Bolt Metered Paywall
Written by Benji Weiser
Updated at December 19th, 2022
Table of Contents
This article highlights the functionality of the metered paywall. Please see this article for the paywall overview.
Metered Paywall
Pugpig Bolt supports the concept of a metered paywall, which allows users to access a certain amount of content that would usually be protected before they're presented with the paywall. This serves as an easy, flexible way to give users a taste of the full app experience.
You're able to choose a number of articles or other widgets that a user can view or interact with before they're shown the paywall. Users will retain access to these articles even after the paywall is shown, but any new articles they try and read will display the paywall.We show a display in app to let users know how many articles they've read out of their limit, tapping the display will invoke the paywall, allowing them to easily subscribe at any point.
This limit is currently tracked locally on the device, and thus users are able to exceed their limit by using multiple devices, or deleting and reinstalling the app
Options
Currently the metered paywall offers a configurable number of free articles and can be reset on a specified time-basis, but there are a number of ways in which we're planning to or considering expanding this functionality in the future, including:
- Resetting at the beginning of every week or month
- Offering a time-based limit
- Tying the limit to a 3rd-party system, such as Piano
Notes
- Metered articles will remain available to the user even after they reach their limit
- Free articles won't count towards the limit
- The limit can be change via config, but this will not reset the count for users who have already installed the app and viewed some content, it will adjust it
Config
The paywall is configured in Distribution > Settings, under the paywall tab. The default meter number is 5, but this can be whatever you'd like.
The current time configurations supported can be any of the following ISO8601 duration string subsets:
- years, e.g. P1Y (1 year)
- months, e.g. P1M (1 month)
- days, e.g. P30D (30 days)
- weeks, e.g. P4W (4 weeks)
- minutes, e.g. PT5M (5 minutes)
- a combination, e.g. P1Y6M (1 year and 6 months)
Exclusion
Certain articles can be excluded from the metered paywall (meaning they won't be available at all without subscribing) by adding a custom field to the article in the CMS called:
pugpig_widgets_meter
To exclude the article from the meter, the value for this field can to be set to anything other than the word "default" (which means the article will behave as normal, counted as part of the meter).This can be anything you choose, however we recommend using "excluded".
Exclusion via feed
If you'd like to control metered paywall inclusion/exclusion via an RSS feed, you can do so by adding a new tag to each item and setting the value to "default" for any articles to be included in the meter, and "excluded" for articles that should be excluded from the meter.
Running concurrent meters (not supported)
A concurrent meter would involve, for example, being able to access 5 standard articles and/or 2 premium articles before hitting the paywall. We have discussed this internally, but currently do not have a good solution that isn't very confusing for the end user. If you have any good suggestions or examples, please get in touch with us.