I have used Digital Access Pass for a long time now, and have always found it to be a great tool for specific use-cases. Over the last year or so, it has completely revolutionized itself and the roll it plays for me.  

DAP allows you to turn any WordPress site into a versatile platform, where you can turn any part of your site into a product that a user pays to access, whether that is one-time, a monthly  membership, or a variety of pricing options. I have one site that actively uses multiple payment styles on it right now. 

This site itself is WordPress, so I could take this page you are reading for example, and make it part of a paid course or membership, allow you to see the first part of this review and charge one-time for the rest or have it be ‘members only’ (not that I would!) – the practical possibilities of it are huge. 

This is essentially the big-picture premise behind any WP plugin designed for memberships, payments and such. There are many other solutions out there that do this with different nuances, features, approaches and price points. I have used several of them through various projects I have helped with. 

One thing that really made me go in the direction of DAP are newer tools to help turn the pages on your site into easy to navigate, good looking courses and products with the right WordPress theme. 

The software has also improved greatly in creating good-looking pages for your site that are necessary for customers to use it: A visual layout showing their available courses, buttons to navigate around a course or the site, what else they can purchase, places where they can update their password or billing info and more. 

If you are familiar with Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, or have done any online courses, DAP essentially allows you to turn your own site and pages into a similar landscape, seamlessly integrated and with many options.

Please be aware that a plugin which is giving your WordPress website these features, no matter how well designed, is not going to be as simple as some of those platforms can be. In those cases you are paying monthly  (in some cases, literally paying more for 1-2 months than it costs to own DAP) for a platform built solely to do one thing, versus integrating it into your own site which will have its own features, themes and such. 

If you have checked out DAP in the past, I highly recommend you explore this review anyway, given the amount of changes and upgrades to what this can do now. 

Digital Access Pass is what I use on my own sites

You may have seen me mention other products I have used in conjunction with helping others, or for specific cases. There are a lot of good products out there and new platforms for different people.  

For me, with the newer updates in DAP, the amount it is being constantly added to, and my own comfort with technology, it is what I use on my own sites that I personally run. There will be links on this page to my own setup with it.  

I have been impressed with all aspects of it enough that I have gone all-in with DAP and invested in a lifetime license, which with everything being monthly these days, is about as strong an endorsement one can give in terms of putting your money on a particular service.  

The Product Co-Creator Veena Prashanth, Relationship and Support

One of the things I really like about this system, and a big part of what made me go all-in with it, is the support and relationship that is developed with the product creator, Veena Prashanth. 

First of all, it’s rare for the product creator and developer to be so consistently working with and improving something over this length of time, in my experience. I’ve been a customer for at least five years, and think of DAP as a being on a completely different level of power and accessibility than it was before.  

Second, it’s even more rare that this individual is so directly involved with support, so quick to help, and has as much direct interaction with customers. Not only through the usual support ticket system, Veena has a Facebook group that she is active on and is quick to respond to customers personally. I have not had any long wait times if something needs to be addressed, which is going to happen in the world of WordPress, hosting and the piece-parts of your site like plugins. 

I have felt like an actual member of something that is continuing to grow and evolve, because Veena regularly asks us what we need, is on top of changes taking place in the digital market, and seems to create improvements and features at a rate that suggests absurd levels of productivity and/or lack of sleep! 

Your website content as products or membership

If you think about any information product, course, or download you have purchased online, what essentially is it? 

You login, then see a series of any or all of the following on a webpage:
 

• Videos
• Text
• PDF
• Audio Player
  
• Files to Download
• Community Forum (DAP can be used to create a forum only paid members can access. I did this in the past)
• Details to Access a Live Call, Zoom or Otherwise

Several of those items, you could see on any website. If you go to the homepage of THIS website you’ll see several of those.

The only difference between a regular webpage with those elements, vs. a product or course is:

• You have to purchase access to it
• You have to login with your email and password to get that access
• (Hopefully) if it’s a course it is organized in a clear way and easy to navigate
• If it’s a membership with regular updated content, regular live calls or similar, the automatic billing of your card or PayPal, and the ability on y our end to cancel. 

Digital Access Pass allows you to do all of the above, and more, with whatever content you create

As you’ll see further on, I can take any content on my site, even part of a single page, my audio player, private videos or links to calls, and control who has access to what based on their payment status. 

