I am assuming only a registered member can download? You can store the time of payment in a database. Then the download can be accessed through a url like this: http://myhost/download-file.php?file=the-file-name.smthn
When the user goes to this url do all the credential checks like user name and password and the time he has paid. If he is allowed to download fetch the file and output to the browser like so:
$file = file_get_contents('dir-inaccessible-through-web/the-file-name.smthn');
header('Content-disposition: attachment; the-file-name.smthn');
// optionally
$size = strlen($file);
header('Content-length: ' . $size);
echo $file;
Gerçek dosya web erişilemez olduğunu unutmayın.