Puck

Puck is a subscription-funded digital media company covering the power centers of Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and for twenty-two months I was the engineer who owned its WordPress platform: the custom Stripe subscription engine behind the paywall, the consent and analytics stack around it, and the DevOps that made any of it safe to change.

Key Takeaways

  • Owned the platform that transacts the business: a custom Stripe subscription engine, Payment Intents, webhooks, proration, discount codes, gift and corporate plans, serving 50,000+ subscribers on a site with 4M+ monthly page views, with no commerce plugin on the critical path.
  • Built Inner Circle, a second paywall tier, from entitlement checks to a full-width paywall experience, a dedicated landing page and a one-free-article unlock.
  • Delivered GDPR consent properly: every cookie audited and categorized, a public cookie report for legal review, and Consent Mode wired into GTM with verified events flowing to GA4 and BigQuery.
  • Shipped Apple News in roughly eight weeks, including a custom Apple News Format template and a modified display font cut specifically so drop caps rendered correctly on Apple's renderer.
  • Strengthened subscriber attribution and newsletter preference handling across the renewal and upgrade lifecycle, with reporting the editorial team could verify.
  • Put Cloudflare to work in front of the platform, brute-force mitigation on login, security hardening, and caching that held origin load down through traffic spikes.

Organization

Puck is a New York digital media company built on the premise that the writer, not the masthead, is the product: journalists are partners in the business and readers subscribe to them by name. The business is a two-tier membership transacted entirely on its WordPress site, which serves as the store, the fulfillment system, the entitlement database and the customer service desk.

Challenge

Puck needed an engineer who could take ownership of a large, opinionated custom codebase, a Sage theme with Blade templates, a hand-built Stripe integration, an editorial mega menu, and be productive without a long ramp. The platform where money changes hands had to become safe to change, measurable, and compliant, while shipping product the whole time.

Solution

  • Environment and deployment work first, so localhost, staging, QA and production behaved identically and checkout could be developed safely.
  • Continuous development on the Stripe engine: pricing, proration, retention offers, gift and corporate subscriptions, duplicate-account analysis and clean billing surfaces for subscribers.
  • Inner Circle as a complete product: entitlements checked against both Stripe and the CRM, paywall and checkout paths for every entry point, and newsletter integration kept in sync.
  • Cookiebot deployment with a full cookie audit, a public cookie report page and consent events verified into GA4 and BigQuery before rollout widened.
  • Apple News integration with category mapping handled in code and typography adjusted for Apple's renderer.
  • Caching and edge architecture for an editorial site whose most-used component changes daily.

Results

  • Involuntary churn down an estimated 10 to 15%.
  • Paid conversion rate up an estimated 10 to 20%.
  • Origin load during traffic spikes down 40 to 60%.
  • Consent rollout completed with verified measurement and a public audit trail.
  • 6 to 10 analyst hours a month recovered through category dimensions and an organized GTM container.