How to sell access to your research or documents

Steps

1. Create a Base and add what you are selling: reports, datasets, filings, interview notes, a research archive. PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, plain text, Markdown and images, up to 50 MB per file.
2. Read the overview and facts Base extracts, and fix anything in the review queue. This is what buyers will be paying for.
3. In the Share step, choose Paid access.
4. Set up payouts. Stripe's onboarding opens and brings you back; a Base cannot go on sale until payouts can reach you.
5. Set the price: one-time or monthly, from $1. The panel shows what you receive on each payment as you type.
6. Write a short description of what buyers get. It is the only text of yours shown before someone pays.
7. Publish and share the link wherever your audience is: a newsletter, a post, your site.

What a buyer sees

• Before paying: the Base with its words withheld. They see how many facts it holds, the shape of its knowledge graph, the span of its timeline, its document types and when it was last updated, so they know what they are buying without getting it free.
• After paying: the whole Base, in the browser and in their own AI. They can connect it to Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP app and ask questions that are answered with quotes from your documents.
• Monthly buyers can cancel at any time and keep access to the end of the period they paid for. A one-time purchase lasts as long as the Base is live.

Running it

• Add documents whenever you like. Every buyer sees them, which is what makes a monthly price worth paying.
• Invite people free beside the people who buy: reviewers, collaborators, your existing subscribers.
• The sales list shows each buyer, what they pay and since when. You can cancel a subscription or refund and remove a buyer from it.
• Downloads are a switch. Leave them off if buyers should read and question the Base without saving the original files.

Where else people sell this kind of material

Gumroad sells files, Substack sells a publication and Patreon sells a membership. Each is the better choice for some sellers; the comparisons say which: Base vs Gumroad, Base vs Substack, Base vs Patreon.

Questions