Communities are coming to CheckoutJoy

Until now, CheckoutJoy has handled one part of your business: getting paid. Your customers check out in their own currency, with the payment methods they already use, and then they're handed over to wherever your course or membership lives.

We're now building the part that comes after the checkout. CheckoutJoy is getting communities, with courses inside them, so you can run a membership and sell access to it in one place.

Here's a quick look:

The idea at the centre of this is simple. A community works like any other product in CheckoutJoy. You can sell it on its own, give it away for free, or bundle it with a course so every student gets in when they buy.

Whoever buys it becomes a member. If their subscription ends or they get a refund, their access goes with it. You don't have to manage a separate tool with its own list of who has paid.

Spaces give it shape

A community is made up of spaces. Each space is a room for one part of the community, and you decide what those rooms are and who gets into each one.

A space can be open to every member. It can be by request, where members see it and ask to join. Or it can be by invite, where only the people you add can see it at all. You can cap how many people fit in a space, which is useful for small groups like a mastermind pod.

Inside a space you can set topics, so posts stay sorted. A feedback space might have topics for pricing, landing pages and product. Members filter the feed by topic and find what they're looking for without scrolling through everything.

A few ways to set it up

A course cohort. You sell a 12-week course with the community bundled in, so every student is a member for the length of the cohort. There's an announcements space, a space per module or skill, a space to ask the tutor questions, and a small opt-in space where students find a practice partner.

A coaching programme. You sell a six-month programme. Everyone shares a general space, and each group of six gets its own private, invite-only pod. Members can message you directly, but not each other, if that's how you want it.

A free community. You give the community away to everyone who signs up. Spaces are organised around what people come to do: show their work, get feedback, find a job. Later, you add a paid course for the members who want more, linked right inside the community.

What members do inside

Members write posts in the spaces they belong to. A post can have a cover image and attachments, so people share files, resources and wins, not just text. Others comment, reply in threads, react, and follow a post when they want to keep up with the conversation. Anything worth coming back to, they bookmark.

Each member also gets a home feed that pulls together the latest posts from every space they can open, so they see what's new in one place.

Outside the spaces, members can message each other privately, one-on-one or in group chats. You decide how that works for your community: whether direct messages are on, whether members can message each other or only you and your team, whether a first message arrives as a request, and how big group chats can get. Members can mute a chat or block someone.

Courses sit inside the community

A space can link to a course. Students open the course from the space where they discuss it, so learning and conversation happen in the same place and nobody has to jump between a course platform and a separate community tool.

Access still follows what people bought. If a course is part of the bundle, members open it straight away. If it's sold separately, it's there for the members who bought it.

You stay in control

You and your team can see and moderate every space. You can also make trusted members moderators, so they can look after the community with you.

For spaces where quality matters, like announcements, posts can be reviewed before they go live. Members can flag a post, comment or message that crosses a line, and it goes into a queue for you or your moderators to deal with. You can pin the posts that matter to the top of a space and schedule announcements ahead of time.

Run it by asking

The community comes with an MCP server. Connect Claude or another AI agent and you can set up spaces, invite members and manage posts by asking for it in plain language.

Sold through your local payment methods

This is where it all comes back to the checkout. Your community and courses are sold through CheckoutJoy, with your local payment gateway, in your customers' currency, with the checkout features you already have.

Under the hood

Communities run on Headless LMS, an open-source learning platform I've been building. It handles members, access, courses and progress, and the community is built on top of it.

Tell me what you need

Early access will be opening in November 2026, so if you're running a community, or thinking about starting one, I'd like to hear about it.

Especially if you've been looking for a community platform that works with the payment methods in your region.

Reach out to hello@checkoutjoy.com and we’ll get you started!