Article gifting with metering
🔍 Problem Statement
When a subscriber gifts an article behind a metered paywall, the recipient's meter is still decremented. There is no way to allow gifted articles to bypass the meter, which undermines the gifting experience and discourages sharing.
💡 User Story
As a subscriber, I want to gift individual articles to non-subscribers without it counting against their meter, so that recipients can read the full article seamlessly and are encouraged to subscribe.
🎯 Definition of Done (DoD)
A feature is done when:
✔️ Given a metered paywall, when a subscriber shares an article via the gifting feature, then the recipient can view the article in full without their own meter being decremented, and the gift link respects any configured expiry or usage limits.
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Comments3
Chris Gogos
Nov 3, 2025
Gifting articles has become an important feature for paywalled products. This is a good suggestion.
Michael Ghattas
Nov 6, 2025
Can you provide examples of how these gifts will be offered to the users? Is it something created and shared by the marketing team on social media? by email? Do you want users to be able to gift each other free articles?
Chris Gogos
Nov 6, 2025
It’s for premium subscribers to be able to gift articles to anonymous (non subscriber) users to access content.
Best practice I’ve seen from many publishers is the following:
A subscriber is logged in with a subscription that has gifting permissions
In the product plan the subscriber is given ‘x’ number of articles to ‘gift’ during ‘x’ period
The subscriber reads an article they want to share but instead of just sharing the url link, they share the unique ‘gift link’ (to ensure the recipient can read it behind the paywall)
The user interface normally has a small gift icon and once clicked and the unique link is generated it displays how many articles the subscriber has left in ‘x’ period to ‘gift’
Example UI journey from theaustralian.com.au
https://www.nytimes.com/ and many other publishers have this feature