A while back, I was going through my credit card statements to trim spending.
I sifted through subscriptions first since cutting those means recurring money back in my pocket… and there were many:
- Kit
- Xbox LIVE
- Meat delivery
- Organ supplements
- Online marketing/copywriting community
- Men’s shaving/grooming
- Paid newsletters (print AND online)
- SaaS tools
- Streaming services (primarily Spotify)
- Amazon Prime
All are examples of continuity offers — an arrangement where a customer pays you on a recurring basis in exchange for ongoing value.
But notice how each delivers a different type of value.
(Put another way, Xbox LIVE is NOT the same type of product as a meat delivery box.)
There are five main types of continuity offers worth understanding. Knowing which you have (or want to build) shapes everything about how you sell, onboard, and retain subscription customers.
| Table of Contents |
| 1. Delivery-Based 2. Content-Based 3. Perks-Based 4. Service/Coaching Based 5. Software-Based Launch The Right Recurring Offer What To Do Next |
1. Delivery-Based
Delivery-based continuity is the simplest and most familiar:
Pay to receive a physical product on a recurring schedule.
Ongoing auto-billing and delivery until they decide to cancel. These also let you pause and edit your order (like if a customer wants to add something before their order renews).
Monthly delivery is common because many delivery-based offers are designed to last a month.
Not always, though. I worked with a meal kit company that defaulted to semi-monthly and let you choose weekly or monthly.
This offer structure works best for products that get used up regularly and require replenishment.
Consumable Auto-Replenishment
The customer buys a product they use regularly, and instead of manually reordering each time they run out, they set up automatic, recurring delivery.
Often, the brand uses specific automated sequences to upsell those one-off customers on the subscription since it is the logical next step.
Example niches/product types include (but are not limited to):
- Supplements
- Skincare
- Coffee
- Pet food
- Candles
- Cleaning supplies
The value prop is convenience.
The customer never runs out, nor has to think about reordering.
Many brands tack a discount onto auto-replenishment, such as Amazon’s Subscribe & Save. Amazon’s offers tiers that unlock more savings as you maintain more subscriptions.
Heart & Soil offers an example of leading with subscription offers, even though its offers are not exclusively subscriptions. It sits between this offer type and Subscription Boxes.
Some subscription programs throw in freebies and perks.
For instance, I worked with a pet health brand that offered the following to subscription customers:
- Free food bucket for your dogs
- A free T-shirt
- Occasional mystery gifts throughout the year
- Guaranteed product in stock (set aside for subs so they’d have product on schedule, even if regular inventory runs out)
Retention is tied to product satisfaction and results.
If the supplement works, the coffee tastes great, or the skincare makes you look radiant — they stay.
If it isn’t working, they cancel. Pausing/skipping their next delivery and editing their order are options, too.
Subscription Boxes
The customer receives a curated selection of products on a recurring basis — usually themed around a niche or interest.
Common examples include:
- Beauty
- Fitness
- Meal boxes
- Meat boxes
- Snacks
- Books
- Pet supplies
- Outdoor gear
Many brands with this offer type are subscription-only. Some may have a la carte one-offs while maintaining the box as the main offer for the front and back ends.
Two ways to do this type of offer…
Brand-curated: You curate their monthly box and surprise them. The customer forfeits some control in exchange for an expert’s taste and expertise.
Surprise and discovery are part of the appeal here.
It also takes the thinking off their plate and offers a real opportunity to “wow” them.
This works with consumables AND nonconsumables.
For example, BirchBox sends brand-curated makeup/beauty products monthly. They choose each item, not the customer.
Brand-curated boxes have to keep surprising to work well. If customers don’t feel like they’re getting something cool, new, and relevant each month, they’ll ditch it.
Customer-curated: The customer selects everything. This offers more choice, but shifts the order management onus onto the customer. Discovery matters less than convenience, quality, fulfillment reliability, and choice.
