A New Way to Earn Money on WordPress.com

With Recurring Payments, your supporters become your sustainers, and a reliable income stream frees you to push your creative boundaries.

November 12, 2019

Artur Piszek

It’s hard to be creative when you’re worried about money. Running ads on your site helps, but for many creators, ad revenue isn’t enough. Top publishers and creators sustain their businesses by building reliable income streams through ongoing contributions.

Our new Recurring Payments feature for WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites lets you do just that: it’s a monetization tool for content creators who want to collect repeat contributions from their supporters, and it’s available with any paid plan on WordPress.com.

Let your followers support you with periodic, scheduled payments. Charge for your weekly newsletter, accept monthly donations, sell yearly access to exclusive content — and do it all with an automated payment system.

With recurring payments, you can:

  • Accept ongoing payments from visitors directly on your site.
  • Bill supporters automatically, on a set schedule. Subscribers can cancel anytime from their WordPress.com account.
  • Offer ongoing subscriptions, site memberships, monthly donations, and more, growing your fan base with exclusive content.
  • Integrate your site with Stripe to process payments and collect funds.

Enable Recurring Payments in three steps

Start accepting ongoing payments in just five minutes, without any technical background. 

1. Connect (or create) a Stripe account

WordPress.com partners with Stripe, one of the internet’s biggest payment processors, to make sure transactions are fast and secure. You’ll need a Stripe account to use Recurring Payments. 

Head to your Earn page and click Connect Stripe to Get Started — we’ll walk you through the setup and help you create a Stripe account if you don’t have one.

2. Put a Recurring Payments button on your site

Recurring Payments takes advantage of the powerful block editor. To start collecting revenue, open a post or page, click the (+) to add a new block, and insert a Recurring Payments button.

3. Customize the details of the recurring payment

You can create as many payment plans for your site as you’d like—different currencies, amounts, payment frequencies, and names, so you can offer different tiers or subscriptions.

You can also choose one of your previously created plans when you insert a new button.

Bravo!

You just set up Recurring Payments for your site. Now your fans can support you, just like they do on Longreads.com and around the web.

For more detailed setup instructions, visit the Recurring Payments support page.

So many options to grow your supporter base

With Recurring Payments, you can turn your content into revenue, accept donations, or fund your next big idea. 

  • Sell access to members-only newsletters.
  • Collect club membership dues automatically.
  • Let fans fund your next art project.

Some people even collect rent with recurring payments!

It’s easier than ever for your visitors to support your site

Recurring Payments make it easy to purchase a subscription or become a supporter on any WordPress.com or Jetpack-connected site — your subscribers will be able to use the same payment information and manage all their subscriptions in one place. To do that, they’ll just need a WordPress.com account.

During the checkout process, they will enter their email address. If they already have a WordPress.com account linked to that address, we will associate the purchase with that account. If they don’t, we’ll create an account for them. When they complete the purchase, they’ll receive an email with more info and login instructions for their new account.

The transaction is between you and your subscriber. WordPress.com only facilitates the processing and management of the subscription. We don’t save your subscribers’ credit card information, either — it’s stored by Stripe, the payment processor, so that the charge can renew automatically. Your subscribers can manage, edit, or cancel their recurring payments on their own, without your intervention, by visiting Me > Manage Purchases > Other sites.

A competitive fee structure helps you share your work far and wide

Recurring Payments is available on all paid plans, for both WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected sites. You pay a percentage of the revenue your site generates through Recurring Payments, which varies depending on your plan. As you collect more subscribers, you might consider switching to a different plan in order to retain more revenue.

WordPress.com PlanJetpack planRelated Fees
WordPress.com eCommerce —None
WordPress.com BusinessJetpack Professional2%
WordPress.com PremiumJetpack Premium4%
WordPress.com PersonalJetpack Personal 8%

In addition to the fees you pay us, Stripe collects 2.9% + $0.30 for each payment made to your Stripe account.

Make the most of our collection of monetizing tools

Recurring payments is the latest addition to the monetizing tools available on WordPress.com. Here are the other tools you can find by visiting WordPress.com/earn.

  • Use Simple Payments to take one-time payments, or to sell digital or physical products with minimal configuration.
  • Add WordAds to run advertisements on your site, and earn revenue from your traffic.
  • Move to WooCommerce when you’re ready to create a full shopping experience for visitors — it’s the most customizable online-store platform on the web, with thousands of extensions.

