I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin called PostGate, and the mods allow promotional posts when properly tagged, so I wanted to share what I’ve built and hopefully get some feedback from other WordPress users.

The idea behind PostGate is pretty simple: what if you want to charge for access to WordPress content, but don’t need an entire membership or e-commerce system to do it?

For example, maybe you want most of your blog to remain free, but charge $5 for an in-depth article. Or offer a monthly subscription to a premium category. Or keep the introduction of a tutorial public and put the rest behind a paywall.

That’s the use case I built PostGate around.

Everything is managed from WordPress, while Stripe handles the actual checkout.

What it currently does:

• Protect individual posts and pages
• Protect entire categories, taxonomies, post types, or the whole site
• Lock only specific Gutenberg blocks while keeping the rest of the article public
• Sell individual content with one-time Stripe payments
• Offer recurring subscriptions
• Offer one-time purchase + subscription options on the same paywall
• Keep a configurable public preview before the paywall
• Restrict content to logged-in users without requiring payment
• Manage purchases, subscriptions, revenue, and content access from WordPress
• Let subscribers manage billing through the Stripe Billing Portal

A typical setup could be:

Free introduction → Paywall → $5 one-time unlock OR $10/month subscription → Stripe Checkout → reader gets access

I’m deliberately keeping PostGate focused on content monetization rather than trying to turn it into another huge membership platform.

If you need member directories, community features, complex membership profiles, courses, etc., a full membership plugin will probably be a better fit.

But if the requirement is closer to “I want to charge for this article/category/section of my WordPress site”, that’s what PostGate is designed for.

It’s free to download and there’s no recurring plugin license. The current business model is a 5% platform fee on successful transactions, in addition to Stripe’s processing fees.

You can find it on WordPress.org here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/postgate/

It’s still a relatively new plugin, so I’m especially interested in feedback from people who monetize content with WordPress. If there’s something preventing you from using it for your particular setup, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

And if anyone wants to test a specific paywall setup and gets stuck, I’m the developer, so I’m happy to help with the configuration.