~ 7 min

An investment expert had 900+ newsletter subscribers and 18,000+ site visitors a year, but no way to earn from them. We built the technical side of a paid subscription platform: Stripe payments, a member area with articles and subscription status, automatic granting and removal of access, emails about expiring access and a simple admin for publishing new articles. Everything runs without the author’s manual involvement. In the first 2 months after launch the project brought the author $3,800.

A joint project, 2024. We were responsible for the whole technical side: the database, access logic, payments and subscriptions, automations, integrations and CRM. UX/UI design and layout of all Tilda pages were done by designer David from Migas Studio. The client and the designer approved publishing this case.

Hidden Value Gems is a weekly newsletter with financial ideas from investment expert Ildar Davletshin. He looks for undervalued companies by five criteria: low debt, management ownership, attractive valuation, business quality and strong financials.

By launch the newsletter had 900+ subscribers and the site had been visited by more than 18,000 people in a year. The audience already existed, so the team decided to monetize the traffic: build a platform where the most valuable articles are available by subscription only. Speed mattered, so the deadline was strict: 18 working days.

- Content is given away for free. Every article goes into the newsletter, so there is no reason to pay.
- Paid content leaks easily. If you just put articles on a hidden page, the link can be forwarded to anyone.
- A subscription is not just a “Pay” button. It can be active, canceled but still paid, expired or lifetime. Tracked by hand, someone gets access for free and someone loses access they paid for.
- Publishing must not become a programmer’s job. The author writes every week and should add an article to the platform on their own, without a developer.

- Run a technical study: how to protect paid content from leaking and how the author can add new articles conveniently.
- Connect Stripe payments: a subscription with auto-renewal, cancellation and resumption.
- Build a member area: articles, profile, subscription status, plan change, cancel and renew, payment history.
- Open and close access automatically by subscription status and warn subscribers before access ends.
- Build a database of subscribers, articles and purchases, that is, the project CRM.
- Implement everything on the designer’s ready design and layout and finish within 18 working days.

Designer David from Migas Studio created the UX/UI and built the pages on Tilda, and we “connected the engine to them”. All data about subscribers, articles and payments lives in one database. Every payment event automatically changes the subscription status, opens or closes articles and updates the subscriber’s card. The subscriber manages the subscription in the member area, and the author only has to write.

Tilda — site and member-area pages (layout by David, Migas Studio).

Airtable — the database of subscribers, articles, purchases and subscriptions, also the CRM and the admin for articles.

Make — business logic: payments, statuses, granting and removing access.

Collabza — passing personal data from Airtable into the member area.

Stripe — international payments, recurring charges, cancellation and resumption of auto-renewal.

Mailchimp — the newsletter and automatic emails about expiring access.

- Card data never passes through the site: payment happens on the Stripe side.
- Articles are shown only to signed-in subscribers with an active status, with no public links.
- Access changes on payment events, not by hand, so statuses in the member area, the database and access always match.
- Cancel and renew require confirmation.
- All forms were tested 50+ times before launch.

Let us walk through the platform through a subscriber’s eyes, from choosing a plan to managing the subscription. Below are the member-area pages in the Tilda editor and the subscription screen mockups.

- $3,800 earned by the project in the first 2 months after launch.
- 18 working days from start to launch.
- 900+ newsletter subscribers and 18,000+ site visitors a year at the start.
- 3 plans (Lifetime was added after launch) and 4 subscription states in the member area.
- 8 integrations for live data in the area.
- 50+ form test runs.
- 0 manual access operations.

If you have a newsletter, a blog or gated content and want to sell it by subscription without manually granting access, tell us about the project in the brief. We will work out how to protect the content, which plans and subscription states you need, and build the platform around your payment model.

The 2024 platform runs on Make and Airtable. Today, for such projects we more often use n8n and SeaTable on your own server. We describe that kind of migration in the case “Moving from Make and Airtable to n8n and SeaTable”.