Who owns your member list? Patreon, Substack, Kajabi and others, checked

Two things decide whether your members are yours

“Owning your members” sounds like one thing. In practice it’s two, and platforms differ on both.

1. The list. Can you download every member’s email address, whenever you like, in a file you can open in a spreadsheet?
2. The payment relationship. In Stripe, which most creator platforms use, a paying member is a customer (their email and saved card) and a subscription (the price and the next renewal date). If both sit in a Stripe account in your name, another platform can connect to it and keep charging members on the same dates. If they sit with the platform, members sign up and enter a card again when you move, and some won’t bother.

There’s a third case. Members who subscribe inside an iPhone or Android app pay Apple or Google, and those subscriptions stay with the app store whichever platform you use. Our guide to app store fees vs web checkout covers the trade-off.

Platform by platform, as of 13 October 2026

Every answer below comes from the platform’s own help pages, checked on 13 October 2026, with the page’s own date where it shows one. Where the help pages don’t answer a question, the table says “not stated”, which isn’t the same as “no”.

Platform	Export member emails	Whose Stripe account takes the money	Can paying subscriptions move?
Patreon	Yes, as a CSV	None of yours: Patreon is the merchant	No; members rejoin
Substack	Yes, as a CSV (no names)	Yours, connected to Substack	Usually, through Substack support
Stan	CSV exports described, columns not listed	A Stripe Custom account Stan sets up and manages	Not stated
Kajabi	Yes, as a CSV sent by email	Yours, or Kajabi Payments with no Stripe account of your own	Your own Stripe: they stay there. Kajabi Payments: not stated
Uscreen	Yes, as a CSV	Yours, connected to Uscreen	Not stated
Memberful	Yes, with Stripe customer IDs	Yours	Cards stay in your Stripe; leaving not stated
Member Kitchens	Not stated	Yours, connected to Member Kitchens	Not stated; subscriptions are created in your Stripe
Clubb	Not stated	Yours (Stripe Connect Standard)	Yes, according to its switch page
Launch with Voyage (us)	Yes, at any time	Yours	Yes

Patreon

Patreon’s help article on exporting emails (updated October 2026) shows how to download a CSV of your members from the Relationship manager, filtered by paid or free and active or cancelled.

The payment relationship is Patreon’s. Its page on how payment processing works says “Patreon manages the actual exchange, thus making us the merchant”. No Patreon help page describes transferring paying members to another platform. Substack’s own guide to moving from Patreon has creators export the list, pause billing on Patreon and give members free access on the new platform until they subscribe again.

Patreon’s Creator Privacy Promise (dated 27 May 2026) matters too. It names Patreon as the data controller and the creator as a data processor, limits member data to running your membership on Patreon, and says that a creator who leaves Patreon “will securely destroy personal data” and has “no further rights to process Member Data”. Read it before you plan a move, and invite members to your new home while you’re still on Patreon.

One more detail from Patreon’s help: if you unpublish your page, memberships bought through iOS in-app purchase are cancelled without automatic refunds, while web and Android memberships are paused. Our Patreon alternatives for food creators guide covers where to go instead.

Substack

Substack’s help page on readers in the Substack app says “You will always own your readers’ email addresses and be able to export them at any time”, and its data controller page treats publishers as the controllers of their audience. The export is a CSV from the Subscribers page, though Substack notes it can’t include subscribers’ full names.

Paid subscriptions run through a Stripe account you connect from Substack’s settings, and payouts show there. That’s why paid subscribers can usually move. Two warnings. Substack’s Disconnect Stripe button refunds and cancels every paid subscription, so it’s the wrong button for a move; Substack’s help says to ask a human support specialist if you’re moving platforms. And Ghost’s migration guide warns that Substack keeps taking its 10% on existing paid subscriptions you bring across; Buttondown’s guide suggests asking Substack to remove that fee as part of the move.

Readers who subscribed in Substack’s iOS app pay Apple, and Apple pays Substack, according to Substack’s in-app payments page. Those subscriptions aren’t in your Stripe account.

Stan

Stan’s help pages say that when you connect Stripe, you set up “a Stripe Custom account that’s managed by Stan”, that you can’t connect an existing Stripe account, and that a Custom account has no separate Stripe Dashboard login (pages updated July and September 2026).

Stan describes CSV exports from its Customers and Income tabs (help page updated March 2026) without listing the columns. Its help pages don’t say whether subscriptions can move to another platform. They do say that cancelling your Stan plan doesn’t cancel members’ subscriptions: you cancel those by hand “or else they’ll continue to be charged”.

Kajabi

Kajabi exports contacts as a CSV it emails to you. The link lasts three days, and the export is capped at your plan’s contact limit.

Payments run one of two ways. Connect your own Stripe account, and Kajabi’s help says subscriptions billed there stay on Stripe and keep charging. Or use Kajabi Payments, which “runs on Stripe’s processing engine, but you don’t create or manage a Stripe account to use it”. Kajabi will move Stripe subscriptions into Kajabi Payments, but its help pages don’t describe moving them back out.

