There may also be some legal ramifications of having people do work in exchange for membership.
BioCurious used to do this, but they stopped offering that on the advice of their lawyer. Because if you require people to do a certain amount of work, it could be argued that that makes those people effectively an employee (even if the only compensation those people get is access to a space). And then you need to start worrying about OSHA regulations, etc...
AT CCL we get around this by offering "sponsored memberships". People submit an
online sponsorship application, in which we ask how much they are able to afford to pay, why they feel they would be a valuable addition to our community, what tasks they can help out with, etc. How much they actually wind up helping is still entirely up to them. But they do need to renew every 6 months, so if someone is really not pulling their weight we always decide not to renew their sponsorship next time (which actually has never happened to far, because we're really bad at asking people to renew).
Last time I checked, our sponsored members were paying on average about half of the standard membership fee, so explicitly asking how much they can afford is definitely a much better approach than just giving people a free ride by default.
(Note that sudo-humans is currently really bad at supporting this process though. Because you can only offer specific membership rate levels through Stripe, and if you have different levels they are available for anyone to pick, not just the folks who you approved to pay at a different level!)
Patrik