Buttondown works with Stripe to run the payments behind your paid newsletter. Stripe takes your subscribers' money and sends it to you, and Buttondown keeps track of who has paid and what they can read. You keep all of the money you make after credit card fees: we don't take a cut of your paid subscriptions.
Connect your Stripe account
You can connect a Stripe account that you already have, or register a new one.
- In Buttondown, go to Settings and find "Paid subscriptions" under "Features".
- Click Connect to Stripe. Stripe opens.
- Log in to Stripe and approve the connection to your newsletter.
After that, go to the Paid subscriptions settings page to choose your price, currency, and billing cadence. To learn more about each setting, read Paid subscriptions.
Each newsletter needs its own Stripe account. A single Stripe account can only be connected to one newsletter at a time.
What you can do
- Charge the way you like. Pick a fixed monthly or yearly price, let readers pay what they want, or charge per email.
- Send to paying readers only. Choose the "Premium" audience when you send an email, or paywall part of an email.
- Let Stripe handle the taxes. Stripe reports and collects the taxes for your paid newsletter. To learn more, read Stripe's tax documentation.
- Send receipts. You can turn on Stripe-managed receipts so that every payment sends one.
- Take your subscribers with you. The customers and their subscriptions live in your own Stripe account, so you keep them if you ever move to another platform.
Test your setup
Buttondown does not support Stripe's test mode. To test your setup, charge a small amount to a real credit card and then refund the charge. This costs a few cents for each transaction.
Other payment processors
Stripe is the only payment processor that Buttondown supports natively. If your readers pay you somewhere else, you can connect Memberful, or use Zapier to connect a tool like Patreon.
