WordPress Paywall Plugin: 5 Situations and the Cut Each One Takes

A WordPress paywall plugin locks posts, pages or files behind a payment. The options split into 2 groups. Dedicated paywall plugins like Leaky Paywall, Zlick and PostGate install free and take a percentage of every sale. Membership plugins like Simple Membership, s2Member and WishList Member charge a flat licence and take nothing per sale.

Those percentages rarely reach the roundups. Leaky Paywall takes 10% of paid subscriptions on its free tier, and Pro is $299 a month plus a $750 one-time setup fee. Zlick takes 10% on 2 of its 3 tiers and 30% on the third. PostGate takes 5%. On the flat-licence side, s2Member Pro is $89 once and Simple Membership is free.

The WordPress plugin directory shows a price beside every plugin, and next to the paywall ones it says Free.

The download is free. The service behind it bills you, usually as a share of everything you sell, and none of that appears in the listing.

A reader on r/Wordpress put it better than I can. All the paywall plugins, he wrote, want to be the more-than-half-partner, and they want your site to make money for them.

So this post prices them the way you will actually pay. What the licence costs, what comes off each sale, and which of the 5 situations below is yours.

Key Takeaways

• Free on WordPress.org rarely means free to run. The 4 dedicated paywall plugins take 5% to 30% of your sales, or will not take payments at all.
• Leaky Paywall Pro is $299 a month, plus a $750 one-time setup fee, plus 5% of new subscriber revenue. Its plugin listing says Free.
• Membership plugins do the same job for a flat fee. s2Member Pro is $89 once, Simple Membership is free, and neither takes a cut.
• Google has a free paywall option almost nobody names. Reader Revenue Manager installs through Site Kit and charges 5% per transaction, credit card fees included.
• 4 of the plugins Reddit recommends for this cannot be installed from WordPress.org any more, including 2 named in a thread posted after they were removed.

What actually differs between WordPress paywall plugins

WordPress paywall plugins separate on how they get paid. Almost every option here restricts a post, a page, a category or a file, so the locking itself is close to a solved problem. The money side is where they diverge, and it diverges hard.

If you have not settled on a price for your paid content yet, that decision sits underneath this one and it moves more money. The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge is a free 5-day email course on the pricing and delivery mistakes that quietly drain solo sellers, and paying a percentage forever is one of them.

Group 1 is the dedicated paywall plugins. You install a small free plugin, connect Stripe, and the company behind it takes a slice of everything you sell. Group 2 is the membership plugins. You pay a licence once a year, or once ever, and keep everything after your payment processor takes its own cut.

Both groups gate content. Only 1 of them gets more expensive as you succeed.

Put real numbers on it. At 100 subscribers paying $5 a month, which is $6,000 a year in sales, the dedicated paywall plugins cost between $300 and $4,638 a year, and the membership plugins between nothing and $493.50. The top of that second range is MemberPress, because its entry plan takes a percentage too.

Every figure comes from the vendor’s own site. Where a vendor publishes only a monthly rate, the year is 12 of those. Stripe or PayPal processing sits on top of every row, including the free ones, because that money goes to the processor rather than to the plugin.

2 of those are year-1 figures. The $750 setup fee is charged once, so Leaky Paywall Pro settles at $3,888 a year from year 2 and Pigeon at $1,788. The percentages carry on either way.

Pigeon shows the mismatch at its sharpest. Its plugin is free to install. Its own pricing table then marks that free tier “No transactions allowed”.

So the cheapest Pigeon plan that can accept a single payment is $99 a month, before the setup fee and before the 10%.

The gap widens the moment anything works. Double that magazine to $12,000 a year and Leaky Paywall’s free tier takes $1,200, while s2Member still costs $89. Then remember that the s2Member $89 was a single payment, so year 2 costs nothing at all and the 10% keeps running.

If you only want to paywall 1 article, not your whole site

Gating a single article is the most common version of this question, and the phrasing people use is worth quoting. A blogger on r/Wordpress asked it plainly: he wanted to paywall 1 article, because it was a humdinger and he did not want to give it away.

He wanted 1 post behind 1 payment, with no membership site around it.

None of the guides in this search treats that as its own question. They rank plugins instead, so the answer comes back wrapped in membership levels, drip schedules and access rules, for a job that needs none of them.

Your real choices are 3.

PostGate locks a single post, a category, or even a single Gutenberg block, sells it with a one-time Stripe payment, and takes 5%. Their own worked example is a $20 sale, $1 to PostGate, $19 to you, before Stripe. It is a new plugin, published this year, and its directory listing shows fewer than 10 active installs, so you would be early rather than safe.

