A Steady membership is a subscription. It renews automatically, and members keep paying until they cancel. A membership never stops on its own, and there is no contract term beyond the billing cycle the member chose.
Monthly or yearly
Steady supports exactly two billing cycles: monthly and yearly. Each project decides which of them it sells – monthly only, yearly only, or both. Where both are offered, members pick one at checkout; where only one is offered, that is what they get.
Monthly: the amount is charged every month and the membership renews every month.
Yearly: the full twelve months are charged upfront in a single payment, and the membership renews every twelve months. There are no instalments.
The billing cycle is set for the whole project, not per plan, and changing it only affects new memberships – existing members keep the cycle they signed up with.
There is no fixed-term membership. A plan advertised as “6 months” keeps billing until the member cancels; it does not end by itself after six months.
When a cancellation takes effect
Members can cancel at any time. A cancellation always takes effect at the end of the period already paid for. There is no notice period: it takes effect at the end of that term even if it is submitted on the last day. The exact date is shown on the cancellation page, in the sentence “Your membership is paid through …”.
So a monthly membership runs for at most one more month, and a yearly membership can run for up to another twelve. Access continues until that date, and the member can undo the cancellation at any point before it.
Free trial
If a project offers a free trial – 7 or 30 days – nothing is charged until the trial ends. After that, billing starts in the chosen cycle. Trials never apply to gift memberships.
Gift memberships
A gift membership works differently: it is paid once and never renews. A monthly plan buys one month, a yearly plan buys one year, and the membership ends by itself when that time is up. Nothing is charged again.