I just listened to an episode of the New Creative Era podcast, and the topic of being "oversubscribed" to Substack came up. Josh pitches bundling, cross-platform micropayments, and revenue sharing as alternatives that could let subscribers access work from more than a handle of $ 5 subscriptions, while potentially also compensating authors , but notes the challenge that any of those solutions are technically quite difficult to implement. It feels incumbent on platforms like Substack to offer solutions, since they have such a big chunk of the paid-writing market, but Substack doesn't seem too interested in exploring these alternatives.
This got me thinking about what models of micropayments might be technically quite easy to implement and deploy, even for an individual author. When I think about what I want out of Substack writing, typically it's actually just a few articles a month from any one author. But the typically $ 5 or more monthly payment feels like too much for me to pay, partly because I'm not earning any income at the moment, and partly because even if I was, I know I'd have to somehow remember to cancel my subscription, or end up subscribing to way too many Substacks at once—I'd end up oversubscribed.
What I'd love to do is have a really thin paywall, like $ 0.25 or something, to read a single article. In other words, a micropayment - or maybe centi-payment would be a fun term for this, since we're talking full cents, not fractions of cents. I'm pretty sure the reason this isn't more of a thing is that accepting $ 0.25 payments is basically pointless from the seller's perspective, since most or all of it will get eaten up by payment processing fees, if it's even accepted at all. Stripe, for example, charges 2.9% plus $ 0.30, and their minimum payment is $ 0.50. So asking readers to tip $ 0.25 before reading an article isn't feasible.
The good news is I think there's a relatively simple solution for this: let your customers run up a tab. Paid articles would be behind a sign-up wall, you'd have to sign in with an email to start reading. Register for an account with your email, and you'd be able to start reading. Charge micropayments to your tab, hit some threshold like $ 5 where you get a reminder to settle your tab, and some later threshold like $ 10 where you get fully paywalled.
Or maybe the exact same flow happens, but it's framed as getting $ 5 credit on sign-up (20 free articles at $ 0.25 an article), and you can't dip below $ 0, you have to reload your account with credit. I think I prefer the traditional tab, feels like it retains more of a sense of value and obligation to support the artist—I don't know why, but "free credits" just feels a bit icky and sleazy. And heck, may even be more complicated from a legal standpoint, I know there are specific laws here in Canada around gift cards, and I wonder if they'd apply here depending on the framing.
Of course, you could absolutely just sign up for a new account with a new email and circumvent either framing... but that feels petty in the face of the value being delivered. If you've run up a tab of $ 5, you've read 20 articles, that's a lot of writing. It seems like the ratio of leeches who try to circumvent the system to relatively supportive customers who are willing to play the game would probably be acceptable.
Anyways... this kind of solution feels like it has to have been attempted before... but at risk of revealing my own business ignorance and programming hubris, I feel like it'd be neat to try to set up a pre-built solution that integrates with common payment providers like Stripe and Square. I think the components I'd need would be:
- User accounts, for the sign-up wall, and to have something to associate each tab with
- Tab entries, each row is an item identifier and the amount it cost
- Payment provider integration, to settle tabs of course
- Probably lots of other stuff, but I don't know enough yet to know what I'm missing
I have an embarrassingly low level of experience working with databases, but this feels like it could be within my technical grasp if I give it a shot. And this might tie in nicely with some ideas I have about re-publishing public domain texts as nicely formatted e-books—those feel like they'd have a similar value-per-item as a well-written internet essay.