Making Circle paywalls free
How to make a Circle paywall free without taking someone’s credit card details.
I run a couple of couple of Circle communities (Pitch Guide is for startups raising money, and Photocritic Photo School is for people wanting to learn photography). Both have paywalls.
For the Photo School, I wanted to make it possible to access the school for free — my promise to my 10,000+ users over the years was that it would always be free, forever, but a proportion of the users pay voluntarily. The problem is that on Circle, it’s easy to give a 100% discount code, but then you still have to collect their credit card details. That seems silly and invasive when I’m never planning to charge them anything.
Here’s the workaround I found: it’s a combination of a form and a Zapier automation. For the form, I’m using JotForm (because it supports instant Zapier triggers, and I have a JotForm account anyway) — but you can use Google Forms or something else that’s free.
(update: Turns out Google Forms are now instant triggers for Zapier, too. That is new, so I updated my Zapier to use Google Forms after all)
Here’s the Zapier script:
In a nutshell, it uses Google Forms to collect the email address, then looks for the user on Circle using that email address. From there, if it finds the user, it adds it to the space(s), which can include paywalled spaces. I then choose to add tags to my users and send them a welcome message (and a slack message to my team so we know there’s a new (free) user)
If it doesn’t find the user, it’s probably because they mistyped their email address, or used the wrong email address. We send them an email to tell them as much, just in case they want to try again.
Pretty simple, but very efficient!
If you wanted to learn photography in our free 21-week photography course anyway, try it out and you can see the mechanism in use for yourself!
