Do you need a pro tier?

Just because you start at $7/month doesn’t mean you have to stay there.

Over and over again when I introduce a new sponsor, offer a new class or ask for tips, it is the people who already paid me who show up to the table with cash. I’m not alone in this. Other publishers like RANGE have shared anecdotes about existing members increasing their contribution level when asked.

This is what we call ✨ expansion revenue ✨ and it is often overlooked by writers who are focused on MORE subscribers when maybe the answer is MORE money per subscriber.

Today, I want to dig into one tack you can take to expand revenue: the pro tier.

A pro tier is a package aimed at professionals who use your work for…their work. It can be offered to individuals or to organizations. Indie publishers are experimenting with both and I’m going to show you some ideas of what you could try.

Is it time to add a pro tier of your own? Today’s issue will help you find out.

—Lex

P.S. I’m running No Monopoly Media Week on my other newsletter starting Monday to close out my summer reader raise and piss off my internet enemies. Be part of it for free!

This newsletter is produced in partnership with Outpost 🪐 

Today’s issue was inspired by chats I’ve had with the team at Outpost.

They built three features to help you expand subscription revenue: gift subscriptions, group subscriptions and institutional subscriptions.

Outpost added these because they noticed publishers wanted to offer different kinds of subscriptions beyond the basics so they built the tools and made them available to everyone. Less manual labor for you. More money in your bank account.

If you’re on Ghost, start using Outpost today to sell subscriptions smarter.

What’s a pro tier?

Pretty much every niche has a version of a “professional” audience.

If your publication is about cheese, there are people who make and sell cheese for a living. If your publication is about fashion, there are people who make and sell fashion for a living. If your publication is about politics…you get it.

A professional tier takes into account that your work is especially valuable to people who use it to do their work. It’s more relevant if you also have consumer pricing at a low price point. It’s less relevant if your whole audience is professionals (and you already priced for them).

We are talking about a separate price and package, beyond your basic tier, designed for either an individual professional who wants more access themselves or for an organization who wants to give access to their members. What access means is up to you. Let’s look at a few examples.

The individual pro tier

Alissa Walker, who writes Torched about the LA Olympics and other cursed mega events, started noticing a lot of interest from nonprofit leaders who wanted deeper insight into what she was reporting on.

Alissa launched last year with only a couple tiers, more aimed at a wide range of readers, but she quickly added a special tier “just for nonprofits.”

It includes early access to tours and events as well as a quarterly nonprofit briefing with Alissa. The nonprofit tier is still fairly affordably priced at $15/month or $200/year and she’s already had several nonprofit leaders take her up on it.

The organization pro tier

Matt Brown, founder of Extra Points which covers the business of college sports, has multiple pro audiences and offers.

One of them is universities. Matt designed a game that simulates what it’s like to run a D-1 athletic department. He had sports management students in mind as he built it and schools have been making it available in their classrooms ever since he went live.

You get access to the ADS4000 game and all paid stories at the lowest subscription tier of the publication as an individual, but schools often want to buy seats in bulk.

Matt said it’s pretty manual how this happens behind the scenes. For schools that want to buy a batch of licenses, Extra Points sends an invoice and they’ll send back a list of emails they want to get access. Matt then puts these in a segment and upgrades their accounts with comp access. EP gives bigger discounts for this path because it’s a lot easier to deliver.

The other path is to create individual discount codes that get used by students. That becomes a hassle to manage because students sign up at different times and forget to cancel and the EP team has to do more manual follow up and clean up.

Extra Points doesn’t just work with universities though. They also have law firm and newsroom clients who do group subscriptions. And they have an individual pro tier for their Extra Points Library, which turns their public records requests into a searchable database vendors, coaches, lawyers and other journalists can pull from.

Matt and his team have increasingly prioritized these types of subscribers and these types of pro offers as the newsroom side keeps generating valuable intel that can be productized and therefore, monetized.

A few other examples of pro pricing

Seamus Hughes from Court Watch, who covers the most surprising federal court filings no one else is talking about, has a Founders Tier which includes an online training on the system they use to dig up those court records.

Ryan Broderick and the Garbage Day team offer custom consulting stemming from their “Garbage Intelligence” reports. Not the same thing as a pro tier, but it’s pro services and it’s along the same line of thinking as what we’re talking about here: how to expand the lifetime value of each reader.

Garbage Day’s consulting practice includes running additional custom reports and even giving custom presentations. Typical clients are brands, agencies and industry conferences, according to their own page explaining this offer.

Ed Zitron and Nathan Tankus have both added “you’re rich” tiers which also aren’t the same thing as pro tiers but are likely hitting people whose professional work intersects with their beats.

Ed’s $10k tier is kind of a joke, though I’m sure someone wants his cell phone number enough to do it. Nathan has told me via Bluesky that people do in fact buy his $5k Trump-Musk Payments Crisis of 2025 Platinum Tier, again not explicitly a pro tier, but it’s not standard consumer behavior to put that much cash down on a media entity.

Status, Hell Gate, and 404 Media all offer bulk subscription pricing too and you can contact them to negotiate your package directly.

Should you add a pro tier?

If you get messages from professional types who want more from your work, it’s worth considering a pro tier.

Trying something like a group subscription (where an organization buys seats and gives them to members) is an easy experiment because if you do it once and hate it, you can just not offer it anymore. Just add a line to your contact page and see who reaches out.

Adding a whole new public-facing tier takes more consideration and more demonstrated demand, especially if you’re going to add more stuff for you to produce like a Zoom call or extra content.

What I would recommend doing is asking the pros in your audience what they’re looking for. Then, test a beta offer with a few of them behind the scenes (use Stripe and send an invoice to them directly). See if you like running it and if so, add it to your offer set.

💬 Chat with us about pro tiers in the Project C Slack! Matt Brown offered to help people think through the opportunities and pitfalls. I’ll start a thread on it next week.

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