Paid Discord server: layout, roles, how members pay

You already have people who want more from you: a course, trade ideas, coaching, early releases, a quieter room. You want one server where anyone can join and look around, and a part of it that only paying members can open.

The layout does that with one role. Everything a paying member gets is a channel the VIP role can see. Selling the membership then means selling that role, and ending it means taking the role off.

If nothing in your server is paid, the business community layout is the same idea without the members area.

1. Create two roles. Open Server Settings, Roles, Create Role. Name one VIP and one Team. Leave every permission off on both.
2. Create the Start Here category with three text channels: rules, announcements and how-to-join.
3. Make it read-only. Right-click the category, Edit Category, Permissions. For @everyone, set Send Messages to the red cross. Add the Team role and set Send Messages to the green tick.
4. Create the Community category with two text channels: general and introductions.
5. Create the Members category with Private Category switched on and pick the VIP and Team roles. Add two text channels, members-chat and members-resources, and one voice channel, Members Lounge.
6. Create the Staff category with Private Category switched on, pick the Team role, and add a team-chat text channel.
7. Give the Team role to your staff. Right-click a member, Roles, and tick it.
8. Take payment. Discord's own Server Subscriptions sell a role for you, but only to servers whose owner is in the United States. Anywhere else you take the money somewhere outside Discord, then give VIP to each person who paid and take it off when they stop.

Step 8 is the one that does not scale by hand. Past a handful of members you need something that watches the payments and moves the role for you.

• The VIP role must stay a plain role. Bond will not sell a role that carries a permission beyond an ordinary member's, such as Manage Messages, and it tells you which permission to take off.
• Bond's own role has to sit above VIP in Server Settings, Roles, or it cannot give the role or take it off.
• The server owner and anyone with Administrator can read the Members and Staff categories without paying.
• Put what members get in #how-to-join, and post the panel there or in a channel next to it. Someone who cannot see the Members category cannot see what is inside it, so the free side has to say it.
• Bond does not do free trials, coupons, PayPal or crypto, and it does not work out sales tax for you. If you need trials or coupons today, the fee comparison says which tools have them.
• A member who cancels keeps the role until the time they paid for runs out. A one-time purchase loses its role when it is refunded in full or disputed. On a subscription, the subscription's status in Stripe decides.
• Bond cannot refund a payment or cancel a subscription. Its key cannot do either; you do both in Stripe.
• Building this uses tokens from your weekly allowance. A free account gets 1M tokens a week.

Once the layout is built, selling the role is two things you do once and one sentence.

1. Install the Paid roles plugin. Ask Bond to, or add it on the dashboard.
2. Connect Stripe. On the dashboard's Paid roles page, paste a restricted key from your own Stripe account. The key goes on the dashboard only, never in a Discord message.
3. Say what to sell: @Bond sell VIP for $20 a month. Bond shows you the role, the price and what happens when a member cancels, and makes nothing until you confirm.

Bond then posts a panel with a button for the tier. A member presses it, pays on Stripe's page, and has the VIP role when the payment goes through. When their subscription ends, the role comes off and the Members category closes for them. Prices can be monthly, yearly or one-time, and you can sell more than one role.

The money goes straight to your Stripe account. Bond takes no cut; Stripe charges its usual card fee. You can try the whole thing first with a Stripe test key, where no real money moves.

• Sell the role: how to sell roles on Discord shows a real run, from the sentence to the member getting the role.
• Greet new members and point them at #how-to-join: how to make a welcome message.
• Give paying members a private way to reach you: how to make a ticket system in Discord.