Read this story for $1.

I noticed that Rascal offered this option on their paywalls so I reached out to co-founder Rowan Zeoli to see how it was working for them.

Most importantly—was it competing with their subscription revenue?

Chasing everyone down for $10 each month is a serious hassle. That’s why recurring subscriptions are the preferred revenue stream for many of us. Even so, there’s good reasons to offer one time payment options, one of which caught me by surprise.

Our revenue series continues today with “Pay per article: does it work?”

Pay per article: does it work?

Rascal covers the tabletop roleplaying game space. They’re worker-owned by a small, visionary team and they are reader-funded.

A couple months after their site went live last February, they installed a tool called Acta, which allows their readers to pay to read just one article. It sits right next to the subscribe option on their paywalls.

Not every article includes both options. Plenty of Rascal’s posts are open to everyone without a paywall, and some are only for paid subscribers, but most look like the one below.

Acta currently only works with Ghost publishers though founder Guillermo Olaizola told me they’re looking to expand to WordPress and beehiiv this year.

Why the $1 price point?

Immediately I thought this was too low, but Rowan said the team chose this price because it’s cheap enough to not “trigger the guilt in your brain for spending more money, but not entirely insignificant.”

With Acta, you can set the price per story.

Most of Rascal’s articles are $1 but some are more expensive if they are “exclusive columns” or “deeply investigated content that took months of work.”

D&D ReinKarnated, another subscription-based website that uses Acta, chooses their pay once pricing based on how detailed the content is too.

Creator Rich Spuller told me the price points range from $1 to $7.50 where the lowest tier is a basic map or NPC and the highest tier is a full adventure module that includes a whole D&D story to play through.

Is it hurting subscription revenue?

You always have to be careful not to cannibalize your own revenue by offering competing offers or price points.

This was my main concern with Acta, and it was Rascal’s too, but Rowan said it hasn’t been a problem.

In fact, they’ve seen people pay up to $10 on individual articles (more than Rascal charges for a subscription) and some of those readers do go on to become paying subscribers.

Rascal’s fans are loving this option. The team gets far less complaints about the dreaded paywall and when they do, Rascal readers take to the comments to defend them because the $1 price point is so fair.

Rowan’s noticing a shift in reader’s attitudes about paying for journalism too, even just in the last year.

For Matt Newberg, who runs food tech publication HNGRY, Acta is more of a mitigation against “free trial abuse.” 

HNGRY offers a one week free trial on their subscriptions and some readers try to game the system (probably a lot like I do with the New York Times—sorry to whoever has all the valid Gmail addresses I make up to read posts, all my money goes to the indie publishers).

Pay once is potentially more enticing for these readers but jury is still out on whether or not that’s working for HNGRY.

What’s the revenue like with pay per article?

That might actually be the wrong question.

Rowan sees this tool as an audience builder.

Since Rascal’s writers need to get paid (how dare they!), and some stories go behind a paywall anyway, new readers just discovering them are welcomed in with a lower barrier to entry than a recurring subscription.

Along those lines, Rowan cautions her peers to avoid pushing out clickbait just because people will buy it. As anyone with a Stripe account knows, those little transaction alerts can be quite addictive.

In terms of actual cash money, Rascal’s made a good chunk of change with Acta—Rowan estimates it’s at least covered “roughly a month's salary for one writer” since they started using it last year.

As for D&D ReinKarnated, they just hit 50 purchases after a few months of using Acta, which Rich called a “solid number” based on their audience size.

So, should you offer pay per article?

Worth a try! It sounds low risk to me based on what founders of Rascal, HNGRY and D&D ReinKarnated shared. Advantageous even, for the audience growth reasons Rowan pointed out.

Acta operates on revenue share so there’s no platform fee. Their cut depends on your pricing and you negotiate that with them directly right now. Also, it does not require a developer—just an API key—so anyone on your team with access to Ghost could install it.

Want to chat with Acta? Guillermo invited you to reach out.

Check out the publishers featured in this article: Rascal, D&D ReinKarnated and HNGRY.