Paid Newsletters

Our mission is to empower publishers to create and grow successful paid newsletters. Here’s what you can achieve today with beehiiv…

🥇 Launch multiple subscription tiers
💳️ Offer flexible payment options for your readers
🎁 Optimize conversions with trials, promotions, and gifts
📊 Track growth, churn, LTV, and more with top-tier dashboards
🌐 Seamlessly sync your subscriptions with thousands of apps

And the best part? You keep 100% of your earnings — beehiiv takes 0% of your subscription revenue.

We're also introducing password authentication today, making it easier for readers to access your content. Let’s dig in…

Paid Newsletters & Subscriptions

First, explain it to me like I’m 5 years old… What’s a paid newsletter and how can I offer paid subscriptions to my readers?

By default, most readers typically subscribe to your newsletter for free. However, with paid subscriptions, you can charge readers for additional perks, which might include:

• Premium content

• Exclusive offers

• Members-only community access

You can launch a paid newsletter on beehiiv in just a few clicks, with no need to handle payments or user authentication. Plus, unlike most platforms, beehiiv never takes a cut of your subscription revenue. To show you how easy it is, I’ll walk you through the process real quick.

Simply navigate to Settings → Publication → Paid Subscriptions to get started.

First, you’ll need to sync your Stripe account so you can get paid.

Next, you’ll set up the various subscription tiers for your readers. For each tier, you can customize the:

• Plan name and description

• Pricing options and currency

• Benefits and perks

With beehiiv, you can provide your readers with flexible payment options and billing schedules, including:

• Monthly subscription

• Annual subscription

• One-time payment

• Name Your Price

Real-life example: Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN, recently launched his independent media company, status.news, on beehiiv. Alongside his free newsletter, he offers two paid subscription options:

• All Access — includes a 7-day free trial, with monthly or annual payment options.

• Founders Club — offers exclusive perks, available only through an annual subscription.

Grow Your Subscription Business

Now that you’re converting free readers into paying subscribers, it’s time to deliver.

You can use our audience controls in the Post Builder to determine who can access your exclusive content.

When it’s exclusively for paying readers:

• Select All Paid Subscribers for email audience.

• Select All Paid Subscribers for web audience.

This ensures that your newsletter reaches only those actively subscribing to your paid content, while non-subscribers attempting to access this content on your website will encounter a paywall prompting them to upgrade.

You can also send your newsletter to your entire audience while reserving specific sections for paying readers. There are two ways to accomplish this:

1. Simply drop a Paywall Break into the post.

   • Everything above this break will be available to all readers.

   • Free readers will encounter a paywall at the break, prompting them to upgrade.

   • Paying readers won’t see the paywall and will have full access to content below the break.

2. Edit the Visibility Settings of individual sections.

   • You can group together elements in your post and adjust the visibility settings to show them only to free or paying readers.

   • This lets you display premium content exclusively to paying subscribers while providing an upsell or preview for free readers.

Here are even more beehiiv tools to elevate your strategy:

• Free Trials: Allow free readers to experience your paid content at no cost.

• Promo Codes: Incentivize free readers to upgrade with limited-time offers.

• Gift Subscriptions: Manually upgrade specific readers to a paid tier for free (hi Mom 👋).

• Referral Program: Leverage our popular Referral Program to incentivize readers to share your newsletter. We've integrated it directly with our Paid Subscriptions feature, rewarding referrals with access.

Data, Baby!

You can quickly track all the essential metrics you need to scale your subscription business, including active subscribers, revenue, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), annual recurring revenue (ARR), lifetime value (LTV), and average time to upgrade.

You can also see a quick breakdown of your active plans in terms of payment cadence and when the upgrade event occurred.

Further down, you can view your paid subscriber and revenue growth. All charts are customizable to change the timeframe of the data you’d like to analyze.

By clicking on the Attribution tab, you can track…

• Upgrades and downgrades by day.

• The top acquisition sources driving upgrades.

• The top performing posts that converted the most readers.

Again, all charts are customizable, allowing you to adjust the timeframe for your analysis.

Lastly, by navigating to the Breakdown tab, you can analyze:

• A complete overview of active subscriptions by payment cadence and amount (full price, discount, trial, gift, etc.)

• Conversion rates and the effectiveness of your free trials and other promotions

We’ve also introduced new insights and tools to dive deeper into each subscriber’s:

• Payment history

• Total revenue

• Subscription events

• Trials and promotions

• Quick access to Stripe billing

Open Platforms Are Better

Most paid newsletter platforms operate within a closed ecosystem, restricting your options and locking you into their capabilities.

In contrast, beehiiv is an open platform, enabling you to leverage our automations, API, and webhooks to integrate seamlessly with any service on the internet.

For example, when a reader upgrades to a paid subscription, you can:

• Trigger a new automation.

• Send them an email welcoming them as a new subscriber.

• Share their subscription data with Slack or Discord to grant them community access.

The beauty of open platforms is that the possibilities are endless.

Introducing Password Authentication

Even with all the tools and dashboards to build a powerhouse subscription business, we want to make sure your readers can access their content as seamlessly as possible.

Starting today, your readers can log in by creating a unique password for your publication. This is in addition to having the option to log in via Magic Link.

You can also choose to disable password authentication in your website security settings. With paid newsletters on beehiiv, you’re entirely in control.