Goals
It should be extremely easy and quick to create something really cool on the internet and then charge people to access it. Whether it's art, a tool, or a piece of journalism, you should allow people to pay for things they find valuable. This is only possible if you let them.
I am a big fan of drafts/nuxt-3-and-netlify as a prototyping toolkit, and I have a customized project template that lets me spin up apps quickly. Once I've made something cool, I want to let people pay to access it.
Memberships
One model is to let people pay a monthly fee to access the site, or certain portions of it.
Commodities
Another model is to let people pay for specific app actions: uploads, image generation, processing, tokens. People want to perform an action, and you let them pay for it before proceeding.
Paywalling
Yet another model is to take a piece of content and only allow access to people who have paid for it (or have a membership granting them access) – this might be on a page-by-page basis for journalism. Users shouldn't need to sign up for an account to pay for access, and paying should be as seamless as possible.
Free, but collect emails
A final option is to create an entire checkout flow, but give out coupon codes that let the user get the product for free, but adds them as a customer to your Stripe account and collects their email.
Using Stripe
Stripe offers a number of tools that help users of different technical abilities charge for things. Our Nuxt app sits at a weird juncture where we could potentially do everything ourselves; we need to resist that temptation and focus on the task at hand.