There is a gap between what people search for and what actually exists in this category, and it is worth naming before you spend money. “Per-post paywall” gets used for three completely different products: charging a reader $3 to unlock one specific article, letting a subscriber through because their plan covers it, and the metered wall that gives everyone three free reads a month before asking for a card. Most WordPress membership plugins do only the second one. The listings that call them “pay per post plugins” are, charitably, being loose with language.

This piece separates the three, then tells you which plugins genuinely deliver each. If you want a reader to buy a single article without ever creating a subscription, your real options number about three, not thirty. If what you actually want is a subscription with tidy previews, the field is wide and cheap. Knowing which one you are buying is the whole game.

Pricing and feature claims verified August 2026. Several products in this category repriced or changed ownership during 2026, so confirm on the vendor page before buying.

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Three models that all get called “paywall”

True pay-per-post

The reader pays once for one piece of content and keeps access, with no recurring commitment and often no account beyond an email address. This suits research reports, long investigations, recipe archives, and anything with a few disproportionately valuable pages. It is also the rarest capability on this list. Conversion is high because the ask is small, but revenue is lumpy and you carry the full cost of acquiring a customer for a single transaction.

Subscription gating

The default behaviour of every membership plugin. Content belongs to a level, the reader subscribes to that level, access follows. This is what you want in almost every case, because recurring revenue compounds and one-off purchases do not. If you are unsure which model you need, it is this one, and you should read our companion piece on membership plugins for paid newsletters instead.

Metered access, the NYT model

Everyone reads a few articles free, then hits a wall. This is the hardest of the three to build because it needs per-visitor counting that survives cache layers, incognito windows, and bot traffic. Getting it wrong means either giving content away or blocking Googlebot. Only purpose-built publisher platforms handle it properly, and they are priced for publishers.

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What to check before you buy

• Guest checkout. Can someone buy a single post without creating an account? Forcing registration for a $3 purchase kills most of the conversion advantage.
• Access duration. Lifetime, or a fixed window such as 48 hours? Time-limited unlocks suit event coverage and reduce sharing.
• Bundles. Selling three related posts together is usually worth more than selling them separately.
• Gifting. Letting a buyer unlock a post for someone else is a genuine acquisition channel and almost nobody supports it.
• Preview control. How much shows before the wall, and can you set it per post rather than globally?
• Cache compatibility. Ask directly how the plugin behaves behind a page cache or CDN. This is where paywalls leak.

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The 10 plugins compared

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Comparison table

Plugin	Entry price	True pay-per-post	Metered	Best for
ARMember	Free, or $79/yr	Yes, native addon	No	Selling individual posts
Paid Memberships Pro	Free	Yes, via add-on	No	Testing demand free
MemberPress	$199.50/yr	Approximated	No	Existing MemberPress sites
MemberMouse	$149.50/yr	Approximated	No	Upsell funnels
Leaky Paywall	$299/mo plus 5%	Limited	Yes	Real publications
Pigeon	$750 setup	Limited	Yes	News publishers
MemberSpace	$24/mo plus 5%	Via one-time	No	Zero maintenance
Kadence Memberships	$299/yr	No	No	Kadence sites
Paid Member Subscriptions	€99/yr	No	No	Clean subscriptions
Patreon WordPress	Free	No	No	Patreon creators

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Checkout, wallets, and why 30 cents matters

Per-post selling lives or dies on small-transaction economics, and the fixed component of card fees is what kills it. Stripe’s 2.9% plus 30 cents means a $2 unlock loses 18% to the fixed fee alone. At $10 that same 30 cents is 3%. The practical consequence is simple: price single-post unlocks at $5 or above, or bundle them. Below roughly $3 the processor takes more than the platform ever will.

Wallet payments matter more here than in subscription businesses. Apple Pay and Google Pay convert dramatically better on impulse purchases because they remove the card-entry step entirely, and per-post buying is the definition of an impulse purchase. Stripe’s Payment Request Button gives you both, and any plugin using Stripe Checkout or Payment Elements inherits them. Verify this before buying, because plugins still using legacy Stripe Charges integrations do not get wallets, and that alone can halve conversion on mobile.

