The Metered Paywall is a feature for those at the Luna level and above, providing a way to allow readers to read a certain number of posts a month before being prompted to subscribe to the free level. You can also set the number of articles that a free member can read per month before being prompted to upgrade subscription to a monthly or annual paid one.
You get to set the number of stories per month, and what the call to action for each level says. Ghost doesn't have this built in.
This is a beta feature because this is very much a soft registration and paywall. By soft, we mean that when readers hit their limit they are presented with a popup that has no close button and all the text underneath it is fuzzy. However, more technical readers will have very easy ways to get around this. In fact, all you need to do is hit the escape button to close the popup. Other tricks, like Safari Reader Mode, will work.
The benefit is that you do not sacrifice any indexing by search engines and you do not have to change permissions on any of your existing articles. This is the very leaky version, and for many sites this may be enough because you will get people who will not know how to get around it and will upgrade.
We will be offering a hard version that is not escapable, but that comes with some tricky issues around having to change the permissions automatically on all your existing posts. Additionally, moving to a hard paywall will affect search results unless the hard paywall has ways to identify which crawlers to let in. For some sites, they may not want any crawlers. For others, google search is important and the paywall needs to have ways to present Google Search and Google News with the text that is hidden to readers.
This is a harder project that we will likely be building soon, but for those who want to experiment with a lower-risk and much easier method, the soft paywall is a great option and we will be keeping both.
Image Credit: NASA