Solutions / Newsletters & paid media
Your readers, your revenue
A publication with free and paid tiers, a gated archive, and analytics that show which stories convert — on your own domain, on your own terms.
The case for building it
Why build this instead of a newsletter platform?
Hosted newsletter platforms take a share of every subscription and keep the reader relationship — your archive lives at their domain, your paywall behaves their way, and your publication is a tenant in their product. Kliv puts the publication on your own domain with the same machinery — paid tiers, a gated archive, email delivery — and the subscriber list is simply yours.
Editorial judgment should reach the paywall: which pieces are free, which unlock after a month, how series and sections are organized, what a trial includes. Your archive is your database, so those are rules you state — and analytics show which stories actually convert readers into subscribers, so the judgment compounds.
Anatomy of the system
What the publication actually knows
A paid publication is an archive with opinions about who reads what. The system has to know each article's gate, each reader's standing, and — if the business is going to grow — which stories actually convert. Here is the shape Kliv would build.
Articles
Your archive as rows in your own database — draft, published, premium, or free-after-a-month; the gate is a field on the piece.
Readers
Everyone on the list, free and paid — their standing, their history, what converted them.
Subscriptions & trials
The paid relationship — monthly or annual, trialing or settled, current or lapsed.
The gates
Editorial rules about access — this piece free, this one premium, this series unlocked after 30 days.
Issues & sends
Email delivery on your templates — the free issue to everyone, the full one to subscribers.
Conversion events
Which article turned a reader into a subscriber — editorial judgment, compounding.
Who sees what
Rules the database enforces
- Gating is a rule on the article row — free, premium, or time-delayed — so editorial judgment reaches the paywall directly.
- A lapsed subscription falls back to free automatically; recovery emails chase the card meanwhile.
- A draft is invisible until published — and publishing updates the site, the archive, and the send at once.
- Every subscription records the article that converted it — attribution is a fact, not a guess.
The archive is your database, the paywall is your rule, and the reader relationship is your row. That's the whole difference from being a tenant in someone else's publication.
What Kliv assembles
A shopping list of platform pieces — each one built in, each one composing with the rest.
Articles as data
Your archive lives in your own database — published is public, premium is gated by a rule, drafts stay private.
The paid tier
Monthly or annual subscriptions with trials — lapsed readers fall back to free, automatically.
Which stories convert
Conversion events show which articles turn readers into subscribers.
The archive, asked anything
An agent answers reader questions from a knowledge base built on your writing.
Ways to charge
Three ways a publication can charge
Reader revenue has more than one shape, and the healthiest publications run several at once.
Monthly subscription
$8/month
The reader who wants in, lightly
The full archive, every premium piece, the subscriber-only send.
- Unlocks
- An active subscription opens every gate; lapse falls back to free without a fight.
- Billing
- Renews monthly; failed cards get retries and recovery emails before access closes.
- Refunds
- Approval-gated — a decision, not an accident.
Annual subscription
$80/year
The convinced reader
Everything monthly gets, at two months free — the price that rewards commitment.
- Unlocks
- Same gates, longer clock.
- Billing
- Renews yearly with a reminder before the charge — no surprise renewals, fewer disputes.
- Refunds
- Your policy, enforced through the approval step.
Founding supporter
$240/year
The reader who wants the publication to exist
Everything in annual, plus the colophon credit and the annual letter — patronage, made legible.
- Unlocks
- A tier on the same subscription machinery — no special-case code, just a different door.
- Billing
- Same annual cycle, same billing page.
- Refunds
- Same approval flow.
Before launch
The first week, before you launch
The archive deserves better than a migration weekend. Four days, then a rehearsal.
Shape the publication
Describe it: sections, what's free, what's premium, how the trial works. Kliv builds the first preview with the paywall already thinking your way.
Make it yours
Typography is the product here — refine the reading experience until the pages feel like your publication, not a platform theme.
Load the archive
Import the back catalog as data, set each piece's gate, wire the templates for the send. The archive arrives organized, not dumped.
Try to break it
Read as a free reader and hit the paywall. Start a trial, cancel it, lapse a subscription — watch the gates follow billing in real time.
Then rehearse a year
In the Sandbox, with simulated money and simulated time, run a subscriber's year: the trial that converts, the annual that renews after its reminder, the card that fails in March and recovers in April, the lapse that falls gently to free. Publish knowing the reader lifecycle already works.
Bespoke, without the bespoke risk
Custom software used to mean a budget, a contractor, and a maintenance contract. This is a different deal.
Enterprise-grade parts
Sign-in, permissions enforced at the database, billing, audit, email — the components under your bespoke system are the same hardened pieces every Kliv app runs on. You compose proven infrastructure; you don't commission code from scratch.
Changes ship in order
When your process changes, say so — the change is built in conversation, you review it in a live preview, and nothing reaches your users until you publish. Commerce changes can even be rehearsed in the Sandbox with simulated money and time.
Nobody can sunset it
Off-the-shelf tools get re-priced, redesigned, and retired on a vendor's schedule — and your workflow goes with them. Your Kliv app changes only when you change it. It's your product, not a seat in someone else's.
Say it in one sentence
“Build a publication site with free articles and a paid tier that unlocks the full archive, a free newsletter signup, and analytics on which articles drive subscriptions.”
This is genuinely how it starts — describe it, then refine in conversation.
Common questions
Do readers subscribe on my domain?
Yes — the publication, the checkout, and the reader's billing page all live on your own domain. Nobody else's brand touches the relationship.
Can some articles be free and others paid?
Yes — gating is a rule on your own data, so free pieces, premium pieces, and time-delayed unlocks coexist however your editorial judgment dictates.
What happens when a reader's subscription lapses?
They fall back to the free tier automatically — the archive gates follow billing in real time, and recovery emails chase the expired card for you.
How do trials work?
As catalog rules: a trial period on the subscription, stated at signup, converting unless cancelled. The gates open on day one and follow the outcome automatically.
Can contributors have accounts without seeing the business?
Yes — roles scope access, so a contributor works on their own pieces and never sees the subscriber list or the revenue. The boundary is the database's, not a shared login's.
Do I need a separate tool to send the newsletter?
No — issues send from the same system, on your templates, to the right slice of the list: the free issue to everyone, the full one to paying readers. The archive, the gate, and the send agree because they're the same data.