Guest checkout is the other conversion lever. Requiring account creation before a $5 purchase adds a form, a password, and a confirmation email to a transaction the reader is making on impulse. Where the plugin supports it, take the payment first and create the account silently afterwards using the email from the receipt.

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Keeping paywalled content indexable

This is the part that gets skipped and then costs traffic. Showing Googlebot the full article while showing readers a truncated preview is cloaking, and it is a policy violation that can get pages demoted. Showing everyone the truncated version means the page ranks on 200 words instead of 2,000. The supported way through is structured data.

Google’s paywalled content specification lets you mark the gated portion explicitly. You add isAccessibleForFree: false to the article schema, then use a hasPart block identifying the CSS selector wrapping the paid section. That tells Google the full text exists and is intentionally restricted, so it can index the whole article without treating the difference as deception. Both major SEO plugins allow custom schema output, and it is worth setting up on day one rather than after a ranking drop.

• Give every gated post a preview long enough to rank, roughly 300 to 500 words of genuine content, not a teaser sentence
• Never serve different HTML to crawlers than to readers without the schema markup that authorises it
• Keep the headline, meta description, and any FAQ schema outside the wall
• Test with Google’s Rich Results tool after setup, then watch Search Console coverage for a fortnight

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Frequently asked questions

Which plugins genuinely sell one post at a time?

ARMember through its Pay Per Post addon, and Paid Memberships Pro through its Pay Per Post add-on. MemberPress, MemberMouse, and MemberSpace approximate it with one-time products pointed at a single post, which works but creates one product object per saleable article.

What should I charge for a single article?

At least $5, and ideally more, because of the fixed 30 cent processing fee. Below $3 the economics stop working. If your content is not worth $5 on its own, sell a bundle or a subscription instead of a single post.

Can I do a metered paywall without paying publisher prices?

Not reliably. Metering needs per-visitor state that survives caching, private browsing, and bots, which is exactly the hard part. Cheap implementations count in cookies or local storage and are defeated by a new incognito window. If metering is core to your business, budget for Leaky Paywall or Pigeon.

Will a paywall hurt my search rankings?

Not if you implement the paywalled content schema and leave a substantial preview. It will hurt if you cloak, or if the visible portion is too thin to establish relevance. Treat the preview as a real piece of writing rather than bait.

Does per-post selling work better than subscriptions?

Rarely, as a whole business. It converts better per transaction because the ask is smaller, but you re-acquire the customer every time. The pattern that works is hybrid: sell individual access to your best pieces, then offer the subscription as the obviously better deal on the same checkout screen.

Do these work with page caching?

Subscription gating generally does, because the plugin checks login state before serving. Metering frequently does not, since cached pages bypass the counter. Ask the vendor directly about your specific cache or CDN, and test with a real cache enabled rather than on a staging site with caching off.

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The verdict

If you literally want to sell individual posts: ARMember. Its Pay Per Post addon is purpose-built, the fixed-duration option is genuinely useful, and at $79 a year it costs a fraction of the alternatives. The dated interface is a fair trade.

If you want to test the idea before spending: Paid Memberships Pro free core with the Pay Per Post add-on. Zero cost, no transaction fee, and enough capability to get a real answer from real readers within a month.

If you already run MemberPress or MemberMouse: use what you have. A one-time product pointed at a post is not elegant, but a handful of premium pieces does not justify a second membership plugin and the conflicts that come with it.

If you want the metered NYT model: Leaky Paywall, or Pigeon if you are migrating an existing subscriber base. Both are priced for organisations, and if metering is genuinely core to your model that price is the market rate rather than a rip-off.

If you got here by mistake and what you actually want is recurring revenue from gated content, buy a subscription plugin and stop thinking about per-post entirely. That is the right answer for most publishers, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with a catalogue of fifty one-time products and no recurring revenue at all.