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Latch

Introduction

Latch is a paywall and subscription platform for publishers. It lets you gate content, manage products and customers, define audience segments, and collect client-side events through a dashboard, HTTP API, and browser integration layer.

Who is Latch for?

Section titled “Who is Latch for?”

Latch is designed for publishers who need:

  • Content gating — metered paywalls, hard paywalls, registration walls, or soft prompts
  • Subscription management — products with multiple prices, Stripe-backed billing, manual grants, and trials
  • Audience targeting — segments based on subscription state and tracked behavior
  • Developer control — browser-safe and server-side endpoints you can integrate into your own stack

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

Latch has three main components.

1. API server

Section titled “1. API server”

The API is the core of Latch. It handles:

  • admin authentication for the dashboard
  • product, price, and subscription management with billing sync
  • paywall rule evaluation
  • customer and segment management
  • event ingestion
  • API key management

The API includes interactive documentation at /docs so you can inspect the live route surface.

2. Dashboard

Section titled “2. Dashboard”

The dashboard is where publishers manage their publication:

  • create and edit products and prices
  • configure paywall rules
  • view and manage customers
  • build audience segments
  • generate API keys
  • configure Stripe

3. Browser integration

Section titled “3. Browser integration”

Latch supports two browser-side integration styles:

  • the JavaScript SDK
  • direct publishable-key integrations such as the plain HTML and WordPress examples in these docs

Both approaches rely on the same client-safe endpoints for access checks and event ingestion.

Key design decisions

Section titled “Key design decisions”
  • Fail-open: if the access API errors, browser integrations should grant access instead of blocking readers
  • Key separation: publishable keys (pk_) are browser-safe and work with access checks, events, and customer auth; secret keys (sk_) are server-side and currently cover customer auth plus subscription flows such as checkout and portal sessions
  • Session-backed admin routes: dashboard management routes use authenticated admin sessions rather than API keys
  • Multi-tenant: each publication is isolated, including products, customers, paywalls, segments, API keys, and Stripe settings

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”