Publisher Terms and Integration Addendums

Last updated: 23 August 2026

1. Becoming a publisher

You become a Paperwall publisher when you connect a site and enable the integration. In doing so you confirm that you are authorised to monetise the site and its content, and that the details you give us, including payout and tax details, are accurate.

2. Your responsibilities

• Your content. You own it or hold the rights to sell it, and it complies with the Acceptable Use Policy.
• Your prices. You set the ticket cost of each article. It must be accurate and shown honestly before a reader commits.
• Billing disclosure. Readers are charged on a 30-day cycle, not at the moment they unlock. Do not imply otherwise on your site.
• Access after purchase. Where reasonable, keep an article available to readers who paid for it. If you must remove one, expect refund requests and handle them fairly.
• The refund window. If you do not want a reader charged, cancel or refund the pending unlock in the admin before their cycle is billed. That window is yours to manage.
• Your site. Its hosting, configuration, security, uptime and Ghost installation are yours to run.
• Legal compliance. Tax, consumer protection, privacy and content law everywhere you sell, including your own privacy policy and any disclosures your readers are entitled to.
• Reader data. Your site report identifies readers by reader ID rather than by email. Do not try to re-identify a reader from that ID, or combine it with data from your own site to do so, unless the reader has agreed. When you use reader information for your own purposes you are the controller of it and responsible for handling it lawfully.

3. Pricing and the unlock ledger

You price articles in tickets rather than currency. You choose how many tickets an article costs. Paperwall sets the cash value of a ticket, currently $0.25 USD, CA$0.30 or £0.20. We may change ticket values with reasonable notice, which will change what your articles earn in cash without you changing anything.

You can also configure an article so its ticket cost moves with reader ratings, visit or read counts, or age. If you enable that, you accept that the cost readers see derives from those signals.

Every unlock is recorded in the ledger with the article, the reader, the ticket cost at the time, and the transaction status. The ledger is our record of what happened and what is owed. We use it for payouts, refunds and dispute evidence.

4. Reader billing and your refund window

Readers are not charged when they unlock. Unlocks accrue against the reader's account, and about every 30 days we charge each reader once for everything they unlocked in that cycle. That cycle defines your refund window.

• Before the cycle is charged. You or your site admins can cancel or refund a pending unlock from the admin, and the reader is never charged for it. This is the intended way to stop a charge, and using it in time is your responsibility.
• After the cycle is charged. The payment is final. Refunds granted after that point go to the reader as ticket credit rather than cash. Paperwall may still return money where the law, Stripe, fraud, a technical fault, a duplicate charge, a failed unlock or a chargeback requires it. UK and EU readers who cancel an undelivered unlock within 14 days are refunded in cash, and that comes out of your balance in the same way as any other refund.

Refunds reduce your ticket balance. If a refund arrives after a payout covering that unlock has been made, the adjustment comes out of your current or future balance.

5. Payouts

Paperwall does not pay you a fixed cut of your own sales. Payouts come from a shared pool.

5.1 How the pool is calculated

For each currency, and for each payout run:

1. We total the net revenue actually settled from readers' completed payments, after our payment processor's charge and payout fees have come out.
2. We take a platform commission of 30% of that total. The remainder is the publisher payout pool. Your admin always shows the current rate, and the rate applied is the one in force at the time of each payout.
3. We divide the pool between publishers in proportion to each publisher's share of all tickets redeemed across the platform in that run.

Your payout is therefore your ticket count divided by all publishers' ticket count, multiplied by the pool. One consequence follows from that formula and you should plan around it: your earnings depend on other publishers' activity as well as your own. If platform-wide redemptions grow faster than yours, your share of the pool falls even when your own readership holds steady. If a reader's payment fails or is refunded, the pool shrinks for everyone.

Pools are calculated separately per currency, so USD, CAD and GBP activity never mix. Payouts are transferred to your connected Stripe account through Stripe Connect. You must keep that account in good standing and accept Stripe's own terms, because we cannot pay you without it. Stripe may hold, delay or reverse funds under its own rules, independently of anything in this agreement.

