Paperwall & Ghost
Paperwall just had a big unlock: individual article access is now live on Ghost!
Poking around the Ghost forum, I found a few earlier attempts to single article access. None got much traction. They all worked the same way: pay X dollars for this post (sometimes as much as $5!), take payment immediately, and negotiate prices with each provider.
Paperwall works more like a wallet. You register once, add your credit card, and you’re good to go. From there, you can unlock articles across any registered publication. Instead of making a separate purchase each time, you’re charged once a month for the articles you unlocked.
The idea is to:
- Meet readers where they already are, at the article they’re actually interested in
- Make unlocking that article as low friction as possible
- Make individual article access easy for blogs and publications to offer, with a simple integration and standardized pricing
Ghost makes this easy, kind of
Ghost has an "Inject Code" option in the admin. I tried it out, and the standalone version worked immediately. Adding it and unlocking an article took a few minutes.
That said, the standalone version isn’t what most sites should use. Paperwall works best when it sits where traffic already flows, as an alternative way to access the article in question. Two things get in the way of that:
- No concept of individual article access. Premium content in Ghost is gated behind a blanket "visibility" setting, and the only way to retrieve a premium post is through the Admin API.
- The UI. The unlock needs to feel like a seamless alternative to subscribing, not a widget bolted on beside it.
The Ghost integration
The dedicated integration adds a button and a short explanation to Ghost’s existing "Upgrade Now" paywall. It picks up the site’s brand information, so it feels like part of the page. The Paperwall logo signals that the reader is taking another route into the article. For now, the button is a basic link. Publishers can add the whole thing with a few lines of copied code.
To display the full article, Paperwall uses Ghost’s Admin API. Once a reader unlocks an article, Paperwall fetches it and replaces the preview with the rendered post. That endpoint is only reachable by someone who has unlocked the article. As long as the reader stays logged into Paperwall, they can revisit it whenever they like.
No publisher should hand over an Admin API key lightly. We protect it in four ways:
- Encrypted in the database
- Only ever used through the production API
- Revocable or rotatable at any time
- Never used for anything other than retrieving an article a reader has unlocked
Pricing
Article access is priced in Tickets. Each ticket has a preset value (currently USD $0.25, CAD $0.30, GBP £0.20), and an article typically costs 1–4 tickets. The ticket count is shown alongside the price. This keeps unlock prices predictable for readers and keeps payments and payouts manageable for Paperwall.
Payments are processed monthly via Stripe, using whatever payment method the reader has on file. Net revenue is split 70/30: 70% goes to blogs and publications according to the number of tickets redeemed, and 30% goes to Paperwall. So a 2-ticket article at USD $0.50 nets the publisher about $0.33.
What the reader sees
When a reader chooses to unlock an article, they’re taken to Paperwall. Returning readers land straight on a preview and confirm the unlock in one click. First-time readers create an account and add a payment method before continuing.
The redirect lets us verify who they are before granting access. The integration only uses read-only access to confirm identity and check whether they’ve unlocked the article.
Setting it up
For a Ghost site, setup works like this:
- Paste the integration code into Ghost’s "Inject Code" panel and connect your Admin API key.
- Add an article and set its unlock price in tickets.
- Review the unlock preview—title, image, and description, usually pulled from the page’s SEO metadata—and decide whether to opt into the discovery feed, the main Paperwall aggregator. Both are editable in the Paperwall Site Admin area.
- Test the whole flow in sandbox mode, which runs your site on sandbox.paperwall.io so only admins can see the integration. When you’re happy, repeat the same steps on paperwall.io and point the code integration at your live settings.
Get started
Full docs are at paperwall.io/docs, and the Ghost-specific guide is at paperwall.io/docs/integrations/ghost. If you run a Ghost blog, give individual article access a try.