Terms of Service

Last updated: 23 August 2026

1. Scope

Paperwall is a pay-per-read service for independent publishers. We supply a widget that a publisher adds to their site, usually a Ghost blog, along with the checkout, the unlock ledger, the admin tools and the payout calculation behind it.

These Terms of Service are an agreement between you and Paperwall. They apply whether you use Paperwall as a reader unlocking articles or as a publisher selling them. You accept them by creating an account, unlocking an article, or installing the Paperwall integration on your site.

Two further documents form part of this agreement: the Privacy Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy. Publishers are also bound by the Publisher Terms & Ghost Integration Addendum.

If you use Paperwall on behalf of a business, you confirm that you have authority to accept these terms for it.

2. Accounts

You need an account to manage your unlocks, receipts and payment method as a reader, or to configure pricing and payouts as a publisher. Keep your credentials secure. You are responsible for activity carried out under your account.

Give us accurate information and keep it current. We may suspend or close accounts that hold false information or are used to break these terms.

To unlock an article you must be old enough to enter a binding contract where you live.

3. Unlocking articles

Paperwall prices articles in tickets. The publisher decides how many tickets an article costs. Paperwall sets what a ticket is worth: $0.25 USD, CA$0.30, or £0.20, depending on your billing currency.

An article's ticket cost can change. Publishers can adjust it directly, and they can configure an article so the cost moves with reader ratings, read counts, or the article's age. Whatever cost is displayed when you unlock is the cost you are billed.

3.1 When you are charged

Unlocking an article does not charge your card at that moment. Instead:

• You must have a valid payment method on file before you can unlock anything.
• Each unlock records its ticket cost against your account.
• About every 30 days we total everything you unlocked in that period and charge your payment method once for the combined amount.
• The charge reaches your statement as a single payment to Paperwall, not as one line per article, and not on the day you read.

You may therefore read in one month and be billed several weeks later. Your account shows your running balance and every article you have unlocked, so you can check what your next charge will be before it arrives.

3.2 Small-charge fee

If a billing cycle totals less than $15, or the equivalent in your currency, we add a $0.30 small-charge fee to that cycle. It covers the fixed per-transaction cost our payment processor applies, which would otherwise absorb most of a small bill. Cycles of $15 or more are not charged the fee.

3.3 What an unlock covers

An unlock gives you:

• access to that article on the publisher's site;
• a record of the unlock in your account, with a receipt;
• the right to read it yourself, but not to republish, resell or redistribute it.

An unlock does not give you:

• a guarantee that the article stays online. Publishers control their own sites and can edit, unpublish or remove content at any time;
• any rights over the publisher's content beyond reading it;
• access to other articles, or to the publisher's subscriber-only tiers.

Ticket costs are shown inclusive of any tax we are required to charge. Where we become obliged to add tax separately, we will show it before you are billed. Your card details go directly to Stripe, our payment processor. See the Privacy Policy for how payment data is handled.

4. Cancellations and refunds

4.1 Before a cycle is charged

An unlock stays pending between the moment you unlock and the end of your billing cycle. During that window a publisher or site admin can cancel or refund it from the Paperwall admin, and it drops off your bill before you pay anything. This is the usual way an unlock gets reversed. Publishers are responsible for using it in time.

4.2 After a cycle is charged

Once a billing cycle has been charged, the payment is final. Any refund granted after that point is issued as ticket credit on your Paperwall account, which you can spend on future unlocks. It is not money returned to your card.

We flag this because "refund" usually implies cash back. On Paperwall it normally does not. Refunds after billing are granted at our discretion, and we are not obliged to grant one because you changed your mind after reading.

4.3 When money is returned

Ticket credit is our default, not a way of avoiding genuine obligations. We return money to your payment method where:

• the law or your consumer protection rights require it;
• our payment processor or the card network requires it;
• the charge was fraudulent or unauthorised;
• a technical fault caused a duplicate charge or the wrong amount;
• you were billed for an unlock that never delivered access;
• a chargeback is raised and upheld.

Email legal@paperwall.io with your receipt if you think one of these applies. Nothing in this section removes rights you hold under consumer law that cannot be waived.

4.4 Cancellation rights for UK and EU readers

If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, you normally have 14 days to cancel a purchase of digital content. That right ends once delivery begins with your agreement.

By unlocking an article you ask us to deliver it immediately, and you acknowledge that you lose the 14-day right to cancel once we have done so. We ask you to confirm this at the point of unlocking.

The right still applies to an unlock that has not been delivered. If you cancel before delivery, within the 14-day window, we cancel the charge or return the money rather than issuing credit. Sections 4.2 and 4.3 govern everything after delivery, and nothing in them removes rights you hold under consumer law that cannot be waived.

4.5 Failed payments

If a cycle's payment fails we may retry it, pause new unlocks on your account until it clears, and reverse the matching credit in the publisher's balance. If the card on file expires before your next billing date, we may ask you to update it before you can unlock more.

