TL;DR: We're thinking about letting you put a gallery of your work behind a Buzz price, so people pay once to unlock it. Paid work would stay out of the main feeds and out of search entirely. This is a proposal, not a done deal, and there's a version of this we already tried and retired, so we want your read before we build anything.
Where this came from
This wasn't our idea. alexds9 built a userscript mockup of it and showed it to us, and the part that stuck was a masked preview: you can see that there's something there without seeing it.
The reason I like it is simple. It's another way for you to earn from what you make, and that matters to me more than most things on our roadmap.
He has since read a draft of this and pushed back on parts of it, so some of what follows is his answer rather than ours.
What we're proposing
You make a gallery. You put a Buzz price on it. Someone pays that price once, and they're in.
A gallery is a collection of your posts. You publish into it the same way you publish anything else, except it lands in the gallery instead of in front of everybody. It would live in its own tab on your profile, kept separate from your ordinary collections, because it behaves differently and mixing the two would be confusing.
That's the whole shape. One price, one gallery, paid once.
Where your galleries live
Your paid galleries would get their own page on your profile, plus a section on your profile overview so someone landing there can see you have them at all. That is the shop window, and it sits on your profile rather than anywhere central, on purpose.
Your followers would get a notification when you publish a new one, the same way they do when you release a paid model. That is the piece that makes this worth doing: the gallery stays out of the feeds, but the people who already chose to follow you still hear about it.
Where the things you buy live
If you pay to unlock a gallery, you need to be able to find it again later. So there would be a page listing everything you have unlocked, reachable from your user menu, instead of you having to remember whose profile it was on.
The part we care most about getting right
Paid work would not appear in the main feeds, and it would not appear in search.
This is the thing we'd most like to hold ourselves to, and it's worth saying why in plain terms. If paid galleries leak into the feed, the feed fills up with blurred boxes and subscribe buttons. Every one of them is an ad. Nobody wants to scroll that, and we're not going to build it.
So the deal we're proposing is: your paid gallery is something people find on your profile, or hear about because they already follow you, not something we push into everyone's feed. That is a real constraint on reach and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Notifying your own followers is the one channel we do think is fair, because they asked to hear from you.
It's also the hard part technically. Right now, publishing a post makes it public to everybody. Publishing into something that stays private is work we'd have to do properly, and it's the piece most likely to determine whether this ships well or badly.
Why not subscriptions
DeviantArt does both. You can subscribe to an artist and get their subscriber galleries, or you can pay a flat price to unlock one specific gallery. Both work there.
We're proposing the second one first, on purpose. A one-off unlock is a single decision for the buyer and a single decision for you. A subscription is a commitment on both sides, and it asks you to keep producing on a schedule or feel like you've let someone down.
Subscriptions aren't off the table forever. They're just not what we'd build first, and we'd rather learn from the simple version than guess at the complicated one.
We tried something like this before, and it went badly
We had Clubs. Clubs were closer to Patreon: people subscribed to you, you set tiers, and you published to those tiers.
We launched it in December 2023 and pulled it about a month later, in January 2024, after a lot of you told us plainly that you did not want it. The concern was fair and I still think it was right: Civitai was young, most of what was here was free, and Clubs looked like the start of a paywall going up around a community that was barely finished being built. We asked for feedback and got over 450 comments, and the answer was not ambiguous.
So why bring any of this up again.
Because the community is not the same one it was in January 2024. Paid access, early access and licensing fees all exist now, creators are earning real money here, and none of that turned the site into a wall. The worry back then was about the direction of travel, and two years of travel later I think we have earned a second conversation.
We are not against something like Clubs coming back eventually. But we would rather start somewhere smaller and safer, where the thing you are buying is one specific gallery at one specific price, rather than a relationship with a monthly bill attached.
What we haven't decided
Quite a lot, deliberately:
What a gallery costs to unlock, and whether we cap it at all.
Whether unlocking is forever, or expires.
Whether there's a preview at all. The masked preview was the good idea in the mockup, but a masked image is still a paywall in your face, and there's a version of this where the gallery is simply listed with a count and no teaser.
Who can make one. Every other paid thing on the site has a creator score floor. This probably should too, and we don't know where.
What happens to a gallery you already paid for if the creator deletes it or changes the price.
This is a proposal. Tell us where we're wrong.
We haven't built any of this. We're putting the shape in front of you first, including the part where we already tried something adjacent and it didn't take.
Three things we'd genuinely like your read on:
Would you use it? Not "does it sound nice", but is there a set of your work you'd actually put behind a price.
Is keeping it out of the feeds right? It costs you reach. We think that's the correct trade, but you're the one paying for it.
If you were here for Clubs, is this different enough? You told us no last time and we listened. I would rather hear now that this is the same mistake in a smaller box than find out after we build it.
We'll read everything and post a follow-up with where we land.
Edit, September 4: we're not building this
You told us no, and it wasn't close. We're not moving forward with paid galleries.
Two things we did take from the thread. Keeping paid work out of the feeds was the one part almost everyone agreed on, so that constraint stays wherever we go next. And a lot of you asked for something that has nothing to do with galleries: paid models aren't marked on the card, and you can't filter them out. That one we're going to fix.
If we land on something that fits better than this did, we'll bring it back and put the shape in front of you first. Thanks for being blunt.