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Manage Your Paid Members with AI: Lists, Failed Payments, and Monthly Income

Query your paid member list, failed-payment list, and monthly income details by talking to Claude or ChatGPT. The routine admin work of running a subscription, done in one sentence.

Written by Firstory

Who this is for

If your show has subscription members or accepts donations, this one is for you.

To find out who failed to pay this month, how much you received last month, or which supporters have stayed the longest, you used to have to log into Studio, click through several tabs, download a CSV, and do the math yourself. Now you can ask all of it in a single sentence inside Claude or ChatGPT. The AI looks it up and organises it the way you want.

If you haven't connected Firstory to your AI yet, start with the first article: Analyze Your Show by Talking to AI: Firstory MCP (Beta Early Access).

First: you need to re-authorize once

This is the step people get stuck on, so do it before anything else.

Member lists and income details are sensitive, so we put them behind a separate permission. The consent you gave earlier does not cover them, which means the feature is live but your AI still can't see it. It will simply tell you the tool doesn't exist.

The fix is to go through authorization again so Firstory can ask for your consent one more time. The consent screen will show an extra line: "Read your paid member data and payment records". That's the one to look for.

Depending on the tool you use:

  • Claude (desktop / web): Settings → Connectors → find Firstory → disconnect, then Connect again

  • Claude Code: type /mcp in your terminal, pick firstory, re-authenticate

  • ChatGPT (Developer Mode): Settings → Connectors → Firstory → re-authorize

How do you know it worked? Say this to your AI:

  • 「List the paid members of my show」

If it starts querying and comes back with a list, you're set. If it says it can't find the right tool, the authorization hasn't been updated yet, so run through the steps above once more.

What the new tools do

Four new tools, all read-only. You don't need to memorise their names; just ask in plain language.

Tool

What it does

member_list

Your paid member list, filterable by tier and by status (failed payments only, for example), searchable by name or email

member_detail

The full picture for one member: current tier, lifetime amount paid, number of payments, join date, cancellation date, their last message, whether Discord is linked

member_export

Export every member as CSV (the same 11 columns as the Studio export), useful for shows with many members

income_list

Line-by-line income, with donations and subscriptions on one timeline and each entry labelled

Try it now: sample questions

Copy any of these straight into your chat.

Take stock of your list

  • 「How many paid members do I have right now? How many in each tier?」

  • 「How many new members joined this month?」

  • 「Export my full member list」

Spot churn early

  • 「List the members whose payment failed」

  • 「Who has cancelled but is still within their paid period?」

  • 「How many members cancelled this month, and which tier were they on?」

Reconcile income

  • 「How much did I receive in July? How much of it was donations versus subscriptions?」

  • 「Who paid the ten largest amounts last month?」

  • 「Work out the difference between July and June, and lay it out as a table」

Find your biggest supporters

  • 「Who are the ten members who have paid the most in total? How much, and over how many payments?」

  • 「Which members left a message? Pull the messages together for me」

In practice: your monthly member routine

The questions above can be strung into one conversation. For a start-of-month check, just say:

  • 「Run my monthly member check:
    1. How many paid members I have now, and whether that's up or down from last month
    2. The list of failed payments, I want to contact them individually
    3. Total income this month, donations and subscriptions counted separately
    4. The top ten lifetime supporters, I want to send them a card」

The AI calls each tool in turn and pulls the four results into one report. From there you can ask it to "turn the failed-payment list into an email list I can copy" or "draft a thank-you note to my top supporters". The data is already in the conversation, so the rest is ordinary AI collaboration.

Privacy and limits

What it can see

  • Only your own show's members and income. Cross-show queries are blocked, even if you have another show's ID

  • Member name, email, tier, status, lifetime amount, number of payments, messages

  • Income date, amount, payer name and email, message, tier

What it can't see

  • Card numbers, national ID numbers, bank accounts, none of these are exposed

  • Income details do not include payer phone numbers

A few things worth knowing

  • The failed-payment list only covers members whose retries have run out. A member who just failed a charge and is still being retried remains "active" and won't appear on that list. That's by design, not missing data

  • CSV download links expire after 30 minutes, so download promptly. If one expires, just ask the AI for a fresh export

  • Only the show owner can use these tools for now; collaborator accounts aren't supported yet

  • Everything is read-only. The AI can look things up, organise them, and help you write, but it cannot change a single record, and it will never cancel or refund a subscription for you

Free during Beta, and we want to hear from you

These features are in Beta and free for creators already in the test group. In the future we'll be folding the AI assistant into the PRO plan; we'll let you know before that happens and arrange a transition for existing testers.

If you're not in yet, message us from the widget in the bottom-right corner of Studio and say you'd like to try the AI data assistant.

If something feels clumsy, or there's a feature you wish existed, tell us in the same place. The last two rounds of features came from exactly that.

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