What you see after you pay
Most paywalls just remove a block. This one changes what the whole site looks like — and why that matters for any product.
Most paywalls are just CSS.
You pay, the block disappears, the text appears. Same page, same request, same HTML — just a div that was hidden is now visible. If you open devtools, the content was probably there the whole time.
I built that paywall on day one. It looked fine. It wasn't real.
Day three was thinking about what happens after someone pays — and realizing there was nothing there. No acknowledgment. No change. The site looked exactly the same to a paying reader as it did to someone who'd never heard of it. The "Unlock all posts" block was still there. The lock icons were still there. Everything was still trying to sell them something they'd already bought.
That felt wrong. And fixing it turned out to be a product decision, not a technical one.
The rest is for supporters
Pay once, read everything — this post and whatever comes next.
What's inside
- →How the server decides what to show before anything reaches the browser
- →The ★ Exclusive badge — small detail, real signal
- →Why hiding the sales pitch from people who already paid actually matters
- →How one hasAccess() call threads through every page