Tiered content access and user submissions with Sanity CMS?

Welcome to Sanity! Yes, absolutely what you're describing is possible, and it's a pretty common pattern that many projects use successfully. Let me break down how you'd approach this:

The Basic Architecture

Sanity will be your content management layer where editors create and publish content, but the membership/paywall logic lives in your frontend application (typically Next.js, but could be any framework). Sanity stores the content and metadata about access levels, while your app enforces who can see what based on authentication.

How It Works

In Sanity Studio, you'd add fields to your content documents to indicate access levels. For example, on your tutorial documents:

{
  name: 'accessLevel',
  type: 'string',
  options: {
    list: [
      {title: 'Free', value: 'free'},
      {title: 'Tier 1', value: 'tier1'},
      {title: 'Tier 2', value: 'tier2'}
    ]
  }
}

In your frontend, you'd:

1. Use an authentication provider (popular choices: Clerk, Auth0, NextAuth.js, or Supabase Auth)
2. Integrate a payment processor (Stripe is the most common for subscriptions)
3. Query Sanity for content using the @sanity/client, then check the user's membership tier against the content's accessLevel field
4. Show/hide content accordingly

Real-World Example

Check out Vercel's nextjs-subscription-payments starter template - it uses Stripe + Supabase for the membership infrastructure. You'd swap out Supabase's content storage with Sanity queries, but the auth/payment pattern is exactly what you need.

Access Control Options

Here's something important to understand about where access control happens:

For frontend visitor access (your use case): You handle this in your application code. Your Sanity dataset would typically be private, and your frontend would use API tokens to fetch content, then apply your membership logic before rendering.

For Studio editor access: If you need to restrict what content editors can see/edit in Sanity Studio itself, Sanity has Custom Roles and Content Resources (Enterprise plan feature) that let you use GROQ filters to define precise permissions. But this is separate from controlling what website visitors see.

User-Generated Content

For members submitting content to administrators, you have a few options:

1. Forms in your frontend that use the Sanity Client to create draft documents that admins review in Studio. This is the most common approach - users fill out a form on your site, and it creates a draft document in Sanity via the API.

2. Sanity Studio with restricted roles - give members limited Studio access where they can only create drafts in specific document types (requires appropriate plan for role management).

3. Custom submission interface using the @sanity/client to write directly to your dataset with proper authentication.

A Typical Stack

• Frontend: Next.js with App Router for modern projects
• Content: Sanity for all your tutorials, courses, etc.
• Auth: Clerk or NextAuth.js
• Payments: Stripe for subscription management
• Hosting: Vercel (seamless Next.js deployment)

Getting Started Steps

1. Set up your Sanity project with schemas for tutorials/courses that include access level fields
2. Build your Next.js frontend and integrate authentication (Clerk works great with Next.js)
3. Connect Stripe for payment/subscription handling
4. Query Sanity content and conditionally render based on user tier
5. For user submissions, implement a form that creates draft documents via the Sanity client

Preview & Draft Mode

One nice bonus: Next.js has Draft Mode which integrates beautifully with Sanity. This lets your content editors preview unpublished changes before they go live - super helpful for reviewing tutorials before making them available to members.

The beauty of this approach is that your content team works entirely in Sanity Studio managing tutorials and courses, while your membership/payment logic stays cleanly separated in your application code. It's a very flexible and scalable pattern that gives you full control over the user experience!