Membership like functionality

Hello,

We created a directory using GD and everything worked out very well but we would like to take this a bit further. Essentially, we want to give business owners the ability to claim listings and after that they can choose an account type. Depending on the account they choose, there will be certain permissions. I am going to explain a bit what each account type ( level ) will do:

Level 1 accounts will be free and will give the permission to edit a few basic fields like “website URL, phone, email, hours of operation, etc”. Other fields will be “locked down” for Level 1, say “special offers or reservation link”. Level 1 will also allow business owners to upload a maximum of 3 images and add 3 tags to their listing.

Level 2 and 3 will be paid and they will allow access to all the fields, unlimited image uploads, etc. The only difference between 2 and 3 is that Level 3 will allow to add featured listings and will give business owners access to Analytics reports.

Payments will be made after 3, 6 or 12 months. Automatic and / or manual.

The reason I created this post is to gain some insights and advice, maybe someone else built a similar functionality before.

Questions:

1. How would you recommend to build the functionality? Install a membership plugin and start from there? If yes, can you suggest a plugin that will work well with GeoDirectory?

2. What are your thoughts about restricting custom fields depending on the access level? Is this something that can be done with the membership plugin?

Thanks for reading this and let me know if you need other details from me, to make it more clear.