in the background within a few seconds of saving. For a brief moment after the change you may still see the old name there — that's normal.
Price — see the separate article on changing the price. A price change has a direct impact on existing members, and Zenamu warns you when you make the edit and offers different ways to proceed.
Currency — can't be changed while the variant has at least one member. A single client in any live status (active, awaiting start, paused, waiting for payment, unpaid) is enough, and Zenamu refuses the edit with the message "Cannot change the currency on a variant with active subscribers. Create a new variant in the target currency instead." So for a new market, create a new variant in the target currency instead. The old variant stays in place for existing clients.
Billing interval and its multiplier (e.g. every 1 month, every 3 months, every 1 year) — can't be changed while the variant has at least one member. The same rule as for the currency: one client in a live status (active, awaiting start, paused, waiting for payment, unpaid) is enough, and Zenamu refuses the edit with the message "You can't change the billing interval on a variant with active subscribers. To change the billing interval, archive the variant or create a new one." The reason: existing clients have the original price and interval locked in Stripe (Stripe can't easily change these on a running subscription). If Zenamu allowed the edit, you'd see the new values in the admin area, but clients would keep paying the old ones. The fix: create a new variant with the values you want, and move existing clients over to it gradually by switching variants (or wait for their current membership to run out).
You edit a variant from the actions menu (the ⋯ icon) in its row in the table. In the menu, choose the item with the pencil icon.
11. Hiding, archiving, and deleting
Zenamu offers three ways to take a group's or variant's offer down:
Hide from the public
You can switch on the Visible to admins only checkbox for both a group and an individual variant.
The variant or group stops showing to clients in the public offer.
It can't be bought.
Existing members keep it — payments keep being taken as normal.
In the admin area, hidden rows are greyed out.
This is the simplest and gentlest way to stop offering a specific variant altogether. Nothing changes for existing members, but no one places a new order.
If you want to offer a variant only to selected clients by arrangement, Zenamu has no direct path for that. We recommend: create a separate variant with a special price, leave it publicly available only for the time of the purchase, and hide or archive it right after the purchase. The client keeps it, but no one else can buy it.
Archive a variant
You can archive individual variants on their own (separately from archiving the whole group). You'll find the Archive button in the actions menu (the ⋯ icon) on each row in the table of variants.
What happens:
The variant disappears from the offer for new purchases — clients no longer see it in the public offer, so no one new can buy it.
Existing active members keep running on it — Stripe charges as normal until someone cancels on their own or switches to another variant.
In the admin area, an archived variant is greyed out.
You can restore it anytime from the actions menu (the ⋯ icon) → Restore.
When to use it: When you want to pull a variant from the offer for new purchases but let existing members run their course (a common scenario — updating your price list, replacing it with a variant on a different interval). If you have several variants in a group and only want to pull one of them, archiving the variant is cleaner than hiding the whole group.
Archive a group
If you want to pull a membership group from the offer entirely but keep it on record, use Archive. In the confirmation window you'll see:
"This membership will no longer appear in the public offer and can't be added as a pricing option. Existing memberships stay unaffected."
What happens:
The group (and all its variants) disappears from the public offer.
The group can't be added as a pricing option for classes.
Existing members keep their memberships.
In the admin area, an archived group is greyed out with an "Archived" tag.
You can only archive a group with no active members. If a group has active recurring memberships, Zenamu flags this and refuses to archive. First, every client must switch to another variant or cancel their membership.
Deleting a group
Deleting happens in two steps:
Archive the group first (as above).
Only then does the Delete button appear for the archived group in the admin area.
Once deleted, the group disappears from the admin area along with its history. This action can't be undone.
Important: Active recurring memberships block archiving too, not just deleting (a live membership means any of these statuses: active, awaiting start, paused, waiting for payment, unpaid). This is by design: we want to prevent a situation where the group is cancelled in Zenamu but Stripe keeps taking payments. You can safely delete a group only once every member has left or switched to another variant.
Watch out for variants with active members: If you want to delete one variant from a group that has active members, we recommend hiding the variant from the public first and letting existing members leave gradually, or switching their membership to another variant.
Common problems
You can't create a membership — Zenamu says Stripe is required. You don't have a connected Stripe account. You'll see the message "To create a recurring membership, you need a connected Stripe account. Please set one up in the Payment methods section." Go to Settings → Payments (the Payment methods section) and connect it. Without Stripe, you can't switch recurring memberships on at all.
You can't switch recurring memberships on — you're on a lower plan. You're on a plan below Ultimate and don't have a trial either. The feature isn't available on any plan below Ultimate (including the Expert plan). If you're interested, you can upgrade your plan.
"Can't delete — it has active members." The group has active recurring memberships. First let clients switch to another variant, or cancel their membership from the admin area. Only then can you delete the group.
"You can't change the billing interval on a variant with active subscribers. To change the billing interval, archive the variant or create a new one." The variant has at least one client in a live status (active, awaiting start, paused, waiting for payment, unpaid). Existing clients have the original interval locked in with Stripe. If Zenamu allowed the edit, you'd see the new values in the admin area, but clients would keep paying the old ones. Instead of editing, create a new variant with the interval you want; clients can move over by switching variants, or wait for their current membership to run out. You can then archive the existing variant.
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