Membership Subscriptions

[lkngtn]

A handful of ideas, proposals, and proof of concepts have been floating around that generally seek to address a similar need to establish a membership-based or subscription-based business model for Aragon organizations to operate. This seems to make sense, and this issue intends to provide a general set of requirements as a RFP (Request for Proposals) to help the Nest DAO structure and evaluate nest grant applications related to this topic.

Goal

Provide an Aragon application, or set of applications, and any supporting infrastructure to enable organizations to charge a subscription in exchange for membership privileges.

This functionality will create a new and general business model for both for-profit and non-profit organizations based on membership subscription payments.

Key Deliverables

• Organizations must be able to manage subscription tiers and charge recurring subscriptions and revoke membership in the event of non-payment.
• It should be possible to issue non-transferrable voting rights proportional to subscriptions. These voting rights should comply with the minime interface standard in order to maintain compatibility with apps designed to work with Aragon's token manager app.
• It should be possible to query a users membership status, making it possible to restrict or grant access to content or services.
• It should be possible for memberships to be open (not requiring approval to become a member), or permissioned (require approval via an ACL Role).
• When requiring approval via a Role, enough information about the request should be exposed in the docstring to provide context for approval via a voting app.
• There should be a place for users to manage their subscriptions (topping up their payment balance, terminating a subscription). This interface can be global and not necessarily related to a specific organization or individual subscription.

Related Issues and Projects

https://github.com/aragon/nest/issues/161 https://github.com/daonuts/subscribe-app

[john-light]

Possibly also relevant related project: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/1337

[julien51]

Hello! My name is Julien and I am the creator of (@unlock-protocol) https://unlock-protocol.com/

We are basically tokenizing memberships: creators (and that can be Aragon orgs) can deploy their lock(s) to create a membership. Each lock has the following characteristics:

• a number of keys (members) which can be unlimited...
• a price
• a currency (any ERC20 or Ether)
• duration for keys

Membership of a given address is then determined by ownership of a key. In order to "purchase" a key, a user has to call the purchase method on the lock contract which will then capture the payment, and issue a new key (NFT) valid of the specified duration. The lock owner can also grant keys for free to users.

The membership can then be used in a smart contract (or a web app..) to limit some features to members only.

The one thing we do not have right now is recurring subscriptions (it's harder than it looks) but that is something the team is activeky working on and we should have it at the end of Q1 2020 at the latest.

I'd love to hear thoughts and how we can improve Unlock to fit your needs!

[lkngtn]

Hi @julien51

Thanks for stopping by, Unlock looks quite useful. The primary goal of this RFP is to enable Aragon organizations to operate using a subscription based business model. Unlock seems like it would make that possible in a rudimentary way using Agent today (though I haven't validated this) which is awesome!

I think it could be a useful foundation for achieving the deliverables in this RFP, but being able to have recurring subscriptions as well as have members be given governance rights based on their subscription payments are key parts of the deliverables that would need to be addressed on top of what Unlock currently provides.

[yeqbfgxjiq]

@cslarson has a related app here

• https://github.com/daonuts/subscribe-app