Piloting paid memberships for the open social web!

Leaflet is a tool for making blogs and newsletters that are social — publish once, and reach readers across the open network you're already building on Bluesky.

Now we're building an easy way to monetize your content on this network.

Seeking launch partners for paid publications

We recently added support for email newsletters, and are getting ready to launch paid memberships — like you can do on Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon etc, but tightly integrated with Bluesky.

We're also exploring other ways to monetize, like one-off paid content, and want to hear what you'd be most excited to use.

Our creator plan, Leaflet Pro, starts at just $12 / month1 and gets you email newsletters, analytics, and group publications.

The plan is to do paid memberships with a much lower % platform fee than Substack — 5% instead of 10% — available to all creators, whether or not you opt for the extra features of Leaflet Pro.

We'd like to get a few early partners on board as we gear up to launch paid memberships. The best fit is likely:

Independent creator-publishers, solo or small team

Very active / substantive following on Bluesky

Writing a blog / newsletter on Substack (or similar) OR have a substantial audience elsewhere and would appreciate a way to monetize around Bluesky

Indie journalists, early-stage newsletter writers, and creators in other mediums (e.g. video) could all be a good fit. Ditto folks interested in trying an experiment alongside your existing site.

We plan to launch paid memberships this summer, and work as fast as we can to improve and support what you need. We'll start in private alpha with a few early partners, then open up more widely.

If you're interested in Leaflet + monetization tools, fill out this form to tell us more about your work and what you'd find useful:

Leaflet monetization interest form!

The power of Leaflet + Bluesky

Leaflet is built to help creators take advantage of new ways we can make the internet more social, without network lock-in, so you can:

Publish once and reach readers across Bluesky & beyond

Own your content and audience2 — no walled garden platform, like Substack, standing between you and them

Make money, so your work is sustainable

With Leaflet, you can publish with way less friction, and reach your audience in social spaces they already spend time in every day. It's tightly integrated with Bluesky, which means:

No new accounts! You log in and make a blog with your Bluesky account; readers subscribe with their Bluesky accounts

Share to Bluesky when you publish; Bluesky shows special link cards for Leaflet posts

@-mention anyone on Bluesky directly in your post

Readers can comment, recommend posts, and share excerpts directly to Bluesky

And if you're interested in the technical flexibility this affords:

Leaflet is not only easy to use, with a great mobile editor. We're also open source, and built on open protocols, so everything we offer is possible for you to extend, customize, even self-host — you can build your own tooling, with credible exit every step of the way.

Publishing in a growing social ecosystem

Beyond Bluesky, a whole new universe of social blogging is emerging in the Atmosphere, and all kinds of folks are building it alongside us.

Joined by publishing apps @pckt.blog and @offprint.app, we co-created @standard.site, a set of open standards for publishing on AT Protocol: kind of like RSS with a social network built in.

Other tools are emerging, from reader apps like @standard-reader.app to social link aggregation tools like @sill.social, that continue to make Leaflet publications richer and more discoverable!

And Bluesky is building new features for communities, coming later this year, with exciting potential for giving your members more ways to engage not only with your content but with each other.

For creators, this means: more channels for distribution, more ways for readers to find and engage with your work, and a valuable social graph of relationships between readers and publishers.

There are real benefits to publishers in being early to this ecosystem. Leaflet is the easiest way to get started and take advantage of this growing network.

What's next: memberships & other creator monetization tools

Subscriptions won't be the right fit for everyone right away — especially if you don't have a subscription-sized audience yet.

We're also thinking about one-off payments (a single report; a one-time project) and bundled or gated releases (a quarterly magazine; a themed collection) as ways to monetize without needing recurring membership from day one.

If either of those fits how you already think about your work, we want to hear about it.

We'll soon be onboarding a small number of folks to try paid memberships, and exploring what's next. We'd love to hear more about what you're working on, and what you'd find valuable!

Once again, please tell us more here if you're interested:

Leaflet monetization interest form!

And if you have further questions, reach out any time!

Special thanks to @bankonjustin.com for several conversations helping sharpen how we position Leaflet and monetization tools for indie journalists and other creators, including contributions to the draft above.

Thank you to @tylerjfisher.com and @anna.germnetwork.com for feedback as well!

We've tried to keep things simple here! Your only additional cost is +$5/m for each +1k email subscribers. And Leaflet Pro is entirely optional; nearly all our features are free.

Your email list, content — all your data — is yours. Published data lives on your PDS, which you control; private date like email lists we'll help you export any time.