A single account and a single sign-on for your whole audience.
A reader registers once, then they have full access to any payment model you offer via Axate, whether they choose Pay As You Go (“PAYG”), a subscription or sign up for a paid newsletter. You choose the payment models, content and pricing that fit your strategy.
Subscriptions and PAYG are linked: audiences move seamlessly between them, and cancelling subscribers are moved to PAYG automatically, rather than lost.
Four products, one account.
Readers only need one account, which they can use to make payments in four different ways.
Pay as You Go
Pay-per-article access, with no recurring obligation.
One-offSubscriptions
Monthly or annual access to premium content.
RecurringPaid newsletters
Paid access to regular emails.
RecurringContributions
Voluntary one-off support payments.
One-offPAYG pricing examples
PAYG allows readers to purchase small amounts of the content they want, without a recurring obligation. All PAYG pricing encourages reader engagement by including limited free access to additional content alongside the purchase. For example:
Buy two articles in a day and read free for the rest of the day. Readers have the assurance they can’t spend more than £1 a day, but the pricing is a very low barrier.
Buy four in a week and read free for the rest of the week. Readers have the assurance they can’t spend more than £1.20 a week. Attractive if you have a weekly publishing cadence.
One purchase unlocks free reading for the rest of the day. Buy five in a calendar month and be offered a subscription. Axate helps to funnel your more regular readers to subscriptions.
PAYG provides a means to let audiences become customers, and develop payment habits where you have complete control over the terms. You set the prices, you set the consumption caps, you decide on the positioning alongside subscription, and you can optimise as you go.
The full feature set.
Pricing and packaging
- Configurable per-article price with a daily/weekly cap and a limited period of additional free reading to encourage engagement
- Day or week pass
- Monthly and annual subscriptions and paid newsletter subscriptions
- Targeted subscription pricing for different cohorts
- Seamless PAYG/subscription switching, with auto-switch on churn
Promotions and credit: acquisition tools
- Free credit on account creation
- Deposit-match top-up: new readers add money, are rewarded with a matching amount of free credit
- Vouchers for promotions, partnerships and gifting
- Free credit on cancellation and conversion to PAYG
- Price plans for subscription — eg first month free
Top-up and payment
- Preset top-up amounts with a highlighted nudge amount
- Card, Apple Pay, PayPal and voucher
- Braintree-secured payments
- Automatic sales-tax display
Registration and cross-product
- A single light-touch registration-and-payment form
- Marketing consent capture for a permissioned first-party audience
- Seamless transfer between Axate-enabled products
- Cross-publication recognition for portfolio cross-sell
On-page conversion
- Configurable page notice (colours, wording, layout, product mix)
- Configurable "more information" text sections
- An "ask me every time" option on PAYG, so readers have assurance that all spending is transparent
- Low-balance notice
- Price-change notice requiring active acknowledgement
Editorial control
- See-for-free control (how much can people see before the sign-up notice?)
- A bespoke premium category for formats such as video
- Premium tagging (for example WordPress tags)
Co-branding and communications
- Co-branding on screens and emails
- Customisable transactional emails
- VIP staff accounts
- A customer-services support pack
Data and reporting
- Live metrics dashboard: key metrics and summaries for sign-up activity, reading activity and reader insights
- Monthly financial reporting
- A 2FA-protected, GDPR-aligned data portal: registered users, articles read, in real time
- Per-employee, per-product access control
Retention and failed-payment recovery
- Account updater for expiring cards
- Grace period and reminders for failed renewals
Newsletters
- Standalone or bundled (wallet hidden when standalone)
- A newsletter subscriber API to the publisher’s ESP
- Account-management footer links
Safe for your stack, your search and your subscribers.
Works when cookies and ad-blockers don’t
Axate runs on first-party cookies, so it keeps working through browser privacy restrictions and ad-blockers.
Stays visible in Google
Axate uses Google’s paywall markup, so premium articles are still indexed in Google Search and Google News.
Ready for new subs rules
Already compliant with new UK subscription legislation arriving in January 2027: clear terms, renewal reminders and simple cancellation.
What difference might Axate make for you?
Why not run your numbers through our free model? Our assessment tool will benchmark your numbers against industry data to give you a quick sense of the potential opportunity.