Ideas for Memberships or Products

There are several things you can implement to make your website and services into an active membership 

Have a class, Q&A, coaching or similar on a platform like Zoom X number of times per month
– DAP can protect the recordings, the page with the link to the call, automatically mail active subscribers

If you are an regular writer or video creator, charge for some of your more in-depth content
– DAP would allow you to charge for an individual post on your blog, an individual video page, or anything else. You could charge a low fee for a single post, have a membership version that unlocks the whole site. All of this would be controlled and maintained by the software. 

Make some longer videos with a PDF or text
– Put each one on its own page. DAP will allow you to quite easily turn those multiple pages into a course that can be navigated, and charge any amount you want for it. It could also be included as part of a membership. 

how digital access pass makes products, courses, or memberships easy

Once you have your content together, whether it is several pages of videos and constitute lessons in an online course, a single product, or anything else, the process of turning it into a product to be purchased is easy and straightforward in DAP.

Basically everything follows the same format:

Give the product a name
Specify whether it is a one-time payment or membership
Set the Price and/or billing cycle.
Choose which pages of your site, and/or individual files belong to the product
Optionally edit the email which sends users their login and access details automatically on purchase (shortcodes fill in with things like their name, the product name, and more)
If you want to use a third-party platform like ActiveCampaign to send the emails, it’s super easy. 

One-Time Product Creation and Example

I myself am a jazz musician, and set up an online workshop over Zoom with a world class performer that many around the world would love to interact with.   

• I made a webpage with the call-in details for the event.
• I created a one-time paid product in DAP (you’ll see below how easy this is)
• I edited the automatically sent email (which DAP handles, also easily and step-by-step) to include the call-in details
• I added that single webpage I created into this new product, so it is now protected and limited to those who have purchased it. 
• After the call, I uploaded the video and audio recordings to that protected webpage
• Now, you can purchase that product, and instantly be granted access to that audio and video recording. 

Click Here for the order form of this live product running in DAP.

You’ll see the order form, created in seconds by SmartPayCart, the optional but recommended DAP shopping cart. 

 Here is how straight forward the pricing setting is:  

Simply clicking on to the next steps in the product creation process, I made a few edit to the suggested email. 

DAP sends this email when they order, filling in those %%CODES%% with the appropriate information

It looks like this

 Membership

 A membership is essentially no different than the steps above. 

I simply would have set the price to recurring instead of one-time. 

You can add multiple pages to the membership that get added with time. 

Depending on the structure, you could also just have one page for a membership product, and you update that one page with new content for the month, week, etc. I did this approach for most of last year and it worked wonderfully. 

When someone unsubscribed, they simply could not access that page anymore. 

Free Trials? Other Trials? No Problem. 

Any type of pricing structure you want is  easy to do, it’s all part of the same setup process on one screen. 

Do you want a trial period? Simply set the time period and price, including free. 

You can see this there in the image above. A ton of different options and strategies can be easily implemented at any time just by changing those simple, clear parameters. 

I will elaborate more on how DAP handles subscriptions later on. It handles much of the complications of them effectively, automated, and provides a lot of options in terms of what you wish to provide to members. 

 Creating courses with digital access pass

This aspect of DAP is less than a year old at the time of this writing, 2020. I was actually part of beta testing it. 

While the essence of an online course is the content, videos, text and such, there are some key elements to make it really feel like a course.

The main elements are:
A navigation menu that is clear, outlines the structure of the course, and is easy to get to any part of it.
The ability to mark lessons as complete, and keep track of progress for future visits.

Digital Access Pass now has the ability to generate this course navigation and ability to mark lessons complete automatically, without requiring an additional WordPress “course management” plugin or system.

(If you already have, or prefer to use one of these however, such as LearnDash, DAP integrates seamlessly with most of them.)

This is a game changer for me. This has a HUGE impact on the user experience, and is one of the few areas where I felt using DAP + WordPress pages was at a disadvantage.

Not only does this work well for me, it’s easy to do.

One of the themes of all the new upgrades and additions has been streamlining.

This is in the same section where you give the course a title, description and price. It can be changed at any time:

When you make a product, subscription or anything else in the back end, you are already choosing which pages on your WordPress site are to be part of that product. 

DAP lets you generate a navigation menu, as well as other features like a progress bar, button to mark lessons complete, and more. You can setup the order and even things like color and design elements. 

In a format I like that is consistent throughout the software, it gives you a “shortcode” so I can put these elements anywhere on my page after I create them in this simple creator on the DAP backend.  

