I gave PlebPay a shot. It worked well for what it is but it doesn’t do much.
I basically implemented PlebPay paywalls for the first few posts I wrote on here just to see how it works and whether anyone would actually click through and pay to read a post with it.
Major Caveats: this website (satsperpost) is super new so I don’t have enough traffic to really test it properly.
Also, I ditched it after only a few days. So I don’t know how it would perform over longer periods of time on website that have large traffic flows.
The other thing I should make very clear is that Plebpay is really not meant to be very sophisticated. It was built at a hackathon and doesn’t even have a database, so the feature set is very limited.
Here’s what the dev said:
With that in mind, most of my criticisms have to do with the misfit between what Plebpay is built to do and the use case I implemented it for.
I asked plebpay to do far more than it was meant to do. By analogy, I basically took a BB gun to a gunfight.
That being said, as a user, I can already see some downsides to using it, especially if you are the one generating the paywall.
So let’s dig in.
I implemented the plebpay paywall by simply setting up a series of redirects using a redirect plugin on wordpress.
When someone clicked on my link, they went straight over to the plebpay paywall where they could spend 10 cents to enter the site.
Since this was the first implementation of lightning payments I had ever installed, I was thrilled when it worked! I successfully sent some test transactions, and it worked perfectly. Amazing.😲😁
But after a few days, I came to realize that it is limited, intentionally limited it must be acknowledged, but it is limited nonetheless.
Here are a few of my critiques:
- Not anonymous. Everyone can see your Strike address when they send you sats
- Not much room to explain anything on the invoice it generates.
- Not customizable (again, no database)
I would also add that, for this website, it is important that google rank these pages to bring in traffic. But a paywall blocks that. Google can’t crawl a page it can’t access.
That’s a big problem for me. If I can’t bring in traffic from google, then I would have to rely on twitter marketing 🤮 or something to bring in traffic to earn sats.
For these reasons, I decided to try just putting up a lightning invoice and a blue wallet address in the sidebar and asking for donations instead of forcing people to pay via a paywall.
I may still use plebpay for certain kinds of posts, like the secret bitties clubhouse post I made for the last post.
(BTW Did you find the secret site for bitties???)
I will keep plebpay in my backpocket, add it to my tool kit, and maybe I’ll be able to find a good general use case for it, but for now, except for a few specialty pages, I will seek other solutions.
Right now, I put those blue wallet addresses in the sidebar, but I can tell after less than a day that this isn’t going to work either.
First of all, the Lightning invoice already expired after one transaction. So that address is kaput.
Second of all, the lightning wallet address gives out a bunch of metadata that isn’t great for privacy.
The plebpay dev gave me a few suggestions:
After a quick look, it looks like LNbits is the way to go. I’ll try that next.
For now, I will take down the blue wallet address. That means that I have no way of receiving sats you may want to send me. Sad.
But hang tight, solutions are coming soon.
If you have any other tips or suggestions for services to check out, drop a comment below.
Have fun watching the Sportsball championship.