Google’s Reader Revenue Manager is the option almost nobody names. It handles contributions and subscriptions through the Site Kit plugin, and it takes 5% per transaction, credit card fees included. Because that 5% swallows the card fee, it undercuts PostGate’s 5% once you add Stripe on top. A commenter in that same Reddit thread raised it and nobody followed up.

Or you skip content gating and sell the article as a file through a checkout.

CartMango, which I run, is that third option, and its Silver plan is $10 a year with no per-transaction fee, covering 10 products and protected digital delivery. Gumroad takes 10% plus 50 cents per direct sale. Payhip takes 5% on its free plan.

What you give up with a checkout is the gate itself. It sells the file cleanly and it does nothing to stop a logged-out reader scrolling your WordPress post. If the thing you are protecting is the post rather than a download, PostGate or Reader Revenue Manager are the honest answers here.

If you want readers to get a few free articles first

A metered paywall gives anyone 3 or 5 free articles a month, then asks for money. It is how most news sites work, and it is the one job the dedicated paywall plugins genuinely do better than the membership plugins.

Leaky Paywall is built for it. The free version on WordPress.org does metered walls, hard walls, hybrid walls, restriction by post, category, tag or taxonomy, and a registration wall that collects emails before it asks for money. It has 600 active installs and a 4.2 out of 5 rating from 35 reviewers.

2 limits sit inside that free version.

The free version takes 10% of every paid subscription, and recurring subscriptions are a Pro feature, so the free tier can bill a reader once and then stops. Leaky Paywall writes it into the free-features section of its own directory listing, on 2 consecutive lines: “10% revenue share on paid subscriptions”, then “Upgrade anytime to reduce or remove the revenue share”.

Pro reduces the 10%. It costs $299 a month, adds a $750 one-time setup fee, and still takes 5% of revenue from every subscriber who signs up after launch.

Leaky Paywall’s own pricing page. Read the line under the $299: a $750 one-time setup, and the 5% is on top.

A magazine publisher hit that wall and wrote about it on r/Wordpress 7 months ago. After months of setup he found that sending a reader back to the page they had been reading before they registered sat behind the $299 a month plan, and his reaction is 4 letters long. He then said what he would have paid instead. He would happily hand over a cut per transaction, but not a monthly subscription, for a website that small.

That is the trade, stated fairly. If metered access is what your business actually runs on, Leaky Paywall does it properly and 10% at low volume is a reasonable price for software you did not have to build. If you are gating a handful of posts, you are buying a publisher’s tool for a blogger’s problem.

If you do not know yet whether anyone will pay

Most people asking this question have never sold a paid article. That changes the right answer completely. The expensive mistake at this stage is spending money and setup time on a business that does not exist yet.

So the cheapest thing that can take a payment wins until the numbers say otherwise. A percentage looks expensive on a spreadsheet and costs you nothing on zero sales. A $299 monthly plan costs $3,588 a year whether 400 people subscribe or nobody does.

So start on a percentage, then work out the point where it stops making sense.

The arithmetic is a single division. Take the flat plan’s yearly price and divide it by the percentage the free plan charges. Every break-even below lands under $250 a month of sales, so a percentage is the cheaper option only while the site is genuinely small.

Read the first row as the pattern: PostGate’s 5% costs less than s2Member’s $89 licence right up to $1,780 of sales a year, and more after that. Every break-even here is low, and that is the headline. A percentage is a fine way to start and a bad place to stay.

When you do switch, these are the flat-licence plugins with enough users behind them to be a safe landing. Simple Membership has 40,000 active installs and a 4.6 out of 5 rating from 475 reviewers. Paid Member Subscriptions has 10,000 installs and 4.7 from 265. s2Member has 8,000 installs and 4.1 from 234. For comparison, the 4 dedicated paywall plugins in this post add up to roughly 740 active installs between them. Simple Membership has 54 times that on its own.

Almost nobody switches.

Migrating a live subscriber list is genuinely unpleasant, so the plan you pick on day 1 tends to be the plan you pay in year 5. Put a calendar reminder at the break-even number rather than trusting yourself to notice it passing.

If you already sell through WooCommerce or a membership plugin

Check what you own before you buy anything. This catches more people than it should, because every guide in this search is written to sell you a new plugin rather than to talk you out of one.

Gating a course rather than a run of articles changes the answer again. Read what a WordPress LMS plugin costs before you buy either kind.

Running WooCommerce already? Paid Member Subscriptions plugs straight into it and restricts product viewing, product purchasing and member-only pricing without a second checkout. That was the reasoning a commenter gave in the single-article thread for their own pick: they wanted the membership plugin to inherit the payment gateways their store already had.

