Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


                     TidBITS Memberships Now Support PayPal

   Adam Engst

   It never hurts to ask. TidBITS member Carl Pohle recently wrote to me
   because his [1]TidBITS membership had expired. He wanted to renew but
   preferred to use PayPal to avoid having another place to update his
   credit card number whenever it changed. I started writing back to him
   to apologize and explain that our Paid Memberships Pro system supports
   only a single payment gateway at a time, which is Stripe for us. But
   then I wondered if that was actually true or if I was just speaking
   confidently from a position of ignorance, or at least obsolete
   knowledge. Not that we geeks ever do that, of course!

   In fact, a quick perusal of the payment gateway settings in Paid
   Memberships Pro showed that it does now support PayPal Express as a
   secondary payment gateway. After installing the necessary plug-in and
   configuring a few settings in PayPal, I was pleased to see a 'Check Out
   with PayPal' option appear on our Membership Checkout page. ('Check Out
   with a Credit Card' continues to be the default and uses Stripe.)

   A few membership renewals have used PayPal so far, and it seems to work
   well. You can even switch from an automatically renewing Stripe-based
   membership to a PayPal-based membership, though you have to [2]change
   membership levels to do so'there's no way in the interface to switch
   payment systems within the same level. If necessary, you could always
   cancel and restart the subscription manually.

   However, the new PayPal integration does create a bit more work for us.
   If Lauri Reinhardt and I are trying to track down a payment issue,
   we'll have to look in both Stripe and PayPal, and I'll have to sweep
   the money out of PayPal to our bank account more regularly. All other
   things being equal, I encourage you to stick with credit card payments
   through Stripe'it consolidates reporting and payouts for us and reduces
   administrative overhead. But if you prefer to support TidBITS via
   PayPal, that's now completely possible.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://tidbits.com/membership/benefits/
   2. https://tidbits.com/membership/levels/

   Hidden links:
   3. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/11/TidBITS-memberships-PayPal.png

.