How to Create Plans & Subscriptions

A plan is what you sell or grant. It carries the price and the access scope: the set of content a subscriber may watch while their subscription is in good standing. This guide covers the modern Subscriptions workflow in the DynTube dashboard — creating a plan, choosing what it unlocks, and getting a subscriber onto it either through checkout or by granting it manually.

Before You Begin

Two different permissions govern this workflow, and they are deliberately not the same:

• Plans and pricing require the subscriptions entitlement on your account plus the Manage Subscriptions permission. Without the entitlement you are sent to billing to upgrade; without the permission the Plans pages are refused.
• Subscriber records require the subscriptions entitlement plus the separate Manage Subscribers permission. This is the gate on subscriber personal data and on granting, pausing or revoking access. Someone who can build and price plans cannot, on that basis alone, read subscriber details or hand out access.
• Account owners are not restricted by these two permissions.
• Paid plans additionally require a connected payment account (below). Free plans do not.

Plan Types

Every paid plan is one of three types. The type decides how the money is taken, not what is unlocked:

Separately from the type, a plan is either paid or free. Marking a plan free sets its price to zero, makes it a subscription, and removes the payment-provider requirement — subscribers get access after signing in rather than through checkout. How many free plans an account may have is capped by its own plan limits, so the free option can be unavailable to you even though it exists.

What a Plan Can Unlock

A plan's access scope is assembled from these choices:

• Videos — individual videos, selected by name
• Audio — individual audio tracks
• Live Streams — individual streams
• Library Items — collections such as a course, series, playlist, channel, academy, library, bundle or album
• Websites — restricts the plan to the selected hosted sites
• Full Account Access — everything in the account, instead of a hand-picked list

Step 1: Connect Payments (Paid Plans Only)

1. In the dashboard sidebar, open Subscriptions → Payment Settings (/subscriptions/settings/payment).
2. Start the connection and complete the payment provider's onboarding.
3. Return to DynTube. The status card reports whether the account is connected, still in progress, restricted, or complete.

Until the connected account can accept charges, the plan form blocks the save for a paid plan and says so. Free plans are unaffected and can be created before payments are set up.

Step 2: Create the Plan

1. Open Subscriptions → Plans (/subscriptions/plans).
2. Choose to create a new plan (/subscriptions/plans/new).
3. Basic info: give the plan a name — required — and optionally a description and image. The name is what buyers see.
4. Pricing: mark the plan free, or leave it paid and pick a plan type, amount and currency. For a subscription, set the billing interval and, if you want one, a trial period. For a rental, pick the rental duration.
5. Access: choose the videos, audio, live streams, library items or websites the plan unlocks, or turn on Full Account Access.
6. Save the plan.

A live preview of the plan card is kept beside the form while you work, so you can see how the plan will read to a buyer before saving.

Step 3: Status, and What You Can Change Later

A newly created plan is active. Plans list as active, inactive or archived, and you can move a plan between active and inactive from its own page.

• A plan cannot be active with an empty access scope. Select at least one content item, or turn on full account access, before saving or activating it.
• The amount, currency and billing interval can only be changed while the plan is inactive. Deactivate it first, change the terms, then activate it again.
• Free versus paid cannot be changed on an existing plan.

Getting Subscribers onto a Plan

There are two routes, and they are not equivalent:

Checkout

A viewer buys the plan themselves on your hosted site, and the payment provider takes the payment. This is the route that requires a connected payment account, and the only one that collects money.

Manual Grant

You put someone on a plan yourself. This needs the Manage Subscribers permission.

1. Open Subscribers (/subscriptions/subscribers).
2. Add a subscriber (/subscriptions/subscribers/add).
3. Enter their email address — required. A display name is optional.
4. Set a password, or leave it blank to have one generated and a welcome email sent.
5. Optionally choose one of your active plans to grant. Leave it as no plan to create the record without access.
6. Save.

Opening a subscriber's record shows their subscriptions and their transactions, and is where you pause, resume or revoke their access.

How Access Is Decided

When a viewer asks for gated content, DynTube looks for a subscription of theirs that clears all three of these at once:

• Its status is active or trialing
• Its access has not been revoked
• Its current period has not ended — a subscription with no end date is not time-limited, and one in payment retry is not cut off while the retry is running

If a subscription clears those, the content in that plan's access scope is unlocked for that viewer. If none does, the content stays gated. This page does not describe what happens across renewals, cancellations, refunds or disputes; those are billing lifecycle behaviour, and the subscriber's own record is the accurate source for the state of any one subscription.

Legacy Video Membership

Accounts that were set up before the modern Subscriptions plane may still have More tools → Video Membership. It is a separate compatibility system with its own members, its own plans and its own behaviour, and it is not the subject of this article. Records do not flow between the two planes: adding someone as a legacy member does not create a subscriber here, and a plan created here is not visible there. Pick one plane for a given piece of content and stay in it.

Related Articles

• How to Add Login Protection to Videos
• How to Secure Your Videos on DynTube
• Subscriptions API