This works for consumable products only (a customer can’t get the same metal water bottle in the mail month after month, see what I’m saying?).
It’s most common for food and drink (such as meat boxes), though.
For example, Good Ranchers ships me a box of steaks (and some ground beef) monthly. I chose the box I wanted, and they ship it to me.
Strong offer + excellent customer service/support = my loyalty.
2. Content-Based
The customer pays for ongoing access to information, tools, or content they couldn’t otherwise get.
They learn something that can solve a problem and/or move them toward a particular goal. It improves how they think, work, or operate.
Paid Newsletter
The subscriber pays for recurring access to a specific person’s thinking. Often, this is insights, analysis, curation, or unique perspective.
A strong paid newsletter succeeds because the writer earns trust, credibility, and favor among an audience that agrees/appreciates the content and believes their time and money is well spent on it.
Chris Orzechowski’s Make It Rain Monthly is a prime example.
Chris sends you a few dozen pages every month detailing a new strategy or technique he’s applying in his/client businesses (often, but not always, email related).
A lot of the value is the ideas you can implement. I’ve made myself and clients lots of money with Chris’s MIRM newsletter ideas. I am obviously paying for that in the abstract.
But not ONLY in the abstract.
There is no Make It Rain Monthly without Chris’s unique background, voice, worldview, beliefs, etc.
I trust HIM over others because of who he is (alongside seeing the proof his stuff works).
Other examples include:
- Investment research/analysis
- Industry-specific publications
- Premium job opportunity aggregators
Substack’s getting pretty hot as a place to run a paid newsletter thanks to ease of use.
Once you activate paid content (takes a few button clicks), you can make any post or section of post you’d like “paid content.” Only paying subscribers can read it.
For instance, my friend Ryan Stax publishes helpful free content on AI…
But offers more in-depth stuff, such as exact prompts and workflows, behind his Substack paywall.
3. Perks-Based
The customer pays for access to a set of benefits and perks, rather than a specific deliverable.
The value is less about a specific product or content and more about a smattering of nifty bonuses for being a member.
Put another way…
The subscription buys you into something rather than delivering something to you.
The membership ITSELF is the product.
Membership Communities
The customer pays for access to a group — like-minded individuals who share a common interest, goal, or industry — along with whatever resources, events, or programming the community offers.
Unlike a product that either works or doesn’t…
Or a piece of content that helps or flops…
A community becomes more valuable the longer someone is in it because its value is relational and cumulative.
Relationships deepen, trust builds, and inside knowledge accumulates within the community. Members bring what they’ve learned and what’s working from outside to the community, benefiting everyone else. Everyone works with each other to move toward their goals.
A member who has been in for two years has more to lose by leaving than someone who joined last month.
Thus, well-run communities tend to have strong retention.
But a community offer is a double-edged sword since your retention is tied almost entirely to the quality of the community itself
An active, engaged, well-moderated community where members genuinely help each other is worth paying for indefinitely…
Even if the features within aren’t the most wide-reaching..
On the other hand, a quiet, low-engagement community where nothing much happens loses subscribers fast.
The Masterclass Discord community I’m part of is the perfect example of an online community offer.
We focus on making money/building a business online with content (X mainly, but also Substack and in general).
Yet we come from all sorts of niches, interests, and careers:
- AI
- Architecture
- Board games
- Books/reading
- Christian apologetics
- History
- Marketing/copywriting
- Travel
Which allows us to bring our different backgrounds AND what we’ve tried that worked (or didn’t) back to the group.
And I can befriend people who send me clients, customers, and subs (among other things).
Copy Chief is another famous example. RIP. I was a member for many years until Kevin decided it was time to close things down.
But inside were forums running the gamut of freelance/copywriting topics, monthly expert trainings (recorded), entire courses, and a job board, among other things.
Perk/Privilege Program
The customer pays a recurring fee in exchange for a designed set of tangible benefits.
Members technically pay for the belonging aspect. These programs often offer an air of status, after all.
