Paid subscriptions

You can charge your readers for access to premium content on your newsletter. Paid subscriptions are set up with the following steps:

1. Sign up for Stripe (which takes your customers' money & sends it to you) and connect it to Buttondown.
2. Create a paid plan with the pricing & terms that best suit you.
3. Promote your paid plan to subscribers.
4. Send paid-exclusive emails to your paid subscribers.

In this guide, you'll learn how to get set up with paid subscribers, collect your first paying readers, and send your first paywalled email to them.

First, go to Stripe and register for a new account.

Then, go to Settings → Basics. Under "Features", you'll see "Paid subscriptions". Tap "Connect to Stripe" at right. You'll be sent to Stripe to log in & connect your account to your newsletter.

After you've integrated your Buttondown and Stripe accounts, you can configure your paid subscription plan in Buttondown.

Buttondown does not currently support Stripe's test mode, which lets you test your integration without charging a credit card.

To test your integration, we recommend charging a small amount on a real credit card and then refunding the charge. This will cost a few cents for each transaction.

Buttondown only supports Stripe natively right now. If you'd like to provide additional payment options for your subscribers, we recommend integrating creator platform tools like Memberful, Zapier, or Patreon with Buttondown.

Once you've connected Stripe to Buttondown, go to Settings → Integrations → Stripe to begin configuring your paid plans.

1. Navigate to Settings and scroll to the "Paid subscriptions" section.
2. Click Configure. The "Paid subscriptions" page appears.
3. Configure your subscription settings using the form:
   • Content access: Choose who can subscribe to your newsletter (no paid subscriptions, free & paid subscriptions, or paid only)
   • Product: Select which Stripe product to use (if you have multiple)
   • Currency: Choose the currency for your subscription plan
   • Payment model: Select Fixed, Pay what you want, or Per email
   • Cadence: Choose Monthly or Yearly billing
   • Price: Set the subscription price (for fixed pricing models)
   • Yearly upsell price: Optionally set a discounted yearly price (when monthly is selected)
   • Embedded checkout: Choose whether to show the payment element immediately on the subscribe page
4. Click Save to apply your changes.

We have 3 different pricing models:

• Fixed charges your subscribers a specific amount every month or year. Most people go this route, charging people as if they were subscribing to a periodical.
• Pay what you want lets people pay whatever they'd like upfront. They pay once, get access, and that's it.
• Per email charges people every time you send an email. These are best for more sporadic lists, but you'll want to make sure people have a clear sense of what they're paying for before they sign up!

If you want to change the price of your paid newsletter, you can do so by adding a new price to the existing product in Stripe and archiving the old price. Buttondown will automatically use the new price for new subscribers; existing subscribers will retain their current price.

Migrating existing subscribers to the new price is more complex, as neither Buttondown nor Stripe currently supports this within the interface. We are happy to run this manually for you; please contact support if you'd like to do this.

Once new visitors subscribe, they'll be brought to a page that allows them to upgrade their subscription.

Emails to unpaid subscribers will also have a link at the bottom of the email where they can upgrade.

Finally, Buttondown exposes a URL (https://buttondown.com/your-username/buy) where readers can upgrade their subscription. To find your user name, go to Settings → Basics. You can share that URL with your audience anywhere you'd like. Joining through that link automatically subscribes people to your full newsletter as well.

Once someone upgrades to become a paid subscriber, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Paid subscriptions automatically renew at the end of the billing cycle you specify, whether that's monthly or annually. After your subscribers convert their subscriptions to paid, it will not expire unless they cancel it.
• Subscribers can cancel their subscriptions to your newsletter any time by clicking "Unsubscribe." If they unsubscribe from your whole newsletter, they stop paying you on an ongoing basis, too.

When a subscriber becomes a paid subscriber, it's nice to offer them a warm welcome by writing a custom confirmation email. You can create a custom email that is sent to a new paid subscriber automatically. Paid subscribers will receive this email when they opt in to your paid newsletter. Here's how:

1. In Buttondown, navigate to the "Subscribing" menu and scroll to "Premium welcome email."
2. Enter "Subject" and "Body" text for the welcome email.
3. Click Save changes.

You can send a newsletter email only to paid subscribers by configuring the recipient in the email drafting menu.

1. Navigate to Emails and draft a new newsletter email.
2. Click Send. The "Send this email" panel opens. Scroll to the "Audience" section.
3. Choose the radio button that matches the group you wish to send this email to. In this case, selecting "Premium" will send the newsletter email to all subscribers who pay for your newsletter.
4. Click Finalize and then Yes, I'm sure.

To learn more about paywalling part of an email, go to Paywalls & Teasers. If you want to offer other perks to your paid subscribers, take a look at our guide to offering perks.

In the "Paid subscriptions" page, you can choose to prohibit free subscriptions. You can change this at any time. To disable free subscriptions, select Paid only from the "Content access" dropdown in the subscription configuration form.

Stripe automatically reports and collects taxes for your paid newsletter. You can learn more about this on our Stripe setup page, or by reading Stripe's documentation.

You may also need to register your paid newsletter with your local tax authority. Stripe has a tool to help you determine if you need to do this. You can use this tool in the "Monitoring" tab of your tax "Overview" page. If Stripe advises you to register with your local tax authority, Stripe's Registration guide explains the process of adding, editing, and checking the status of your registration. To learn more, read Stripe's tax monitoring documentation.