When phones arrived, everyone said websites were finished. What happened is that people added an app and kept selling the same thing. Micah Mitchell calls AI the new mobile: you add a component, and the core of the offering stays the same. Running Memberium for a decade and sorting support tickets sits behind the comparison.
Micah gets into the role AI actually plays in a membership, a support load it keeps shrinking, and a migration he tried to force on himself and never finished.
AI for Membership Sites: What Actually Changes
“The content is the content,” Micah says, whether it reaches a member through an app, a website, or a mailed VHS tape. He owns one of those tapes, a how-to-get-rich-on-the-internet bootcamp, and going back to it the advice still holds up. Create content, build an audience, become an authority.
The operators he knows augmented instead. Some saw a way to produce content differently, or faster, and took it.
His clients did raise the obvious worry early, that someone could point a model at a successful membership and tell it to duplicate the business. On the surface it can produce a site and something resembling the videos. Then a customer turns up with a question. “That's when it gets real.”
So the AI question for an operator: which parts of the operation can a model carry, and which parts still need a person?
The Community Became the Core
The bigger shift Micah has watched has nothing to do with the technology.
Live came back. Zoom sessions, in-person meetings, mastermind groups. He describes operators doing what would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when the whole design goal was to build the content and the systems well enough that you never had to appear. Now people launch one small mastermind, then another, then another, scaling by multiplying groups instead of removing themselves from them.
“It might have flipped where the content was core, the community was supplemental. Now it's almost like the community is core, the content is supplemental.”
The buying logic underneath is simple enough. A member can ask AI a question and get the same answer as everyone else. What no model gives them is the person they came to model, and the Q&A moment where someone who has seen the problem a thousand times asks follow-up questions and lands on the actual issue. That moment is what the subscription is for.
When Members Would Rather Ask a Bot
Micah's framing for this is texting. You could call a friend, but you do not want to bother them, or bother yourself, and they might not pick up. So you text instead. AI sits in roughly that position for a lot of people: less commitment, less friction, lower stakes.
He has a case of his own. Dealing with something on his Amex account a few months ago, he opened the app, hit contact, landed on an AI and assumed it would be useless. It knew his private data. It named the transaction he was asking about, offered what it probably meant, and asked whether he wanted them to act on it. Done, in less time than it takes to start working through a phone tree.
The same convenience logic runs inside a membership. Someone with a question about the content is not going to watch a hundred videos to find the answer, and asking is faster than hunting. Memberium runs AI as first-level support on its own site. The bot knows the documentation, which means it knows what is supposed to happen. When something is actually broken, it has no idea, and the ticket goes to a person.
Support Turned Into the Scarce Thing
Vic raised a pattern he has been noticing with some of the larger plugin companies. Reach their support with anything past the basics and the answer stays superficial.
Micah's explanation is economic. A company with thorough documentation and a public API has little incentive to staff deep support, because a customer can now hand the docs to Claude along with their site details and get a decent troubleshoot back. For a basic issue that works fine. For anything outside the basics it becomes, in his words, the most frustrating experience ever.
Memberium's counter-position is unglamorous. They answer personally. Micah described a video call the day before the recording with a long-time customer whose fix was running late during a launch, made mostly so he could say he was sorry and that he understood what the bug was costing him. The fix landed a couple of hours later.
The difference shows up most clearly when the problem is not theirs. Customers write in saying they contacted some other plugin company and never heard back, then ask whether Memberium can fix it anyway. “It's not even our plugin,” Micah said. “And we're like, yes, actually we do. Here you go, here's the fix.”
Support volume keeps dropping regardless, as the bot absorbs the routine questions, which leaves the humans more available rather than less. Micah has thought a few times that they could possibly sell support on its own, unbundled from the plugin, for any WordPress membership stack. He calls the idea a little bit risky. His reasoning is that someone sufficiently technical can look at almost anything and solve it, and that a human on the other end of the line has become scarce enough that people would pay for that alone.
What You're Actually Paying a Plugin Company For
Vic's prediction: the small WordPress plugins that do one simple thing are heading for obsolescence, because a prospective buyer will reasonably decide to spend thirty minutes with AI and get something workable instead.
Micah largely agrees, then adds the wrinkle that makes it interesting for bigger tools. Memberium is a toolbox. Some customers use five percent of it, some twenty, and he will guarantee nobody uses half. Nobody is going to vibe-code a replacement for the whole thing. Plenty of people could replicate the two percent they actually touch, and one of his own partners, who had built hundreds of sites on Memberium, did exactly that on a personal project.
Two costs follow that decision, and the code is neither of them.
The first is security. A non-technical person can produce something that works, declare it done, and ship a vulnerability onto their site without ever knowing. AI will help patch that too, if you know to ask what a WordPress-specific attack looks like. Knowing to ask is the whole problem.
The second is maintenance. Anything homegrown has to keep working as WordPress updates and as every plugin around it updates. Micah said some Memberium plans run around $77 a month, which is a low bar for handing that entire category of work to somebody else. Then he named the cost nobody prices in:
“When your vibe-coded thing breaks mid-launch, who do you talk to about that?”