Ready to add Recurring Payments? Head to your site’s Earn section right now.

Missing out on the latest WordPress.com developments? Enter your email below to receive future announcements direct to your inbox. An email confirmation will be sent before you will start receiving notifications—please check your spam folder if you don't receive this.

Join 4.7M other subscribers

26 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. Ana Nov 12th at 5:14 pm

    Thank you for sharing this! Very helpful!

    Liked by 14 people

  2. elenaramirez Nov 12th at 6:51 pm

    I have a question please…. this sounds like a great idea. But I don’t want to make it mandatory, for all my subscribers to pay. Can it be just a contribution at their discretion? For those who might want to give?

    Liked by 20 people

    • Artur Piszek Nov 13th at 5:10 am

      That is indeed the best way to collect donations – and this is precisely how it works! On Longreads.com we use this feature as a “recurring donation” so that the visitors can become supporters if they choose so, but this is not mandatory.

      Liked by 15 people

  3. Zandra L. Nov 12th at 10:34 pm

    But I guess, it would work best for those who already have thousands followers. In my opine, it might shoo people if they are just trying to understand what do you blog most. Well, these are just my perceptions. Thanks for writing, anyway. ☺

    Liked by 9 people

  4. angela barbalace Nov 12th at 11:25 pm

    Can you do this a general account, not an upgraded account?

    Thank you, Angela

    Liked by 6 people

    • Artur Piszek Nov 13th at 5:14 am

      Recurring Payments is available on any paid plan – that means Premium, or higher.
      Other features available in the Premium plan (like the custom domain or Mailchimp block) are really helpful in fostering the relationship with supporters, so they are more likely to sign up for your subscriptions.

      Liked by 5 people

  5. Will Burley Nov 13th at 1:32 am

    I’m definitely going to have to check this out. I have tons of content for email newsletters and eCourses.

    Thanks for putting this out there!

    Liked by 6 people

  6. archup774 Nov 13th at 5:20 am

    Very helpful….nice

    Liked by 3 people

  7. Jesi for INCOMESCO Nov 13th at 7:26 am

    Thank you adding this trust earning feature, really helpful ! I will definitely have a look.

    Liked by 4 people

  8. deepanilamani Nov 13th at 10:50 am

    Thank you for all the information. It will be very useful for those who want, make money from WordPress.com. Like Top Publishers, and Creators and other Business Ventures!

    Liked by 2 people

  9. chandrabmalviya Nov 13th at 4:13 pm

    Thank you for providing such a knowledgeable and helpful information. I will surely have a look.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. chandrabmalviya Nov 13th at 4:24 pm

    Thank you for sharing this helpful information!

    Liked by 2 people

  11. chandrabmalviya Nov 13th at 4:33 pm

    Thank you for enriching me with such a trustworthy and reliable feature.

    Liked by 2 people

  12. H.A. Hood Nov 13th at 6:14 pm

    Are major credit cards the only form of payment? Is there a paypal or crypto option?

    Liked by 4 people

  13. decanterwhiskeyset Nov 14th at 5:56 am

    Your adding this trust earning feature, really helpful ! I will definitely have a look.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. I speak up Nov 14th at 1:22 pm

    Thanks for sharing something valuable

    Liked by 1 person

  15. mayachhaya Nov 14th at 1:25 pm

    Thank you for sharing this 😊😊🙏🙏

    Liked by 1 person

  16. NordicDGI Nov 15th at 7:22 pm

    Seems like a good idea, but hard to convert followers to reccuring payers…

    Liked by 1 person

  17. alidabutler Nov 15th at 8:02 pm

    This sounds excellent. I have a blog I use for promoting some books I wrote a while back. It’s been up for a few years now, but traffic has been a little light for the past couple of years. This could help increase it.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. Redge Shepherd Nov 16th at 5:20 am

    It doesn’t get much easier than this! Thank you!

    Liked by 2 people

  19. The Bookish Elf Nov 16th at 5:49 am

    Thanks for sharing this information.

    Liked by 2 people

  20. frank12344 Nov 16th at 6:49 pm

    Much appreciated, @Artur Piszek

    Liked by 4 people

  21. we can do it Nov 19th at 12:29 pm

    Thanks for this information.

    Liked by 8 people

Create your new blog or website for free

Get Started