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Updated: Jul 16, 2026

Setting up paid access for your community

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Community Beta Disclaimer: The community feature is launching in a beta state, available to all paid beehiiv plans. During this time, we will be prioritizing user feedback and making frequent updates that may cause some images or details in this article to differ slightly from what you see in the app.

Your community can be a free engagement layer, a paid product, or both at once. beehiiv supports gating at two levels: the whole community, and individual channels. This guide covers how to set it up and what your members experience.

Access options for your community

  • Free for all: Anyone you invite can join at no cost.
  • Pay to join:  The whole community is locked behind a paywall. Members must be subscribed to one of your newsletter paid tiers to join.
  • Free with paid channels: Free to join, with specific channels gated to paid tiers. Everyone gets a taste; paying members get more.
  • Pay to join + upgrade for more: The whole community is behind a paywall, and certain channels require a higher tier on top. Your best content becomes a ladder.

Before you begin

Paid access is built on your publication's paid subscription tiers:

  1. You must connect a Stripe account in order to bill your subscribers. 
  2. Create your paid tier or tiers under Subscriptions.
Tech Note: Until you take these actions, you won’t see the paid tier option available.

Set access when you create your community

The setup wizard's Access step asks whether your community is free to join or locked behind a paywall. Choosing paid lets you select which tier or tiers unlock membership. See Creating your community for a full walkthrough of the steps. 

Change access at any time

  1. In your beehiiv dashboard, open Community from the left navigation, then select Settings.
  2. In the Access section, choose:

    Free to join: Your community opens to everyone you invite. Any community-level tier requirement is removed.
    Fully paywalled: Select one or more paid tiers. New members must be subscribed to one of them to join.

Note: If you switch an existing free community to paid, decide how to handle your existing members before flipping the switch.

Gate individual channels

Create paid channels (or edit existing ones) from the channels page: choose Create paid channel and select the tier or tiers that unlock it. If your whole community is already behind a tier, assigning a higher tier to a channel stacks on top, creating premium levels inside a paid community. For more information, read our guide to Creating and managing channels.

What members experience

  • Joining a paid community: new members hit the paywall at the join flow and must subscribe to a qualifying tier to get in.
  • Locked channels: members can see that a gated channel exists (it appears as a locked channel) but can't open its content without the required tier. The lock itself is your upgrade prompt: members always know there's more.
  • Locked posts: posts from gated channels appear as locked cards rather than full content.
  • Upgrading: when a member subscribes to the required tier, the locked channels unlock automatically.

Pricing your community

Whether community access rides along with your existing premium tier or justifies a new, higher tier is a positioning decision. For pricing models that work (and the freemium ladder most creators should start with), check out these resources from beehiiv's head of community.

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