Uscreen

Uscreen’s People export (help page updated September 2026) includes each member’s email, plan and next invoice date. You connect your own Stripe account, “Stripe Billing is used to manage the subscription lifecycle of your users”, and your plans appear as products in your Stripe. Uscreen says that with active subscribers “it is not possible to simply disconnect your account and switch it”. Its help pages don’t cover moving subscribers to another platform.

Memberful

Memberful’s member export includes email, plan, auto-renew status, expiration date and each member’s Stripe customer ID, and payments go into your own Stripe account. One detail: Memberful runs the renewal schedule itself and charges the card stored in Stripe, rather than using Stripe subscriptions. So the customers and cards stay in your Stripe if you leave, and the export has the plans and dates you’d need to set the subscriptions up again. Memberful’s help pages don’t describe leaving.

Member Kitchens

Member Kitchens connects to your own Stripe account. Its Stripe setup page says that when someone joins, “a new customer is created in your Stripe account” along with a subscription, and that you manage payments “through your own Stripe Dashboard”. Its help pages describe importing members by CSV and a public API with read access to members, but no export, and they don’t describe leaving.

Clubb

Clubb’s switch page says it uses Stripe Connect Standard, so “the customer relationship stays yours”, and that “you can leave with your subscribers if you ever want to”. It moves subscriptions from other Stripe-based platforms with renewal dates kept, and for other platforms it signs members up fresh and lines up their billing date. We didn’t find a Clubb help page on exporting member emails.

What to check before you pick a platform

Ask these during a free trial or a sales call, and keep the answers in writing:

• Can I log in to the Stripe account myself? If it’s “managed for you” and there’s no Stripe Dashboard login, the platform controls the payment relationship.
• Is the Stripe account in my name, and does it stay mine if I leave?
• What does an export contain? Run one in the trial. Look for email, plan, status, renewal or expiry date and a Stripe customer ID.
• What does “disconnect” do? On Substack it cancels and refunds everyone. Find the equivalent before you need it.
• Does the old platform keep a fee on subscriptions you take with you? Ghost says Substack’s 10% continues unless it’s removed.
• What do the terms say about member data after you leave? Patreon’s are the strictest here.
• How many members pay through an app store? Those subscriptions stay with Apple or Google.

How a migration works

When members already pay into your own Stripe account

This is the easy case.

1. Export your member list from the old platform, with plans and renewal dates.
2. Connect the new platform to the same Stripe account.
3. Bring the subscriptions across. If the old platform used Stripe subscriptions (Substack, Uscreen, Member Kitchens), the new one can usually take them over as they are. If it ran its own billing (Memberful), the new platform creates subscriptions on the existing Stripe customers with the same renewal dates. Stripe’s Billing migration toolkit covers that second case.
4. Stop the old platform charging without cancelling the subscriptions. On Substack, that means going through support.
5. Remove the old platform’s fee from the subscriptions, and update the statement descriptor if it still shows the old platform’s name.
6. Email members a sign-in link, and watch the first renewal cycle closely.

When the platform holds the payments

On Patreon, Stan or Kajabi Payments, expect members to enter a card again. Stripe can copy customers and saved cards from one Stripe account to another, but only with the sending account’s cooperation, and Stripe’s documentation says it can’t copy subscriptions. Patreon’s payments don’t sit in a Stripe account in your name at all.

So treat it as a relaunch:

1. Export the list while you’re still on the old platform.
2. Build the new membership and give members a reason to move: free access for the time they’ve already paid, a founding price, or something new.
3. Announce it on the old platform with a clear date.
4. Pause or stop billing there so nobody pays twice. Substack’s guide to moving from Patreon uses Patreon’s pause billing setting.
5. Run both for a few weeks, then close the old one.

Plan for some members not to make the move. As an illustration only, assuming 20% don’t rejoin: 400 members on US$8 a month bring in US$3,200 a month, and losing 80 of them costs US$640 a month, or US$7,680 a year. Put your own numbers into the membership revenue calculator to see what a move would cost you.

How Voyage handles it

Launch with Voyage is how Voyage, a product and growth agency in New Zealand, partners with established food and fitness creators to launch their own membership business. Members pay into your own Stripe account, your member list is yours to export at any time, and if you leave you keep your domain, your Stripe account and your list, with no lock-in contract and no exit fee. We do the moving: where your current platform bills through your own Stripe account, members come across without re-entering their card, and where it doesn’t, we line up billing dates so nobody pays twice. If you add your own app, members can also subscribe inside it through the App Store or Google Play via RevenueCat; Apple and Google bill those subscriptions and take their commission. There’s no monthly fee: we take a share of sales, from 10%. See how Voyage pricing works, or the comparison page for the other platforms side by side.