How to Use Kartra to Sell a Membership With a Free Trial

The short answer: if you want members to try a course for 14 days before the first charge, do it on Kartra's Starter plan at $119 a month, because Essentials keeps 5% of every rebill, per the fees article: build the membership, connect Stripe, create a product that delivers the membership with a recurring price and a $0 initial payment, draft the sales page with Kartra AI and have a person correct it, test in Demo mode, then make one live purchase and refund it.

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The job: you have course or community content that people pay for monthly, and you want them to start without paying, be billed automatically after the trial, and lose access if they cancel. Kartra handles the trial, the access and the cancellation inside one product. For the platform and its plans, see the Kartra glossary entry.

Before you build:

1. Price the fee against the plan. For example, 100 members paying $29 a month bring $2,900; at the 5% in the Essentials fee article that is $145 a month, more than the $60 difference between Essentials and Starter on the plans page.
2. Start from the content you have. Recorded lessons, a welcome message you already send by hand, and your Stripe account. Video hosting and unlimited memberships start on Starter.
3. Agree the measure. Trial sign-ups that reach a first paid month, and average retention in days from the membership analytics. Note both for the first cohort before you change anything.

What you need

• A Kartra plan or trial. The trial page gives 14 days on any plan, with 1,000 emails; Starter is $119 billed monthly (checked on 26 October 2026).
• A Stripe account, logged in, in a second browser tab.
• A sales page and a thank-you page, built in Kartra Pages and published before the product.

Step 1: Switch on the privacy settings

If you sell in the EU, the UK or California, go to Settings, Account settings and click Activate GDPR & CCPA. Write the commercial message consent label and the terms label for your forms and decide whether each is mandatory, per the data privacy guide. Kartra's compliance tools stay off until you do.

Step 2: Build the membership

Go to Memberships, All memberships, click + Membership, name it, pick a sidebar orientation and a template, and click Create. The wizard's tabs cover settings, contents, comments, access levels, progress, a helpdesk link, the welcome email and basic automations. Open Contents and click Launch builder to add categories and posts, then Publish, per the membership guide.

Step 3: Send login details on access

In the Welcome tab, enable Send a welcome message and edit the email. Keep the variables {login_page}, {login_email} and {login_password}: the welcome email guide warns that changing the template removes them, so choose the template first, then write. Add yourself as a member to check the email works.

Step 4: Connect Stripe

Go to Settings, Integrations, click + Integration, choose Stripe, then Connect with Stripe, log in and pick the account, per the Stripe guide. Stripe also brings Apple Pay, Google Pay and Klarna to the checkout.

Step 5: Draft the sales copy with Kartra AI, then edit it as a person

First fill in Settings, Account settings, AI business settings: what you sell, to whom, and what makes it different, per the Kartra AI introduction. Then open the sales page, lay out the sections, and click the AI button in the left menu. Write a specific prompt, pick a tone and a language, and click Use Kartra AI; Regenerate refines, Accept content keeps, per the AI in Pages guide. Each run replaces everything in the area you ran it on.

Kartra's own guidance is to treat the result as a first draft and review it for accuracy. Here that means a person checks the trial length, the price after the trial and the cancellation terms against the product you are about to create, because those lines are what a member will hold you to. The Kartra AI FAQs add that prompts are shared with OpenAI, so leave member names and emails out of them.

Step 6: Create the product with the free trial

Go to Sales, Products, click + Product and choose Kartra membership as the delivery method, with the membership and access level the purchase grants, per the membership sales guide. In Pricing, choose Recurring, enter the monthly price, switch on Enable initial payment, and set the price to $0 for a period of 14 days, as the trial guide shows. Turn on delayed cancellation so a member who cancels keeps access to the end of the period paid for, per the pricing structures guide. In Pages, link the sales and thank-you pages, then Publish.

Step 7: Test in Demo mode, then live

Products start on a test gateway, per the products introduction, so open the payment processor module and select Stripe. Switch the product to Demo mode with the toggle at the top right, take the checkout link from Links and buy: check the contact record, the tags, the welcome email and the member login, per the testing guide. Demo mode sends nothing to Stripe, so finish with a live purchase on a real card, match the processor transaction ID in Stripe, and refund it.

Step 8: Check that cancelling removes access

Access granted through the product is revoked automatically when the subscription is cancelled. Access granted by a separate automation is not, and the access guide asks for a second automation to revoke it. Cancel your test subscription and confirm the login stops working when the period ends.

What Kartra's own guides warn about

• The test gateway left in place. No live payments until you replace it.
• A bump on two subscriptions through PayPal. The bump offer guide says the offer will not appear if both products are multi-pay.
• Revoking access without cancelling billing. Removing access does not stop recurring charges unless an automation does it.
• Swapping the welcome template late. It wipes the login variables.

A 14-day trial that lets you build the whole membership but send only 1,000 emails puts your real launch after the first charge, so build during the trial and launch on the paid plan you have already priced.

FAQ

Can the trial cost $1 instead of nothing?

Yes. The trial guide lets the initial payment be any amount, such as $1, before the recurring price starts.

Does a member keep access after cancelling?

With delayed cancellation on, until the end of the period paid for, per the pricing structures guide. Without it, access ends at once.

How many Kartra AI uses do I get?

Thirty a month on Essentials and 100 on Starter, per the plans page. Every Use Kartra AI or Regenerate click counts as one, according to the Kartra AI FAQs.