Running an LMS? LearnDash and LifterLMS both gate lessons behind a purchase with no paywall plugin involved, and Paid Member Subscriptions ships a LearnDash add-on on its Basic licence at €99 a year. Note the currency. IsItWP lists that plugin at $99 a year, and euros and dollars are not the same number.

Already paying for MemberPress, MemberMouse or WishList Member? You already own a paywall. All 3 restrict posts, pages, categories and files. WishList Member states no transaction fees on every tier, so its licence is the whole cost, starting at $149.50 against a $299 list price. MemberMouse starts at $149.50 against $299 and states no fee position either way.

MemberPress is the one to check on your own invoice. Its Launch plan is $199.50 against a $399 list price and adds 4.9% of every successful payment, which its pricing page states plainly. You have to move up to Growth at $349.50 to reach 0%. On $6,000 of sales that 4.9% is $294, so Launch really costs $493.50 and Growth costs $349.50, which makes the more expensive plan the cheaper one. The 2 plans cost the same at about $3,061 of yearly sales, and Growth wins above that.

The metered wall is where this option gets thin. These plugins are built around membership levels rather than a free-article counter, so if read-3-then-pay is the whole point, check that one feature on the plugin you already own before you rule anything else out. What you avoid is running 2 plugins that both manage user access, which is how paying members end up locked out of the thing they paid for.

If your buyers pay through something that is not Stripe

Sellers outside the US and Europe hit this first, and it narrows the field faster than any feature comparison. The question was asked in almost exactly those words on r/Wordpress: are there free WordPress plugins that do paywalls on posts and pages and work with Razorpay or Dodo Payments.

The answer in that thread is worth reading in full, because it is more honest than anything on the ranking pages. A fully free WordPress paywall with Razorpay or Dodo does not really exist. What people do instead is lock the content with a free membership plugin, take the payment separately through Razorpay payment links, then give the buyer access afterwards, by hand at first and with a webhook later.

The dedicated paywall plugins do not help here. PostGate runs on Stripe-hosted checkout. Leaky Paywall is a verified Stripe partner and its subscriptions are powered by Stripe. Zlick avoids Stripe by running cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and carrier billing through its own system, which is a different limitation rather than a way out.

The membership plugins are where the gateway choice lives, because they are built to plug into whatever WordPress already has. Simple Membership takes one-time and recurring payments through PayPal, Stripe or Braintree, and costs nothing at all. Paid Member Subscriptions adds Authorize.Net, though that sits on its Pro licence at €169 a year rather than the €99 Basic. WooCommerce plus a membership plugin opens the widest gateway list of anything here, at the cost of running a full store you may not need.

So the bill for this situation is $0 or about €169 a year. The rest of the cost is your time, wiring a payment link to an access rule by hand.

The original poster in that thread found this out the expensive way. He installed a recommended plugin, then reported back that it gave him no way to charge in Indian rupees, which was the entire requirement.

Check the gateway before the paywall. It is the one thing you cannot work around later.

Where this goes wrong: advice that stopped being installable

The recommendations in this category age badly, and the plugin directory is the only place that records it.

Go back to that single-article thread and count what people were told to install. ARMember, Paid Memberships Pro, Content Control, Restrict Content Pro, MemberPress, Memberful, SureMembers, ProfilePress, MyCred, Leaky Paywall and Reader Revenue Manager. Helpful, specific, from people who had used them.

4 of those cannot be installed from WordPress.org today.

• Paid Memberships Pro closed on 17 October 2024. The directory gives the reason as Author Request and marks the closure permanent. The product is very much alive on its own site, where self-hosting the open-source version is free and the Standard licence is $49 a month or $499 a year. It has simply left the plugin search inside your dashboard, which is where somebody following that advice would go looking.
• ARMember closed on 1 February 2025, and the directory records the reason as a guideline violation. That is a different situation from a company choosing to leave.
• Content Control closed on 12 August 2026. This one is marked temporary, pending a full review, so it may come back.
• Restrict Content Pro no longer exists as a standalone purchase. Its old domain now redirects to Liquid Web’s Kadence add-ons bundle, and the free restrict-content plugin on WordPress.org is published by Nexcess under the name Kadence Memberships.

Paid Memberships Pro was named twice in that single-article thread, posted 9 months after it left the directory, then 3 more times in the Razorpay thread 14 months after. Nobody was being careless. Crowd advice simply has no expiry date attached to it.

A second trap costs people an afternoon.

Paid Memberships Pro and Paid Member Subscriptions are 2 different products, from 2 different companies, at 2 different prices. WPBeginner’s roundup covers the first. IsItWP and WP Mayor cover the second. Neither name appears in the other’s guide, and none of the 3 mentions that a near-identical name exists.

