Lifetime Membership Plan Optoin for CBSubs

Hello,

I have a question about setting up a lifetime plan on CBSubs. I am looking at setting up a membership site where some members qualify as lifetime members. However, in order to control access it it, I think I may need to look at is a manual process to "upgrade" them as I do not necessarily need to see lifetime as an option on the front end.

I have a couple of ideas on how to possible do this.

1) Create a lifetime plan and enable it, which I assume becomes visible on the front end. I then have the member register and give them one time use coupon code which they can redeem for access to the lifetime plan

2) Create a lifetime plan and if necessary don't enable it (only to hide it from the front end). Once the member has registered, manually place them in the lifetime plan in the back-end.

Any ideas of the best approach to this?

Incidentally, the other plans proposed are:

Single member ($20/year)
Household member ($40/household/year)

Thanks!

1) Create a lifetime plan and enable it, which I assume becomes visible on the front end. I then have the member register and give them one time use coupon code which they can redeem for access to the lifetime plan

2) Create a lifetime plan and if necessary don't enable it (only to hide it from the front end). Once the member has registered, manually place them in the lifetime plan in the back-end.

Any ideas of the best approach to this?

Both of those are doable. For a lifetime plan simply set the duration to "Lifetime subscription" under the Pricing tab.

Conditioning against a coupon code isn't really an option though so what you'll need is a separate database table to store those codes. Next you'll need CB Query Field and a Text field with Query Validation configured to query against your code database. This should let you validate the value they supply to the text field against the available codes in your custom table to see if it's valid. If it is valid it'll of course be able to store in the field and you can condition that field in your plan under the Workflow tab.

As for a backend only plan adjust "Allow access from site frontend" as needed under the Access tab of your plan.

Thanks for the quick reply Kyle.

I'll opt for the simplest approach for the end user. Sounds like the coupon option is too complex to set up.

Ideally I would want the member to register to get them in the database but not have to worry about them paying anything as they qualify for a free lifetime plan.

In this case would I need to create a temporary "free" plan (no real access) so they are registered and then manually move them to the proper free lifetime plan (full content protected access).

By the way I also want to be able to have another plan for all other users where they would pay (eg $20./year) so the registration process needs to accomodate them as well.

I suppose I can also set (I believe its a global setting) that activation needs to be approved by admin but that could be time consuming for those that are regular sign-ups where they can access by simply paying.

In this case would I need to create a temporary "free" plan (no real access) so they are registered and then manually move them to the proper free lifetime plan (full content protected access).

Yes, you could have a free plan with limited access for you to move them from. To limit the access of the free plan be sure to protect various content with your paid plans or create usergroups to give them under the Access tab of your plans then limit access to content based off those usergroups.

By the way I also want to be able to have another plan for all other users where they would pay (eg $20./year) so the registration process needs to accomodate them as well.

That shouldn't be a problem. So for example you'd have the below plans.

Plan 1 - free lifetime, exclusive
Plan 2 - free lifetime, exclusive, backend only
Plan 3 - $20/yr, exclusive
Plan 4 - $40/yr, exclusive

They can only be subscribed to 1 of those plans at a given time. They'd start in Plan 1 and then you could move them to Plan 2 as needed.

I suppose I can also set (I believe its a global setting) that activation needs to be approved by admin but that could be time consuming for those that are regular sign-ups where they can access by simply paying.

Yes, you could enable admin approval if you like but I recommend setting admin approval to happen before payment under the Workflows tab of your plan.

Thanks, Kyle.

So to clarify (using your example - "Plan 2 - free lifetime, exclusive, backend only", where I would move member to it manually from Plan 1), to hide it as an option on the front end is it just a matter of disabling it or is there some other way I should set it?

To make it backend only you'd set "Allow access from site frontend" to "No: this plan is not visible in site, only in admin backend" under the Access tab of your plan. You can then give the plan to them by editing them in CB > User Management.