5. Chargebacks and disputes

Chargebacks run through the payment processor and the card network rather than through Paperwall. When you raise one we may respond using the records we hold: transaction records, unlock logs, receipts, article metadata and publisher information. Publishers may be asked to supply evidence, and we may share relevant records with the processor and the publisher for that purpose.

Chargeback amounts, dispute fees and associated costs may be deducted from the publisher's balance. We may suspend transactions, payouts or accounts where we see a pattern of disputes, fraud, or misleading pricing and content.

A Paperwall charge covers a month of reading rather than a single article, so an unfamiliar line on your statement is often a full cycle rather than an error. Check your account activity or contact us first. We can usually resolve it faster than a chargeback can.

6. Selling through Paperwall

Publishers set the ticket cost of their own articles. Payouts are not a direct share of your own sales. Paperwall pools net revenue across the whole platform and pays each publisher a share of that pool in proportion to their ticket volume against all publishers, after commission and other deductions. Your payout therefore reflects platform-wide activity as well as your own.

The Publisher Terms & Ghost Integration Addendum sets out the pool calculation, the commission rate, deductions, payout timing and the Ghost integration. It forms part of these terms for anyone selling through Paperwall.

7. Acceptable use

The Acceptable Use Policy lists what you may not do on Paperwall. In summary: no illegal, infringing, deceptive or abusive content; no tampering with the widget, checkout, ledger or payment flow; no scraping or bulk extraction of paid content; no attempts to avoid payment. Breaking it is grounds for suspension or termination.

8. Content and intellectual property

Publishers own their content. Paperwall claims no ownership of anything a publisher writes or sells. Publishers grant us the limited licence we need to run the service, covering article titles, excerpts, metadata and pricing as they appear in the unlock flow, receipts, reader dashboards and article discovery.

Paperwall owns the service itself: the software, the integration, the widget, our branding and our documentation. Nothing here transfers any of that to you.

8.1 Ratings, votes and notes

Readers can rate articles, vote on them and leave notes. You keep ownership of what you contribute and grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to display, aggregate and use it to run the service, including in article discovery and in the scores shown to other readers.

Ratings can affect what an article costs in tickets, so do not manipulate them. That includes vote brigading, rating your own articles, and coordinated rating intended to move a price. We may remove contributions and suspend accounts for it.

8.2 Copyright complaints

If you believe content sold through Paperwall infringes your copyright, email legal@paperwall.io with enough detail to identify both the work and the article. We will act on it, which may include removing the content and suspending the publisher.

9. Third-party services

Paperwall depends on third parties, including payment processors, hosting providers and, for many publishers, Ghost. We are an independent service, not affiliated with or operated by Ghost. Their terms and their availability are their own, and problems on their side can affect Paperwall.

10. Availability and changes

We work to keep Paperwall running but do not promise uninterrupted service. Technical failures can affect article access, unlocks, refunds and the timing of transactions. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the service, including the Ghost integration. Where a change materially affects you we will give reasonable notice if we can.

11. Disclaimers

Paperwall is provided as is and as available, without warranties beyond those the law requires us to give. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure against every threat. We are not responsible for the content publishers sell; its accuracy, legality and quality rest with the publisher. The Disclaimer covers this in more detail.

12. Limitation of liability

So far as the law allows, Paperwall is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill.

Our total liability for any claim relating to Paperwall is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us, or that we owed you in unpaid payouts, in the three months before the claim arose, or CAD $100.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud and your non-excludable consumer rights.

13. Indemnity

Publishers agree to cover our reasonable losses, costs and legal fees arising from their content, their pricing, their use of Paperwall, or their breach of these terms. This includes claims brought by their readers and by third parties whose rights their content affects.

14. Suspension and termination

You can stop using Paperwall at any time. Publishers can remove the integration from their site. Readers can close their account by contacting us. Closing an account does not cancel unlocks already accrued in the current billing cycle; those are still charged.

We may suspend or terminate access where you break these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, where the law or a payment processor requires it, or where there is a serious risk of fraud or harm. We will tell you why where it is reasonable to do so.

After termination we will settle payouts properly owed, after deducting refunds, chargebacks and fees, and retain transaction and unlock records for as long as the Privacy Policy and the law require.

Ticket credit is spendable on Paperwall and has no cash value, so it is not refunded when an account closes. Tell us before you close your account if you hold credit that came from a transaction you are disputing, and we will deal with the underlying charge rather than the credit. Where the law requires us to return the value of unused credit, we will.

15. Changes to these terms

We update these terms as the product changes. The date at the top of this page shows when we last did. For material changes we give notice through the service or by email. Continuing to use Paperwall after a change means you accept the updated terms.

16. Governing law

Paperwall operates from Toronto, Canada. These terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction over disputes. This does not remove any right you have to bring a claim in your home jurisdiction under local consumer law.

17. General

If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the business.

18. Contact

Email legal@paperwall.io with questions about these terms, or use the contact form. We are a small team in the west end of Toronto and aim to reply within 48 hours.