What FMS is
FMS is the membership engine behind Frontier. It takes members' payments, keeps track of who is a paying member, and makes sure paying members, and only paying members, get what they paid for.
The two problems it was built to solve
We were turning away paying customers. Our main payment account is in Thailand, and a Thai Stripe account cannot accept American Express. Higher-value and international supporters often pay with AMEX. Their payments simply failed, and we lost the membership. FMS connects a second account in Singapore and sends AMEX there. The member never sees the switch.
People kept getting things they had stopped paying for. Newsletter access is controlled by tags in Mailchimp. When the automation broke, the tags drifted. Ex-members kept receiving members-only newsletters, and paying members sometimes lost access. FMS owns that decision now and repairs drift on demand.
The one idea that explains everything else
Access is separate from payment. Whether someone can read a members-only article is decided by FMS, not by Stripe. That is why all of the following are possible:
- Giving a board member free access, with no card involved.
- Recording a bank transfer as a real membership.
- Letting a member keep reading while their bank sorts out a failed renewal.
- Moving a member between payment accounts without them noticing.
The two halves you will use
The admin portal is where staff work: members, teams, plans, money, health. It looks like this.
The WordPress plugin is the other half. It sits on the public website, asks FMS what each reader is allowed to see, and shows the join, account and newsletter pages.
What FMS is not
It is not a replacement for Stripe. Refunds, disputes and card details still live in Stripe. It is not the website. Articles, pages and design stay in WordPress.
Next: the words we use.