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.
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 Plan | Jetpack plan | Related Fees |
WordPress.com eCommerce | — | None |
WordPress.com Business | Jetpack Professional | 2% |
WordPress.com Premium | Jetpack Premium | 4% |
WordPress.com Personal | Jetpack 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.
- November 12, 2019
- Community, Earn from your site, Features, New Features
Thank you for sharing this! Very helpful!
LikeLiked by 14 people
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?
LikeLiked by 20 people
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.
LikeLiked by 15 people
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. ☺
LikeLiked by 9 people
You are right! Developing trust and relationships with your readers is necessary for Recurring Payments to be useful.
If you want to learn more on how to blog effectively, I recommend the free “Blogging University” course:
https://wordpress.com/dailypost/blogging-university/
LikeLiked by 9 people
Thanks for your recommendation, Dear! 😘
LikeLiked by 2 people
Can you do this a general account, not an upgraded account?
Thank you, Angela
LikeLiked by 6 people
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.
LikeLiked by 5 people
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!
LikeLiked by 6 people
Very helpful….nice
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thank you adding this trust earning feature, really helpful ! I will definitely have a look.
LikeLiked by 4 people
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!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you for providing such a knowledgeable and helpful information. I will surely have a look.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for sharing this helpful information!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you for enriching me with such a trustworthy and reliable feature.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Are major credit cards the only form of payment? Is there a paypal or crypto option?
LikeLiked by 4 people
Yes, for now we only support major Credit cards. We are open to revisiting other options in the future, but we have many exciting improvements we want to tackle first.
If you want more flexibility, our full – fledged store feature will have any legal payment option: https://wordpress.com/support/store/
LikeLiked by 6 people
Your adding this trust earning feature, really helpful ! I will definitely have a look.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for sharing something valuable
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for sharing this 😊😊🙏🙏
LikeLiked by 1 person
Seems like a good idea, but hard to convert followers to reccuring payers…
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It doesn’t get much easier than this! Thank you!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks for sharing this information.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Much appreciated, @Artur Piszek
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thanks for this information.
LikeLiked by 8 people