It sounds like you’re doing groups correctly, you just want to modify the security settings of the Categories:
- Go to the Category and select the wrench
- Go to the Security panel
- Add groups so you can customise the permissions of the group with respect to that category
In the above example, only members of discourse-admins, gitlab-members, gitlab-moderators, gitlab-sepcialists can access the gitlab Category.
So in your case, it sounds like you have two main groups:
- Accelerator(basic content)
- Scale (basic content and additional content)
For all Categories, you can remove “everyone” and add Scale. For the lower tier content you can add Accelerator as well.
Free Categories would look like this:
Premium Categories would look like this:
