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Premium Subscriptions Feature

Learn how to set up and manage Premium Subscriptions on your Newsifier site. With Premium Subscriptions, you can offer paid access to premium content, an ad-free experience, or both.

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Written by Support Newsifier

Introduction

Premium Subscriptions allow you to generate recurring revenue from your audience by offering exclusive benefits to paying subscribers. Readers subscribe through Stripe, and you control which content and features are included with each subscription plan.

Once enabled, Newsifier automatically provides:

  • A subscription pricing page (yoursite.com/pricing)

  • A paywall for premium content

  • A reader account area where subscribers can manage their subscription

Payments are processed through your Stripe account and paid directly to your bank account.

Before you start

To start selling subscriptions, you'll need:

  • Premium Subscriptions enabled on your Newsifier site

  • A connected Stripe account

  • At least one subscription plan configured

If you'd like to offer Premium Subscriptions on your site, contact the Newsifier support team for activation.

Pricing: Newsifier charges a 10% fee on each subscription payment. The remaining amount is paid directly to your bank account through your connected Stripe account. Stripe's own payment processing fees are billed separately by Stripe and are not included in the Newsifier fee.

Styling and customization: Premium Subscriptions come with a default theme at no extra cost. If you'd like to change the styling of the feature — such as the paywall block design, the premium icon, or the look of the pricing page — share your request with the Newsifier support team. We'll estimate the work involved and confirm the cost before proceeding.

Step 1: Connect Stripe

After having the feature activated on your site, go to the Settings menu in the right-hand sidebar, then open Payment Settings and click Connect Stripe Account.

You'll be guided through Stripe's onboarding process. Once complete, you'll return to Newsifier and see your Stripe connection status.

If Stripe shows a Restricted status, click Continue Onboarding and complete any remaining requirements.

Step 2: Create subscription plans

Subscription plans are created and managed in Stripe.

In your Stripe Dashboard:

  1. Open Products

  2. Click Add product

  3. Enter a plan name

  4. Add one or more recurring prices

  5. Save the product

You can create multiple plans, such as:

  • Premium Access

  • Ad-Free

  • Premium + Ad-Free

You can also add both monthly and annual pricing to the same product.

Customizing how your plans appear on the pricing page

Your pricing page (yoursite.com/pricing) is designed to closely mirror the layout of Stripe's own pricing table, and you can control how each plan is presented directly from your Stripe product, no changes are needed in Newsifier.

Show custom marketing features

By default, each plan card lists the entitlements you've enabled for that plan in Newsifier (such as Premium Content or Ad-Free Experience). If you'd rather display your own marketing copy instead, set a custom feature list on the product in Stripe:

  1. In your Stripe Dashboard, open the product you created.

  2. Under the product's details, find the Marketing feature list.

  3. Click More options to add each feature you want to display.

  4. Save the product.

These features will then appear on that plan's card on your pricing page, in place of the default entitlements.

Highlight a plan as "most popular"

To make one plan stand out as the recommended or most popular option:

  1. Open the product in your Stripe Dashboard.

  2. Add a metadata entry with the key highlighted and the value true.

  3. Update (save) the product.

That plan's card will then be visually highlighted on your pricing page.

Once you've made these changes in Stripe, refresh your pricing page to see your custom feature list and the highlighted plan.

Customizing your Stripe checkout

Your subscribers complete payment on a Stripe-hosted checkout page. From your Stripe Dashboard, you can customize this page to match your branding and choose which payment methods are available to your subscribers (under Stripe's settings).

For anything specific to Stripe — checkout customization, payment methods, account settings, or payouts — you can also refer to Stripe's Help Center, which covers all Stripe-side configuration in detail.

Step 3: Sync plans with Newsifier

Return to Settings → Payment Settings → Manage Products & Entitlements.

Click Sync from Stripe to import your subscription products.

For each plan:

  • Enable Premium Content if subscribers should access premium articles

  • Enable Ad-Free Experience if subscribers should browse without ads

  • Optionally configure a free trial

  • Set the display order

  • Mark the plan as Active

Save your changes when finished.

A subscription plan must unlock at least one entitlement before it can appear on your pricing page.

Once activated, your pricing page becomes available at: yoursite.com/pricing

Making content subscriber-only

To restrict an article to subscribers, enable Premium Content in the article editor.

Visitors without an eligible subscription will see the paywall, while subscribers continue reading normally.

Offering an ad-free subscription

If a plan includes the Ad-Free Experience entitlement, subscribers who are logged in are automatically flagged as ad-free across your site.

For ads to actually be removed for these subscribers, your ad setup needs to respond to that status. Two things need to be in place:

  1. Tag your ad scripts. In the builder, set isAdvertisement: true on your ad scripts so Newsifier knows not to render them for ad-free subscribers.

  2. Have your ad agency read the user's status and act on it. Your ad scripts (and CMP setup) should check whether the reader is an ad-free subscriber and respond accordingly — for example, not loading ad scripts, not showing the CMP, or showing a different CMP. An ad-free user can be detected in either of these ways:

    • Check for the paid-user class on the <html> element, or

    • Read the entitlement from localStorage:
      ​JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('{tenant}-user')).entitlements.includes('ad_free')
      (replace {tenant} with your site's tenant identifier)

If you're unsure how your ads are configured, your ad agency or Newsifier support can help.

Free trials

You can offer a free trial period for individual plans through Manage Products & Entitlements.

Trials are only applied to first-time subscriptions and cannot be reused after cancellation.

What subscribers see

Subscribers can manage their own subscription through their account area.

From their profile page they can:

  • View their current subscription

  • See renewal information

  • Update payment methods

  • Cancel their subscription

Changes are handled securely through Stripe's customer portal.

Monitoring your subscriptions

The Payment Settings dashboard provides an overview of your subscription setup.

You'll see information such as:

  • Active subscribers

  • Configured subscription plans

  • Stripe connection status

This dashboard is an overview only. For full subscription data — individual subscribers, payments, invoices, refunds, and detailed reporting — check your Stripe Dashboard.

About the connection status:

  • A Healthy status means events are flowing normally.

  • A Stale status doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong — it means no events have been received in the last 24 hours. That can happen because webhook delivery or processing is broken, or simply because there's been no new activity recently.

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