5.2 Deductions

Amounts otherwise payable to you are reduced by:

• refunds and cancellations on your articles;
• failed and reversed reader payments;
• chargebacks, dispute fees and associated costs;
• payment processor fees, which come out before the pool is formed;
• the platform commission described above;
• taxes and other deductions we are required to make or withhold;
• currency conversion costs where they apply.

Where deductions exceed your balance in a period, the shortfall carries forward against later payouts. If you leave Paperwall with a negative balance you remain liable for it.

5.3 Held payouts

We may delay, reduce, reverse or withhold a payout, in whole or in part, where we reasonably need to:

• cover expected or actual refunds;
• cover failed reader payments or chargebacks;
• investigate suspected fraud, abuse, rating manipulation, or misleading pricing and content;
• resolve an open dispute involving your site;
• comply with the law, a payment processor's requirements, or a lawful order;
• verify your identity, site ownership or payout details.

We will tell you when we hold a payout and why, unless the law or an active investigation prevents us, and release held amounts once the reason has cleared.

5.4 Taxes

You are responsible for taxes on the revenue you earn through Paperwall, including reporting and remitting whatever your jurisdiction requires. Where we are legally required to collect tax from readers or withhold from your payouts we will do so, and show it in your admin. We do not give tax advice.

6. Chargebacks and disputes

Chargebacks run through the payment processor and the card network, on their timelines and rules rather than ours. When one lands on a transaction from your site:

• we may respond using transaction records, unlock logs, receipts, article metadata and your publisher information;
• you may be asked for evidence, such as proof the article was delivered, correspondence with the reader, or details of what was sold. Dispute windows are short, so please respond promptly;
• the chargeback amount, any dispute fee and associated costs may be deducted from your balance regardless of the outcome.

Repeated disputes, fraud, or misleading pricing and content practices may lead us to suspend transactions, suspend payouts, or terminate your account.

7. The Ghost integration

• We are independent. Paperwall is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Ghost. We reference Ghost to describe compatibility, nothing more.
• Your Ghost site is yours. Its hosting, version, theme, configuration, content and compliance are your responsibility.
• Credentials. Where you give the integration access to your Ghost site, for example an admin key so we can serve unlocked content, you confirm you are authorised to do so. Keep those credentials current, and revoke them if you stop using Paperwall.
• We may change it. We can modify, disable or discontinue the Ghost integration, or stop supporting particular Ghost versions and configurations. We give reasonable notice of material changes where we can.
• Ghost changes can break things. Updates to Ghost, your theme or your hosting can affect how the widget renders, whether unlocks deliver, and whether content loads. We fix what we can on our side, but cannot guarantee compatibility with every setup.
• Failures happen. Outages and bugs, whether ours, Ghost's, your host's or a payment processor's, can affect article access, unlocks, refunds and transaction timing.
• Do not tamper with it. Do not modify, proxy, spoof or circumvent the widget, checkout, ledger or payment flow, and do not alter unlock records. See the Acceptable Use Policy.

8. Licence you grant us

You keep ownership of your content. You grant Paperwall a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use your article titles, excerpts, metadata, pricing and site branding as needed to run the service: in the unlock flow, receipts, reader dashboards, article discovery and dispute evidence. The licence ends when you leave, except where we must retain records.

9. Changes

We may change the platform commission rate, ticket values and payout schedules with reasonable notice through the admin or by email. If we introduce a minimum payout threshold, we will tell you before it takes effect. Continuing to sell through Paperwall after the notice period means you accept the change.

10. Suspension and ending the relationship

You can stop at any time by removing the integration from your site. That does not cancel pending unlocks. Cancel or refund those in the admin first if you do not want readers charged for them.

We may suspend or terminate your publisher account for breach of these terms, the Terms of Service or the Acceptable Use Policy, for repeated disputes or suspected fraud, or where a payment processor or the law requires it.

After termination we settle amounts properly owed once refund and chargeback windows have passed and all deductions have been applied. We retain transaction and unlock records as described in the Privacy Policy.

11. Contact

Email legal@paperwall.io with questions about payouts, fees, disputes or the integration, or use the contact form.