If you searched a plugin name and landed on pricing that did not match what you just read, that is why.

A last edge case from the same thread. A commenter’s entire answer was to switch to Ghost. For a writer whose whole business is paid articles and a newsletter, with no other reason to be on WordPress, that is not a joke answer.

Situation, pick, cost and the catch

One more thing worth knowing before the table. Of the 3 comparison guides in this search, only IsItWP quotes a revenue share at all, and it gets Zlick wrong. It describes Zlick as performance-based pricing where you pay 5% of revenue, while Zlick’s own page shows 10% on the free Essential tier, 30% on Creator and 10% on top of the €199 a month Premium tier.

That is 1 of 4 things I could not reconcile against the vendor’s own page. WPBeginner’s table marks MemberPress as having a free version, and its text says one is available. MemberPress is not in the plugin directory, memberpress.com/free is a dead page, and its pricing page lists 3 paid plans and nothing else. The same table prices Paid Memberships Pro at $174 a year, where its own site now charges $499. And IsItWP prices Paid Member Subscriptions at $99 a year when it is sold in euros.

None of the 3 mentions a setup fee anywhere, on any plugin, while 2 of the plugins charge $750.

Here is the same information as a decision instead of a ranking. 2 of these 5 situations are answered by a membership plugin that takes no percentage at all, and 2 more leave you no choice but a percentage. Only the first row lets you pick either way.

Pick the row you are in, then open that one vendor’s pricing page yourself before installing anything. Every price in this post came from doing exactly that, and 4 of them disagreed with what WPBeginner or IsItWP had told me.

FAQ

Is there a free WordPress paywall plugin?

Yes, and 2 of them are free in the way you mean it. Simple Membership takes one-time and recurring payments through PayPal, Stripe or Braintree with no licence fee and no cut, and it has 40,000 active installs. s2Member’s free version protects content and takes PayPal payments. The plugins with paywall in the name are free to install and then take 5% to 30% of your sales.

What is the difference between a paywall plugin and a membership plugin?

A paywall plugin is usually built around metered access, where a reader gets a set number of free articles before paying. A membership plugin is built around accounts and access levels, and gating content is one of the things it does. In practice both restrict posts and pages, so they separate on how they charge you.

Do I need a separate payment processor?

Yes, nearly always. These plugins move money through Stripe or PayPal rather than processing it themselves, so you open an account with the processor and connect it. Processing fees go to the processor and sit on top of whatever the plugin charges. Zlick is the exception and runs payments through its own system.

Does a paywall plugin handle my email list too?

Some do, partly. Leaky Paywall includes a registration wall that collects an email before asking for money, and exports those readers to your email tool. Most membership plugins store members in WordPress and integrate with a mailing list rather than being one. Plan on running a real email tool alongside whichever you pick.

Do I need a developer to set this up?

No, for a hard paywall on a membership plugin. You install it, connect Stripe or PayPal, create 1 membership level and tick a box on each post you want protected. Budget an hour or 2, most of it spent inside Stripe. A metered paywall on a real publishing site is a different job, and the $750 setup fee that Leaky Paywall and Pigeon both charge is a fair guide to how much work it is.

Should I use WordPress for this at all?

If paid articles and a newsletter are the whole business, and nothing else keeps you on WordPress, a hosted publishing platform will be less work. If your site already does other jobs, plugins are the cheaper answer, and a $89 one-time licence beats any monthly hosted plan on cost alone.

Before you connect Stripe to any of them

Every WordPress paywall plugin here answers the same question, so the tiebreak is arithmetic. Work out what you honestly expect to sell in your first year. Multiply it by the percentage. Compare that to the flat licence sitting next to it. On $6,000 of sales, a 10% cut costs $600 and an $89 one-time licence costs $89. That is a $511 gap in year 1. In year 2 the gap is the full $600, because the licence does not repeat and the percentage does.

That is the whole decision, and it barely involves features.

For most sellers this ends in selling access rather than gating articles, and a checkout does that job. CartMango is my platform, built for solo digital sellers, and it takes no cut of your sales on any plan. One-time and subscription selling on every tier, protected digital delivery, payouts straight to your own Stripe or PayPal, and your recurring payments keep paying you if you ever leave.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

Related Reading

• WordPress plugins for selling digital products: the 4 jobs a digital seller has to cover, and what the whole stack costs
• Membership site platform costs: what the hosted alternatives to a WordPress paywall plugin charge at 100 members, and who keeps your subscribers if you leave
• MemberPress alternatives: for readers who have decided on a paid membership plugin and are choosing between them
• Paid newsletter: the honest conversion numbers before you put anything behind a wall
• WordPress LMS plugin: if the thing behind your paywall is a course rather than articles