For example, one project I was working with, I made a two column block, and put two codes on the right one that DAP showed me are associated with the outline and progress bar I created, which took seconds:

[DAPCourseOutline id=1][/DAPCourseOutline]

[DAPCourseProgressBar id=1][/DAPCourseProgressBar]

 This is what you see on the page where those codes are: 

Of course, shortcodes and using them within your WordPress theme is a preference.

There are pros and cons to this system.

Because every theme is different, and you are responsible for the layout and alignment of it. It is not the kind of drag-drop, and pre-built beauty of something like Clickfunnels because that would not really be possible. 

I tend to take other people’s themes and modify them rather than try to design myself. I use Thrive Architect for my theme editor, and actually just take the templates that Veena provides as part of what I get as an ‘elite’ member. 

Ultimately though, for me, the ability to turn my pages into this type of fully functional course style with no additional plugins or integrations adding to my bottom line, or technical headaches, is a huge deal. 

You may not have any course type-content, I did not for a long time, but it is nice to have the option. I actually use it in a free giveaway and it gives a sense of professionalism as to what other courses and paid content can be like. 

Digital access pass and subscriptions

I really like how DAP handles subscriptions from an admin and user perspective.

Subscriptions and memberships were the primary function of this software from the get go, and even years ago, I strongly preferred the way it handled all elements related to it.

It was miles better than products like Ontraport, that were hundreds of dollars per month, that some of the projects I was involved with “upgraded” to. It’s been a few years since I have used OP, but as robust as it could be, obviously it’s a much different and more expensive animal, but when it came to subscriptions there were big gaps and I really missed DAP on that project. 

Here are some HUGE pros about DAP and subscriptions. Some of these will seem very obvious or necessary. That’s because they are. However, it’s amazing how other, even more expensive platforms do not do them. 

User has the ability to cancel their own subscription right in their settings.

PayPal or Stripe is automatically cancelled when a user is cancelled in DAP.

No matter when user cancels, they remain having access until the end of their current billing cycle. 

You can easily set it up so that if a user upgrades to a different subscription, for example from a monthly to a yearly plan, or from something like a “gold level” to the “silver level,” they can automatically be unsubscribed from the other version so as not to be double-billed. 

Any tasks such as immediate cancellation, cancel at the end of current billing cycle, granting of additional access or changing any settings for an individual user, can easily be done manually by you as the admin.

Failed Payments?

This can be a big headache to manage. Digital Access Pass has automated options to handle this that a good platform needs, it can notify the user, make attempts to re-bill, and only cancel after a number failed attempts and notifications.

These can be customized to your preferences.  

I want users who subscribe to only get the content that’s been released after they join

This is one that many platforms do not handle well. 

Or if they can do it at all, it’s needlessly complex.

DAP being on top of this since years ago, understanding many would prefer this (in some cases, why would a user subscribe all year when they can join 10 months in and get everything?)

It’s called a “magazine style” subscription and can be done without headaches. 

Users Cancel, but Want to Rejoin Later? 

I have had this happen multiple times and it has been seamless over the last year or two. Product access is simply removed once their time is up, and re-added whenever they pay again.  

Member pages: login, content, management

In order to make your site a truly functional platform for users to access content, subscriptions and more, there are a number of functions you need.

A place for them to login. A button to get their ‘lost password’

A list of their available content, courses, and  what they could purchase – that is an important one that can really affect sales. You want users to be able to see what else you offer, not only what they own, in many cases. 

Users will need a page where they can change their password, billing info, see their affiliate stats and more. 

These are a PAIN to do manually, and a much more recent and in my opinion, excellent addition to DAP is the ability to create and customize these easily. This is what it is like in the backend: 

Inside each of these, you can choose pre-designed templates (which so far have worked fine for me as is, the most I have changed ever is a color) – or you can customize the details of each:  

So this has been made into short-codes as well, and has looked and functioned very well on my site (I use thrive architect) 

Of course, if you use a platform system with a monthly cost, most of these elements are automatically built into it. However, for WordPress solutions it’s unavoidable to have to have some type of pages created.  These new page builders have made the process simpler and look a lot more like a pro platform site than in the past. 

I have sometimes used more than one of these templates on the same site, because the “course style” for example works great for certain contexts where I want a longer list of smaller products without pictures. 

Also an important note hinted at in these pages

digital access pass has its own built in affiliate system

This means users on your platform can refer your products to others and get a commission. 

I’ve had bad experiences with pretty much ALL independent affiliate systems I have tried. Because this one is integrated directly to the same system you are selling everything from, it tracks well and I’ve found it easy. Visually you have a lot more flexibility with it than before, which was a pretty bare-bones look but now can be customized.  