But the main benefit is the math, if it works in the customer’s favor. If the $$$ value of the perks and benefits outweighs the membership’s recurring fee…
Then a customer buys in.
Tons of examples across product types here.
Premium credit cards, for example. Those elite travel cards charge like $495, but offer a laundry list of perks (alongside high cashback rates).
For example, most have an annual statement credit that offsets most of the annual fee.
A high-earning frequent traveler will almost certainly get more than $495 in annual value out of one of these.
Other examples include:
- Amazon Prime: Pay monthly (or annually for more savings), get free shipping, streaming, and a bunch of other benefits. I get WAY more than $140 (or whatever) in value from it each year, so I’ve been a Prime member for over a decade.
- Carnivore Snax’s The Hunt membership: Pay annually, get free Wagyu brisket on signup, earn 5% cashback on all Snax, access exclusive cuts, and earn referral rewards for bringing others to The Hunt. See the value for a Snax enjoyer?
- Costco/Sam’s Club: Pay your annual membership fee, access Costco/Sam’s Club member pricing on groceries and various other services.
See the pattern?
This continuity offer type is best for frequent users of your main offers.
It may work better than recurring delivery for consumable product customers who don’t have simpler needs on a predictable schedule.
It also appeals to customers craving status (subscription programs can offer this, but they require more effort and aren’t as clear a “status symbol”).
If nonconsumables, it allows for continuity income without a consumable product. As long as you offer enough perks to justify the cost, of course.
4. Service/Coaching Based
The customer pays for ongoing access to a person’s time, expertise, execution… or some combination of these.
The value here cannot be fully automated, boxed, or downloaded. A skilled person has to be involved here.
So the offer combines:
- Objective criteria/work
- The professional’s quirks and idiosyncrasies
For example, lots of email marketers can manage your email list.
However, my work will be unique since I am the only one of me on earth.
This model commands higher price points. Think of it as a supply limitation — there’s only one of you (maybe more if you have a team) and 24 hours a day.
Done-For-You (DFY)
The customer pays someone to handle something entirely on their behalf on an ongoing basis.
Such an ongoing arrangement is often called a retainer because you pay a fixed fee to retain some defined amount of a person’s services.
Either way, the customer doesn’t learn how to do it, collaborate on it, or get involved in execution. They pay you, you do it all.
Involvement only comes at key stages where buy-in is needed, such as approving email copy drafts before building and scheduling.
Retention in this model comes down to two things:
Results and relationships.
If the work is good and the provider easy to work with (clear communication, reliable delivery, no surprises), clients stay for a long time.
If either breaks down, the relationship usually doesn’t last long.
Examples include:
- Marketing agency retainers
- Bookkeeping services
- Virtual assistant services
- Email marketing management
This is how I work with most of my clients.
I take their monthly retainer fee. I create the calendar, write/schedule campaigns, build/enhance sequences, update pop-up forms, and much more.
My clients get involved only when planning new initiatives or getting signoffs.
DFY costs more than anything else on this list due to time constraints.
When you’re doing it ALL for someone, you can only take on so many clients/customers.
Done-With-You (DWY)
The provider works alongside the customer but as a leader, guiding the process, answering questions, adjusting as needed, and staying involved throughout.
The customer does the real work. What they’re paying for is the reassurance of ongoing personal support and expertise.
DWY offers tend to cost less than DFY since the customer handles more work…
But that also means you can serve multiple people at once.
DWY can be 1-on-1, but businesses often structure these as group cohort programs.
For instance, I was in Kevin Roger’s Accelerator coaching group (and for a brief time, his ultra-exclusive Supergroup) when Copy Chief was around.
One perk was 1-on-1 text messaging with Kevin. Plus, semi-monthly group coaching calls where we’d bring a business problem to the “hot seat” for help from Kevin + coaches + fellow members.
A big thing I worked on in there was my first offer, AI-Assisted Email Copywriting.
Kevin helped me decide that, yes, I should launch it and iron out some of the details.
