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How to Start a Paysite: What an Adult Site Actually Needs
What an adult paysite is made of, the public rules every operator meets on day one, and what to bring to a call. The build itself is the part we do for you.
A paysite is a small business with a video player bolted to the front, and most of the work is not the player. Here is what one is made of, the rules you will meet on day one, and where the do-it-yourself road usually ends.
What you are actually building
The word "paysite" makes it sound like one product. It is closer to seven systems that have to agree with each other: a catalog, a member area, a billing relationship with a bank, an age gate that respects the law where your visitors are, a delivery path for very large video files, a reason for anyone to arrive in the first place, and a person who answers when a card declines.
Leave one of them out and the site still loads. It simply does not sell, or it sells for a few months and then the merchant account closes.
The parts list
- A domain registered to you or your company. Not to a developer, not to an agency, not to a platform. This is the one asset every other asset points at.
- A catalog and a player. Scenes, covers, trailers, tags, release dates, and a player that behaves on a phone, a desktop and, for VR, a headset.
- A member area. Sign-up, login, subscription status, cancellation, billing history, and an email address you control for every member.
- Billing. A high-risk merchant account and a gateway that supports recurring charges.
- An age gate. Different territories expect different things, and the list of territories keeps growing.
- Delivery. Storage and a content delivery network that can carry large video to many people at once.
- Records and takedowns. Performer records and the statement the law requires, plus a registered agent for copyright notices.
- Distribution and support. Somewhere for traffic to come from, and someone to answer the inbox.
Most of that list is invisible to a visitor. All of it is visible to your bank.
The rules you meet on day one
These are public, and you should read them in the original rather than take anyone's summary, including ours.
- Performer records. 18 U.S.C. 2257 requires producers of sexually explicit material to keep identity and age records for every performer and to put a statement on the material saying where those records are kept. Our post on 2257 compliance for a paysite walks through what the statute says.
- Copyright notices. The U.S. Copyright Office is direct: a service provider must publish its designated agent's contact information on its site and file the same with the Office, and one that fails to do so "may lose its safe harbor protection and be subject to an infringement suit." The DMCA post covers both sides of that.
- Age verification. The UK regulator, Ofcom, frames services that publish their own pornographic content as "Part 5" services, giving "studios or pay sites" as the example, and expects highly effective age assurance on them. US states and other countries each write their own version. The age verification laws post is a dated map.
- Payments. An adult merchant account is an underwriting decision made by a bank, not a checkbox in a store admin. Established adult-facing providers exist and publish their own material, CCBill among them, and the account still has to be approved. The merchant accounts post explains how that decision is made.
None of that is legal advice. We recommend; your counsel decides what applies to you.
Where the do-it-yourself road ends
Everything above is the easy part to find. The part that decides your launch date is what comes next: the order the pieces get built in, how the payments application and the build run side by side, what has to exist before the site is public, how video gets delivered to every device your members own, what the back office has to do, and how traffic is made to arrive.
That is the work people hire us for, so we are not going to publish it as a recipe. A recipe without the people who have run it before is how launch dates slip by a season. What we will do is lay out the sequence for your site, with your content and your plans on the table, and tell you honestly what it involves. You can see the shape of a finished one on the GirlsDoVR case study.
What to bring to a call
You do not need a spec. You need the facts that change the answer.
- What you make, how much of it exists today, and how often new material lands.
- Whether it is flat video, VR, live, messaging, or some combination.
- How you want to charge: monthly membership, per-scene, bundles, pay-per-view, or a mix.
- Where your audience is, and any territories you would rather not sell into at all.
- Who holds the performer records and 2257 paperwork today.
- Whether you have processed cards before, and whether anything went wrong.
- What you already run: an existing site, a platform presence, a mailing list, social accounts.
That is enough for a real conversation about scope, cost and a date. Our services page lists what sits inside a build, and pricing explains how we quote it.
Questions we get
Do I need a company before I start?
Banks ask for business documentation, so the entity question usually comes up early. What form it takes, and where, is a question for your own lawyer and accountant rather than for us.
How much content do I need to launch?
Enough that a member who pays on day one does not run out on day two, and a schedule they can see. There is no universal number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing.
Can I keep selling on platforms after my site is live?
Yes, and many operators do. The usual pattern is platforms for reach and your own domain for the sale, with every link in every bio pointing at the domain you own. The work we have launched runs that way.
What does it cost, and how long does it take?
Pricing starts at $250 a month. Timelines depend on scope and on how quickly the merchant application moves. Both get answered on the call rather than guessed at here.
Talk it through
If you are working out what your site needs and in what order, a call is faster than a checklist. Thirty minutes, your content and your plans on the table, and you leave with a scope, a number and a date. Book a call and we will go through it with you.
Sources
Read next
What 18 U.S.C. 2257 asks of a producer: the records, the custodian, the statement on every page, primary versus secondary producer, and where counsel decides.
What a DMCA takedown notice must contain, why a paysite registers a designated agent, how counter-notices work, and the practical loop of finding leaks.