It’s actually been a while since I have used it, so I would imagine like everything else in DAP it is improved, but would be happy to examine in response to any questions. 

See me do this all on video

I have a YouTube video that talks about DAP and shows you what it looks like for me to navigate it and create a course on the back end. You can jump to about 11 minutes in if you want to go straight to the back-end course creation. 

Technical challenges, hosting and other considerations

As mentioned in the beginning, there are definite differences to using a WordPress integrated solution versus a completely separate platform (ClickFunnels, Kajabi, Thinkific) which are their own infrastructures created exclusively for the purpose of hosting your content and courses. 

You WILL have to deal with things like upgrading your version of WordPress, upgrading Digital Access Pass, keeping on top of things at times. 

Making sure new plugins you add to your site or features do not interact in any weird way with DAP or other systems. 

Your WordPress site + DAP are going to be communicating with PayPal, Stripe and other places using APIs. There are things that can happen in the chain. 

There will be certain elements of setting things up that while, DAP has *dramatically* streamlined and simplified over the years, cannot ever be as simplistic as something that is built entirely in house (don’t get the impression however, that those services never have anything go wrong or don’t have their own headaches with certain functions.)

With this kind of complete freedom to do whatever you want in your own house, so to speak, comes with responsibilities!

Having used a few different ones over the years, I STRONGLY agree with using one of the recommended host. If you do not want to or cannot, I strongly recommend you look into the experience of other users with your host, be aware of any settings etc. – you can face headaches and waste much time otherwise. 

I personally use Siteground and have found it to be the best I have ever used, by far, and while I don’t have a huge user base on any of my sites, I have had an extremely small number of technical issues. I had an uber cheap hosting at one point that no longer even exists, and if you did need to adjust something – it was hard. Bear in mind, WordPress itself can make major updates, as can servers, plugins and more, so you will want to have a good infrastructure in place. 

You can check out Siteground by clicking here. 

Digital access pass PRICING

DAP has a few different pricing plans. 

It is now a monthly or annual model, but even when it was a one-time fee, you had to pay after a year for upgrades and support. DAP is being upgraded SO much that I probably would not have suggested going without maintenance anyway, but please be aware that you can no longer just buy the plugin for a one-time price and use it in perpetuity. 

An annual version of DAP as it is, which allows you to do everything in this review comes to about $12 per month.

If you want to get started and feel comfortable with a WordPress + Plugin approach, this is a low-overhead way to have everything you need.

Consider where you are at, and whether or not you would be able to handle a $80+ monthly cost for platforms, and feel it is worth the difference. This will depend on your financial situation, technical skill, priorities and such.

There are those out there who could jump right into $299+ a month for Kajabi Pro or Clickfunnels Pro and it may be worth it for them to have a robust, self-contained platform. This was certainly not applicable to myself and most anyone I know. 

If you are able to do so, there are advantages to the other plans

You can also upgrade as your business or revenue grows. Once I had ideas for projects that were unrelated to each other, I upgraded to a multi-site subscription before going all-in with Lifetime Platinum at least a year or two after that. 

I do believe SmartPayCart adds enough value and features that directly translate to saving you lots of time, and improving sales (order bumps! that alone paid for it for me) that I would strongly consider an option that includes it, if you have decided to go with DAP and have your strategy together. 

Platinum Subscription

The Platinum subscription is essentially a subscription to several products, everything Veena has created or continues to. None are essential for DAP to function, you do not have to be concerned that you won’t be able to do a monthly subscription or any primary functions without paying for upgrades.

Many of the plugins and products that come with the platinum version are stand-alone, with tools for marketing, social media, incentivizing sharing, a rather in depth gamification / ability to earn and buy with points, and more. 

Several of these products would individually warrant their own long form reviews. Many of them can be purchased separately. My suggestion would be to examine how many you see yourself actually using, and assess what makes more sense for you price-wise if you stretch it out beyond a year. 

Do you h ave any questions?

As lengthy as this is, we’re honestly barely scratching the surface, especially when you get into the various use-cases and needs different people are looking for with these types of software. 

Please leave any questions as a comment below and I’ll be happy to share my experience if I can, whether as a comment reply or in a video. 

My links to DAP are affiliate links which means I get a commission if you buy, full disclosure. 

Like I said, I went all-in with this software and purchased a lifetime license of the highest level, so that is the most direct way to show that it truly is my choice. For me it’s an amazing value that matches my comfort with technology, preference to customize, and price point. 

Thanks! Drop any questions or comments below, and you can get DAP here: