Paywalls & Monetization
NewsTeam’s paywall model is built around billing integrations, entitlements, and content policies.
Instead of hard-coding one paywall provider into the CMS, NewsTeam lets billing plugins describe the products a reader can buy and the entitlement keys those products grant. Your organization then maps those entitlement keys to named content policies, and editors attach those policies to articles.
The model
Section titled “The model”The core flow is:
- A billing integration returns products and entitlement keys.
- Your organization creates a content policy, such as
Premium,Member, orArchives. - The policy says: any of these entitlements unlock content with this policy.
- Editors attach that policy to an article.
- Your website lists products from the connected billing integrations.
- When a logged-in reader buys a product, the billing integration links the purchase back to the reader.
- When NewsTeam checks the reader’s subscriptions, the billing integration returns the entitlements that reader has.
- Those entitlements are matched against the article’s policy.
That keeps commercial configuration out of article body text and out of frontend-only rules. The article carries the policy; the policy carries entitlement requirements; the billing integration carries the product and subscription truth.
Billing integrations
Section titled “Billing integrations”Billing is one of the four integration capabilities in NewsTeam. A billing plugin can provide:
- checkout URLs
- billing portal URLs
- products
- subscriptions
- entitlement keys
- callback handling after purchase
Current built-in implementations include Paystack and Polar. The same billing contract can be implemented by other providers when an organization needs a different subscription or membership system.
See Integrations for the broader integration capability model.
Products and checkout
Section titled “Products and checkout”Audience-facing websites can ask the V1 subscription API for available products. Those products come from the connected billing plugins, not from hard-coded frontend pricing tables.
Each product can include:
- product ID
- name and description
- price, currency, and interval
- entitlement keys granted by the product
- whether the current logged-in reader already has access through an active subscription
When a reader chooses a product, the website asks NewsTeam to start checkout. NewsTeam calls the billing plugin, receives a checkout URL, and sends the reader to the provider’s checkout flow.
After checkout, the provider callback can update reader attributes that the billing plugin needs for future subscription checks.
Content policies
Section titled “Content policies”Content policies live in organization settings.
A policy has:
- a name
- an optional description
- one or more entitlement keys
The entitlement selector is populated from billing integrations. For example, if a billing plugin exposes premium_monthly and premium_annual, a policy named Premium can include both. Any reader with either entitlement can unlock content attached to that policy.
This gives commercial teams a stable editorial label while still allowing billing products to change underneath it.
Articles
Section titled “Articles”Articles can carry a content policy.
In Desk, editors can attach one of the organization’s content policies to an article from the article metadata panel. That policy ID is stored on the article and can travel through the API with the article data.
This makes paywall state part of structured content metadata rather than something a site has to infer from tags, sections, or custom body markup.
API enforcement
Section titled “API enforcement”The intended enforcement layer is the V1 API.
The target behavior is that an API request with no valid logged-in reader access token, or with a reader that lacks the required entitlement, can receive a restricted article response with protected body content removed. A request from a reader with a matching entitlement can receive the full article.
That final API-layer restriction is still being completed, but the foundation is in place:
- billing plugins return products, subscriptions, and entitlements
- V1 exposes subscription product, checkout, callback, and subscription listing flows
- organizations can create content policies from entitlement keys
- articles can attach content policies
- logged-in reader requests already use access tokens
Why this shape matters
Section titled “Why this shape matters”This model lets a publisher change products, pricing, billing providers, or entitlement names without rewriting editorial workflows.
For example:
- A monthly plan and annual plan can both unlock the same
Premiumpolicy. - A special event product can unlock an
Eventspolicy without changing article metadata. - A future provider can implement the same billing integration contract and continue feeding the same policy model.