Metered paywall calculator

Enter your monthly unique visitors, how many articles a typical reader gets through in a month, the share of readers who subscribe once they hit the wall, and your monthly price. Then drag the free-article meter from 0 to 10 and watch the projected new subscribers move. The tool also scans every meter setting from 0 to 10 and highlights the one that produces the most subscribers under this illustrative model. Figures recalculate live in your browser and are saved in the URL so you can share a scenario.

This is an illustrative model, not a forecast. It exists to show the shape of one trade-off: a low meter walls more readers but catches them before they care about your journalism, while a high meter builds the habit that makes people pay but lets most readers slip through without ever meeting the paywall. Because one effect falls as the other rises, there is usually a peak in between.

The exact formulas used, so you can check them:

• pHitWall(meter) = exp(−meter ÷ average articles read) — the share of readers who reach the paywall. It falls as the meter rises.
• engagementFactor(meter) = 1 − exp(−meter ÷ 2) — readers who have sampled more of your content convert better. It rises as the meter rises.
• New subscribers per month = visitors × pHitWall × base conversion × engagementFactor.
• Reader reach retained = 1 − pHitWall — the share of readers who never hit the wall and keep browsing freely.
• Added MRR = new subscribers per month × price.
• Recommended free-article limit = the meter value from 0 to 10 that maximises new subscribers per month.

The curves are deliberately simple stand-ins for real reader behaviour. Tune the inputs with your own analytics before drawing conclusions.

Take 100,000 monthly unique visitors who read 4 articles each on average, with 8% of walled readers subscribing at £5 a month. Scanning every meter from 0 to 10, the model peaks at a free-article limit of 2, producing about 3,067 new subscribers a month — roughly £15,336 of added MRR.

• At a meter of 1: about 2,451 new subscribers — lots of readers walled, but too early for most to care.
• At a meter of 2: about 3,067 new subscribers — the peak.
• At a meter of 8: about 1,063 new subscribers — highly engaged, but few readers ever reach the wall.

Notice that the curve is fairly flat near the top: moving one article either side of the peak usually costs little, which is why testing beats guessing.

Across the news industry, metered paywalls most commonly allow somewhere between three and five free articles a month, and the long-run trend has been downward as publishers grow more confident in their reader-revenue funnels. Titles with a narrow, high-intent audience tend to run tighter meters or move to freemium gating by content type, while broad general-interest publishers keep looser meters to protect search and social reach.

Whatever the benchmark says, your own average articles per reader matters more. A meter set well above your typical reading frequency is effectively no paywall at all.

Sources

• WAN-IFRA — World Press Trends and reader revenue research
• Statista — free articles allowed by news paywalls
• State of Digital Publishing — metered paywall benchmarks

Illustrative model. Benchmarks vary by market and content type — replace them with your own analytics and paywall data as soon as you have it.