He tapped into his years of experience as a launch copywriter + running a business/launching products + relevant knowledge at the time (AI stuff).
But I had to build it myself.
I stayed in Accelerator for so long because I was solving business problems and moving forward.
That’s the key to retention. If the customer’s not seeing improvements, their ongoing investment isn’t justified. So they cancel.
Other examples of DWY programs include:
- Expert-guided health plants
- Marketing consulting retainers
- Coaching groups
- Financial planning
5. Software-Based
The customer pays for ongoing access to and use of a digital tool or platform that helps them do something faster, better, or in a way they couldn’t otherwise.
Retention’s strong here because a piece of software that solves a business problem will be useful for a LONG time for that business.
Plus, the longer someone uses a piece of software, the more embedded it becomes in their workflow.
Data accumulates, habits form, and integrations multiply.
Ditching it at all becomes unthinkable.
Switching to new software becomes costlier and more inconvenient, too.
You risk paying more and going through the headache of a migration between tools without 100% certainty the new tool or platform will work better.
Horizontal SaaS
Horizontal SaaS tools serve businesses across any industry.
Communication, project management, document creation, customer relationship management — regardless of what that business actually does, it needs these things.
The value of these offers is breadth and flexibility.
A law firm and an eCommerce brand can both use Notion for documentation, HubSpot for their CRM, or Google Workspace for their day-to-day operations.
What usage looks like differs. Useful for both, though.
Retention tends to be strong because these tools become deeply embedded in how a business operates across multiple teams and functions.
Look at Google Drive.
ANY business can use it.
I can’t see myself without it.
I wrote this very article with Google Docs.
It’s free, yes. But apply this same logic to a paid tool.
How about a paid example to make this clearer:
RightMessage.
It’s AI copy/messaging personalization. That works in any niche. Because it’s the point of the software — to adapt messaging to the audience.
I could use it, but so too could an accountant, a regenerative farmer, a restaurant supplier, you name it.
Vertical SaaS
Vertical SaaS tools are built specifically for one industry or use case. Depth, not breadth.
These are more common in highly regulated or operationally specific industries (healthcare, law, finance, etc.) where workflows are more unique and compliance is imperative.
Doesn’t mean they can ONLY be used by one industry or use case. That varies depending on the tool.
Klaviyo is a decent example of a not-purely-vertical tool. It’s an Email Service Provider (ESP) built for eCom email and SMS marketing.
Others can use it (I know of a nonprofit that almost moved to it, and a personal brand that DID), but the features best lend themselves to physical product eCommerce.
A few other examples that are more purely vertical:
- Mindbody: Scheduling and business management for fitness studios
- OpenTable: Reservation management built specifically for restaurants
- Clio: Practice management software built exclusively for law firms
- Jane: Practice management software built exclusively for health and wellness practitioners
They’re not trying to serve everyone — they’re trying to serve one type of business exceptionally well by solving problems that are unique to that context.
The retention dynamic here is stronger than horizontal SaaS.
Fewer options are available, yes, but the specificity of this software type makes switching costs higher.
Launch The Right Recurring Offer
Every offer type on this list works, but they come with different pros, cons, and retention levers.
Knowing which type of offer you have (or want to build) shapes every decision downstream:
- How you onboard new subscribers
- How you communicate value to existing ones
- How you pitch the subscription
- What you need to address before someone will commit
Many continuity offers blend structures.
For example, my health/wellness client’s recurring offer mixes recurring consumable product delivery with coaching-based DWY assistant.
Thus, understanding the offer types helps you make hybrids that amplify the benefits of each while downplaying the drawbacks.
So pick an offer type and build it, or use what you learned here to increase sales.
And speaking of boosting sales…
When you subscribe to my Substack, you get a free copy of my eBook, Simple Email Sequences That Sell.
This free guide breaks down 10 email automations worth having in place regardless of which type of continuity offer you run.
Click subscribe to get it now.
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