What is price grandfathering?
Price grandfathering is the rule that a price increase applies only to people who join after it. Whoever is paying today keeps the price they joined at for as long as they stay, and whoever joins tomorrow pays the new one. A reduction, by contrast, reaches everyone at once. On a community platform the rule works at two levels: the platform's rate to the owner, and the owner's price to their members.
Why the rule exists
The first people who joined your community paid when there was almost nothing in it: few lessons, nobody answering, no proof the place would still be here. They carried the risk, and they are the reason it is worth more today.
Raise the price on them and you have charged the people who believed you first. That is also why people hesitate to join early: they assume the increase will catch up with them anyway, so they wait. When the rule is stated out loud, waiting becomes the expensive option and joining today becomes an easy decision.
And there is a plainer reason. The price written on the page is a promise. Somebody who read it and paid agreed to that number, not to whatever you decide a year from now.
How it works: prices arrive in cohorts
The mechanism is simpler than the word. Each member's price is recorded at the moment they join and stays attached to them rather than to the page. The price on the page belongs to people who have not joined yet.
- You raise the listed price, and only new members pay it.
- Existing members keep theirs, so a community ends up running several prices at once — one for each period people joined in.
- A reduction reaches everyone straight away. There is no sense in holding anybody at a price above the current one.
- Somebody who cancels and comes back returns at the price listed on the day they return, because coming back is a new join.
The asymmetry between rises and cuts is deliberate: the rule exists to protect members from a surprise, not to trap them at an old price that is now the higher one.
What it means if you are deciding whether to join now
It means the price you see now is your price for as long as you stay. If the community grows and gets more expensive next year, that is a number for whoever joins after you.
It also means cancelling is not entirely free. Leave and come back, and you come back at that day's price rather than your old one. That is worth knowing before you cancel, not after.
So the question worth asking of any community you are considering is short: if the price goes up later, does mine? The answer is usually on the pricing page, and if it is not written anywhere, the question is a fair one to ask out loud.
The other side: what about the platform's own price?
A community owner is a seller and a buyer at the same time — selling membership to their members, and buying a service from the platform they build on. The same rule applies at both levels, and the second half is the one people forget to check.
If you set your price around a platform's rate and the rate later goes up, your margin changes without you doing anything. So "what happens to your rate if you raise it?" deserves as much attention as what happens to your own members' prices.
What to ask of any platform
Five questions, and the answer is either written in the product or it does not exist:
- If I raise my community's price, does it rise for my existing members too?
- Can I see who pays what — every price running in my community, not one number on a page?
- What happens to somebody who cancels and rejoins?
- If I lower the price, does the reduction reach everybody straight away?
- And the platform's own rate: does an increase apply to a community already running, and how much notice comes before any change takes effect?
These questions are worth asking of any platform you look at, ours included.
A worked example: how Nadi does it
Nadi is a community platform, so this is the part where we describe our own product. Only what it does today.
For Nadi's own fees to a community, the rule is written on the fees page in these words: "Any change to Nadi's fees is announced 30 days before it takes effect, as the Terms of Service set out."
For a community's price to its members, the owner's pricing page says: "When you change the price, current members keep the price they joined at. Only new members pay the new one."
- Under that sentence sits a table of every price running in the community: who pays what, and how many members are on each one.
- If some members are paying more than the current listed price, the page says so outright: "Some members pay more than your current price. They keep their old price unless they cancel and rejoin."
- The rule covers all five pricing shapes an owner can choose. It is not a feature of one plan and not another.
Notice that the last warning works against the owner's short-term interest — we tell them some of their members are paying above the asking price. That is exactly what makes the table worth reading.
The honest limits
The rule protects a price, not what is behind it. An owner stays free to change what they offer: lessons get added, others get retired, live sessions start or stop. The price you keep is a price for whatever the community becomes, not a receipt for what it was on the day you joined.
It also does not make a membership permanent. Either side can end it, and coming back after cancelling is a new join at that day's price — which is what the product's own warning says.
One limit on the wording, too: we say nothing about what other platforms do here, because we have not measured it. The rule above is ours, and the five questions before it are what we suggest you ask of any platform, this one included.