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Last year I decided to open up the paywall connected to my newsletter “Creators Getting Paid”. I have always thought about, maybe the right word would agonized over ethical monetization. What is the best and right way to serve both my audience and create a financially sustainable business. Like many creator entrepreneurs my goal is not only to help my audience but it’s also to help myself and what that looks like on the surface feels…complicated. So when I decided to open up the paywall for my newsletter I was trying to figure out if making everything accessible in that way would be the right way to approach the being of service part of my brand. Here are some of the conversations and points of view that we’ve all heard:
- Black creators aren’t REALLY of service to their audience if…
- Why are people charging…
- Shouldn’t that be….
- Grifters are going to grift
Like many creator entrepreneurs I spend a lot of time working through am I doing the right thing for my audience and business and how do I manage the perception of the ethics connected to the approach that I’ve decided to take. What I learned and experienced after a year’s experiment of making all of my content open and available to everyone may surprise you. The most important lesson was that as long as you have the intention to right by the people and lead with that the people that you’re of service to will understand your pricing model. Maybe the second lesson is that I can try my best but ultimately people will have opinions on why I’m charging money for the products that I’m selling.
Earlier this summer I had a really transformative conversation with Stephanie Perry co-founder of The ExodUS Summit. A resource and initiative focused on helping Black women take sabbaticals or move out of the United States. She said that she doesn’t have $40 dollar problems and that if she’s looking for support with a problem-the price has to match the caliber of problem that she’s trying to solve. She shared how she gives away free content all the time. There are just things that she has to charge for or else she couldn’t continue to work on her mission-which is to help Black women. Including the ExodDUS Summit. What I realized was that I was thinking about making money as a Creator Entrepreneur in both the right and wrong ways and this year without the paywall ended up being an important experience that will influence how I build my business moving forward.
A Year Without The Paywall
People still paid for the newsletter. I want to make that clear. There were still new paid subscribers that were onboarded throughout the year. The paid subscribers who were already paying when I made that decision continued to pay. I think that the following things made the switch pretty simple to do:
- Clarity in mission-My audience knows that I care about access
- Sharing your why-I shared why I wanted to open up the paywall
Here’s what I didn’t expect to happen. I felt like the engagement with the content went down even though I did and do continue to have a lot of comments on the content that I share.
Here’s what also happened.
- Not having the paywall had me constantly concerned about how to curate and manage a safe space for my audience. I was always worried about my ability to create a safe space for the people that were in my community. Part of the function of the paywall was to manage the space and community experience. This was harder to do when everyone could access everything.
- Enthusiasm-The natural energy that I had for the newsletter tapered off. I should also mention that I was actively in mourning and just wasn’t myself. I had a lot more emotionally bad days than good days in 2025.
- Workflow disruption-Not having the paywall actually disrupted my workflow from content creation to marketing. I feel like I didn’t spend enough time working on a compelling reason why people should say “yes” to paying for a newsletter that anyone could access. People DO “Pay-it-forward” Just not as much as I was hoping for.
- Paid subscriptions flatlined-I did have new paid subscribers but the growth that I experienced in paid subscriptions prior to that basically it was flat.
I didn’t realize that I was unintentionally communicating a very dangerous message to myself which was that my work wasn’t worth charging for or that to assert its value was greedy, bad or wrong.
Here’s the thing, I produce a lot of free content: Blogs, Podcasts, Workshops, Panels, Sessions, etc. I’m not a volunteer, I’m a mission driven creator entrepreneur who is focused on serving my community and doing it well. The reality is that businesses have products and services and they sell them. It’s that simple.
You Can’t Make Everyone Happy
I’ve also realized that I can’t make everyone happy. I can do my very best to be ethical, transparent, empathetic and thoughtful about the pricing of my different products. I can tell people-please don’t sign up or purchase this product because I don’t believe it’s a good fit for where you are right now and that money and time should be elsewhere.
Ultimately, though, I’m dealing with adults. I can’t force people to make thoughtful and smart spending decisions. I can’t tell people to not to use certain financial tools-that’s not my business and not my responsibility. I can’t assume responsiblity for your personal finances.
However, the onus is on me to do the following:
- Provide clarity on who a product or service if for
- Break down what to expect when making a purchase
- Deliver on what the product/good or experience promised
- Provide payment plan options
- Use tools that empower community members to finance their product in a different way. I’m somewhat reluctantly talking about Klarna, Afterpay, ApplePay or GooglePay. Tools that are made available to me because of the newsletter tool that I use.
- Depending on the product-Sliding scale pricing whenever possible.
Most importantly, communicate that I’m open to having conversations about pricing accessibility for products and also being candid and saying “No” when the situation calls for it. Paywalls communicate a lot of messages to your external audience but I think that we don’t discuss the message that a paywall communicates to THE CREATOR. I’m glad that I tried the experiment at the time that I did. I didn’t have the capacity to do more than what I was able to do at the time. This year I have a lot more mental energy so I don’t think testing this out would have worked as well as it did in 2025. Have you experimented with paywalls in your content? What decisions did you end up making?