Sutra gives you two ways to let people pay something other than a single fixed price: Pay What You Can, where the buyer types their own amount, and multiple plans, where you offer a few set tiers side by side on the checkout page.
Requires the Silver plan or above. Pay What You Can is part of Sutra's advanced payment options.
Turn on Pay What You Can
Open your space and go to Manage → General settings → Privacy and payment settings.
Set the space to Paid and connect Stripe if you haven't.
Click a plan to edit it, or add a new one.
Switch on Pay What You Can (let buyers choose their price). The fixed price field disappears and three amount fields take its place.
Minimum, maximum, and suggested
Minimum — the lowest amount a buyer may enter. Checkout refuses anything below it.
Maximum — the highest amount you'll accept. Most creators leave this empty.
Suggested — the amount the field is pre-filled with. This is the single biggest influence on what people actually pay, so set it to the number you'd like to be the norm.
Leave minimum and maximum at zero if you don't want any boundaries. Be aware of what that means: with the minimum at zero, someone can enter 0 and join without paying anything. If you need a floor, set the minimum explicitly.
The suggested amount has to sit between the minimum and the maximum, and the minimum can't be higher than the maximum — Sutra won't let you save a plan that breaks either rule.
Offering pricing tiers instead
If you'd rather present a few clear options than an open field — supported, standard, and solidarity rates, for example — create one plan for each and leave Pay What You Can off. All visible plans appear together on the checkout page and the buyer picks one.
You can combine both approaches: make one of the tiers Pay What You Can and leave the others at fixed prices.
Plans shown together must all use the same currency. Mixing currencies on one checkout page isn't supported.
Older spaces using the legacy payment setup
Spaces created before payment plans handle this differently: flexible pricing there is built as a payment survey that people see when they register, with each answer carrying a price. If your Privacy and payment settings show a Flexible option with an edit button rather than a plan list, that is the version you have.
Troubleshooting
The Pay What You Can switch opens an upgrade message — it's a Silver feature. Upgrade your plan to use it.
People are paying less than you hoped — raise the suggested amount, or set a minimum. An empty or low suggested amount reads as the expected price.
Someone joined for nothing — the minimum is at zero, which allows a zero amount. Set a minimum above zero to stop that.
Sutra won't let you save the plan — check that the minimum isn't above the maximum and that the suggested amount falls between them.
You want to mix currencies across your tiers — that isn't supported on a single checkout page. Pick one currency for all the plans a buyer will see together.
What's next
Pay What You Can works with the rest of the checkout controls: add a free trial on recurring plans, create coupon codes for specific discounts, and set up tax collection if you need to charge VAT or sales tax.