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 cards (e.g. audio) that a user can view or interact with before they're shown the paywall. Users will retain access to these articles or cards even after the paywall is shown, but any new articles or cards they interact with will display the paywall. We show a display in the 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. The meter also support a configurable reset timer, for example after a day, week or month. This counter begins from when the user first invokes the metered paywall.

This limit is 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

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:

1. Resetting at the beginning of every week or month 
2. Offering a time-based limit
3. Tying the limit to a 3rd-party system, such as Piano 

Exclusion

Specific collections or articles can be excluded from the metered paywall (meaning they won't be available at all without subscribing or signing in) by adding a custom field to the collection or article in the CMS called:

pugpig_widgets_meter

To control how the meter works you can set the value for this custom field to:

• "default" - for any articles to be included in the meter
• Any other value, including not setting a value - for articles that should be excluded from the meter.

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
• Any other value, including not setting a value - 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.