Vic frames the decision as who-not-how. Grant that you could vibe-code the patch. The open question is whether your hours are better spent there than with someone who already understands what sits underneath and can see the compatibility problem coming. Both agreed: a developer using AI is dangerous in a good way. Someone untrained using it has no way to judge the output, and that is where the exposure lives.
The Switching Test
Vic describes the impulse plainly: this thing has a flaw, so let's ditch it and go to the other thing, because the other thing is new and exciting and has promise. MemberFix talks people out of it regularly, including clients well along in their business.
The example he gave was a client who wanted to move, so MemberFix installed BuddyBoss for their community. The client then discovered BuddyBoss has no native way to reply to a forum post by email, which their previous app had. That single gap was enough that they started considering leaving WordPress altogether.
Before agreeing to any migration, MemberFix asks three questions:
- Is this preventing you from growing to the next level in any serious way?
- Is it causing you, your team, or your members substantial headaches that cannot be remedied?
- Could we build a solution on top of what you already have?
In the exchange Vic described, the answers came back no, no, and yes. Knowing that rarely settles it. “We're in such a dopaminergic age” that the logic registers and the pull stays anyway. The other platform still just looks cool.
Then Micah shared his own experience. Last summer he bought a HighLevel account, expecting the purchase itself to force the migration he had been circling for a while. He got as far as the stored credit cards on Keap, which would not move out under PCI compliance the way he had set them up, and stalled. He now mails from three systems depending on what he is sending.
“It's not HighLevel's fault, it's my fault. But you know, the shiny object didn't solve my problems somehow.”
He is careful not to turn it into a rule. His own mentor moved from Keap to Zoho a year or so ago and is delighted with it, because it genuinely suits his business better. Moving helps when the current solution does not fit. The trap is moving because something newer exists.
Where the AI Coach Earned Its Place
Memberium's AI product started as an event demo. Micah's team vibe-coded a plugin that connects a membership site to OpenAI, indexes the site's own material, and puts a chatbot inside the member area. The original idea was a box under a video where a member could ask how the content applied to them as a painter or a plumber.
The use that surprised him was search.
Because the plugin indexes video transcripts, a member can ask something specific and get pointed to minute 16:40 of a particular video in a particular module, plus the two other places it comes up. WordPress site search does not usually reach inside transcripts, so that library was close to unsearchable before. Micah's hypothetical is a member in med school with a question about an employment contract with the hospital, who would otherwise be guessing which of a hundred videos covers it.
Two implementation details are worth stealing.
One is layered prompting. Site-wide instructions set general behaviour, then each page carries a further instruction of its own. Micah's example: on this page, whatever they ask, bring them back to the homework. That's a great question, we'll get to it, right now you need to write down your ten.
The other is memory. Onboarding answers are written into the WordPress users table, so when the member returns and asks something new, the assistant already knows what they said the first time.
What his team got wrong is the instructive part. They built it expecting site owners to opt individual pieces of content into the index and place a chatbot under specific videos, on the assumption that a member on module one wants to discuss module one. Customers wanted the whole site indexed and a chat bubble in the corner everywhere, because a member sitting in module one asks whatever module one triggered, which is usually about something else entirely.
Vic added a MemberFix client outcome. The client runs a membership in a technical field with real compliance considerations, and she was losing hours every day to answering member questions by email, with nothing left over for the business. Training a chatbot on her content took the repetitive questions off her, and members can still escalate to her directly when they want a person. She grew the site with the time it gave back.
What Membership and eLearning Operators Can Take From This
Micah Mitchell sells software to membership operators, so he has a stake in them staying put. What makes the argument hold is that he applies it against himself, in public, about a purchase he regrets.
Three things transfer directly.
Ask the three questions before you commit to a migration. Growth blocked, real headaches, can we build on top. If the first two come back no and the third comes back yes, the case for moving is aesthetic.
Price the maintenance, not the build. AI will produce the function you need. It will not own the security updates, the WordPress compatibility, or the 9pm phone call during a launch. Whoever builds the thing inherits all three, permanently.
Point AI at your own content before you point it at your members' questions. The win that landed hardest with AI for membership sites was search. A member finding the exact minute of the exact video that answered their question, inside a library they had already paid for.
None of that requires rebuilding anything. Which is roughly Micah's point about mobile.
Micah Mitchell is the co-founder and CEO of Memberium, which connects WordPress membership sites to Keap and ActiveCampaign. You can find him at https://memberium.com/
Running a Membership or eLearning Platform on WordPress?
MemberFix provides managed WordPress operations for membership, eLearning, and community platforms — so your team never has to worry about the tech breaking during a launch or losing members to site issues. We handle development, support, updates, and monitoring with SLA-backed guarantees. Trusted by industry leaders like Echelon Front, TechServe Alliance, and hundreds of others since 2014.
About MemberFix Radio:
We interview experts and share insights for membership site owners and subscription business leaders building sustainable, profitable recurring revenue models.
