Show HN: Subscriber-Only – Paid Subscriptions for Jekyll | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Subscriber-Only – Paid Subscriptions for Jekyll

subscriber-only.com

23 pointsvmsp9 comments

I want to show you something I've been working on for the past couple of months. You can check it out at

If you want to post paid written content on the web, you'll invariably reach out to Substack, Ghost or good old WordPress. If you're a fan of static site generators -- like I am -- you'll know that, by doing so, you'll lose the customizability and simplicity you get when using a tool like Jekyll.

Subscriber-Only is -- in my 100% impartial opinion -- a good alternative to using the mentioned platforms. You get to keep using Jekyll and, with a gem and a couple of lines of YAML, you'll enable subscriptions, subscriptions management, payment processing, access controls and all other needed machinery needed to have memberships on your site.

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Do check it out and let me know what you think!

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Do you get much uptake on subscriptions? Just wondering.

Personally I'd be very hesitant to give private blogs my payment details - I guess that's the raison d'etre of sites like medium and substack also.

But I'm pretty hesitant to do that anyway as I don't like recurring payment models. It's not that I don't like paying for things but the recurrent model is a problem for me.

Because of this I don't have any subscriptions in general to news/blog sites, though I do sponsor two people on patreon and I donate monthly to KDE. But everything else gets a big donation at the end of the year.

So perhaps I'm not the audience. I'm just wondering how well you fare with a personal blog. I'm thinking of making one with in depth tech info. It will be unmonetized (and no ads or tracking) but I worry people will not find it so I do the work for nothing :)

So if you manage to successfully monetize one, it means I have a decent chance with a free one too as there'll be an even lower barrier.

Just to be clear, you're neither giving Subscriber Only nor the authors your payment details. All of that is handled by Stripe. Their core service is handling this kind of sensitive data.

I can certainly understand not liking recurring payments but it's a pretty standard business model. On Subscriber Only, you can choose between monthly and yearly subscriptions and you can cancel them at any time. You can look at it a sort-of automation of what you're already doing with one-time donations.

Don't quote me on this -- I have no data -- but I think monetizing a personal blog is pretty tough. Unless you'd consider Strachery <https://stratechery.com/> a personal blog. If you want to get paid writing, I suggest specializing in a niche of a niche. E.g. Don't write about the tech industry, write about semiconductor manufacturing in Germany.

But hey, you won't know until you try!

I'm excited about this. I signed up. Are there docs somewhere?

That's exactly right. That's pretty much all there is to know. Your configuration tokens will show up in the site page as soon as you setup a payment method.

Feel free to reach me at vitor@subscriber-only.com if there's anything I can help you with.

Thanks for you kind words!

As someone using ghost self-hosted, I love the simplicity.

So, if I'm reading the code right (never used ruby, don't code much), you're implementing the paywall by serving the gated content from your own servers? Is that right?

Are you just dropping cookies or is more happening as part of sign-up? How are you handling access from different browsers or feed readers?

You got it. Copies of your gated posts are kept on the our end which will run access-control and serve it to authorized users. You get to keep all of your content and you won't ever be locked to Subscriber Only.

For authentication, the bare minimum of the "OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant" [0] is being used. A blog post detailing this process is on the roadmap.

You can login in as many browsers as you like. This will raise some eyebrows but, right now, I'm adopting a sort-of Netflix's "Love is sharing a password" motif. This might change later.

On feed readers, the content of the post will just be a message saying you need to access the website to read the post. I wish there was a better way of handling this use-case but haven't found one yet.

[0] https://oauth.net/2/grant-types/authorization-code/

Generate a special RSS feed URL for their subscription posts that has a unique token in it? Then serve the RSS yourself and validate the token?

That's a very reasonable approach. Sort-of like what Substack does on the podcast feeds. Do you think having a feed exclusively for subscriber posts would fit the use-case, though? I'd expect the feed to include both public and private posts.

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