How the Bolt metered paywall works

Pugpig Bolt supports the concept of a metered paywall, which allows users to access a certain amount of content that would usually be protected before they're presented with the paywall. This serves as an easy, flexible way to give users a taste of the full app experience. 

You're able to choose a number of articles or other widgets that a user can view or interact with before they're shown the paywall. Users will retain access to these articles even after the paywall is shown, but any new articles they try and read will display the paywall.

We show a display in app to let users know how many articles they've read out of their limit, tapping the display will invoke the paywall, allowing them to easily subscribe at any point.

This limit is currently tracked locally on the device, and thus users are able to exceed their limit by using multiple devices, or deleting and reinstalling the app

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Configuration

Currently this can be reset on a configured time-basis, but there are a number of ways in which we're planning to or considering expanding this functionality in the future:

1. Resetting at the beginning of every week or month 

2. Offering a time-based limit

3. Tying the limit to a 3rd-party system, such as Piano 

The current time configurations supported can be any of the following ISO8601 duration string subsets:

• year or month or day, with at least one value present, e.g. P1M (1 month), P1Y6M (1 year and 6 months) , or P30D (30 days)
• week, e.g. P4W (4 weeks)
• minutes, e.g. PT5M (5 minutes)

Exclusion

Certain articles can be excluded from the metered paywall (meaning they won't be available at all without subscribing) by adding a custom field to the article in the CMS called:

pugpig_widgets_meter

To exclude the article in the meter, the value for this field needs to be set to anything other than the word "default", for example "nothing", "excluded", "pugpig". It shouldn't be left blank. "default" means the article will behave as normal, ie included in the meter limit.

If you'd like to control metered paywall inclusion/exclusion via an RSS feed, you can do so by adding a new tag to each item and setting the value to "default" for any articles to be included in the meter, and any other non-empty string for articles that should be excluded from the meter.