Hi Craig. I'm very glad you like s2Member.
1. I don't know if they have to be mutually exclusive, but I think you don't need them be be together for this to work. Instead of selling the pages with specific access, you can sell them with custom capabilities that get added to the user's account.
So you can have users that register for free and can purchase pages with buttons that add the custom capabilities for each. This will play well with the Level 1 users that pay monthly, because then you can show the page to those that either have Level 1 or the ccap for that page.
This video explains custom capabilities very well:
http://www.s2member.com/custom-capabilities-video/And this is from the changelog for v110815:
(s2Member/s2Member Pro) Independent Custom Capabilities. You can now sell one or more Custom Capabilities using Buy Now functionality, to "existing" Users/Members, regardless of which Membership Level they have on your site ( i.e. you could even sell Independent Custom Capabilities to Users at Membership Level #0, normally referred to as Free Subscribers, if you like ). So this is quite flexible. Independent Custom Capabilities do NOT rely on any specific Membership Level. That's why s2Member refers to these as Independent Custom Capabilities, because you can sell Capabilities this way, through Buy Now functionality, and the Customer's Membership Level Access, along with any existing paid Subscription they may already have with you, will remain completely unaffected. For further details, please check your Dashboard, under: s2Member -> PayPal® Buttons -> Capability (Buy Now) Buttons. Independent Custom Capabilities are currently integrated with PayPal® Standard Buttons, PayPal® Pro Forms, and Authorize.Net® Pro Forms only. Integration with other Payment Gateways supported by s2Member Pro will come in a future release.
2. You could remove the search protection and instead use the WordPress
<!--more--> tag where you want the snippet to end, this the post will be shown up to that point in the posts list, but if they try to open it they'd get the access restriction applied.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitti ... /more-tag/I hope this helps.