Subscription revenue works best when it's good for the subscriber and the publisher at the same time: a clear promise, plain pricing, and an experience that makes renewing feel obvious. We help independent media brands design that subscription, build the systems underneath it and run it month to month.
How we think about subscriptions
Price for the people who value you most. A committed group of subscribers who renew year after year is the strongest foundation a media business can have, and it's built one cohort at a time.
We measure everything, so decisions about pricing, packaging and content come from who joins, who stays and why. Our guide to pricing a paid newsletter or membership sets out the approach.
What we do
- Choose the model, whether membership, paid publication, tool, community or a mix, based on what your audience already does.
- Set pricing and tiers, and test them with the people most likely to pay first.
- Build billing, sign-in, paywalls and analytics on infrastructure we run. Our guide to subscription billing infrastructure covers what that involves.
- Launch to your most engaged readers first, refine what they find, then widen. See how to launch a paid subscription.
Stephen Han, who founded the studio, previously led subscription infrastructure at Vox Media for The Verge and New York Magazine: a platform serving 15 brands and $50M in subscription revenue.
How you'll know it's working
- Free readers convert to paid at a steady rate, well beyond launch week.
- Renewals hold, month after month.
- You can see who joined, who stayed and who left, and why.