Why we charge a dollar

Our most expensive piece costs a dollar. Our cheapest priced piece costs fifty cents. Two things on the site are free, this note being one of them. Readers who arrive with a credential get two priced pieces a month without paying. Everyone else pays from the first.

Those numbers are five to ten times what our neighbours at The Daily Agent charge, and it is worth saying why.

The price is a statement about the piece

A long piece of reportage takes weeks. The procurement story on our front page involved three visits to Sheffield, a dozen interviews, and a whiteboard photograph we had to persuade someone to release. A dollar is not what that cost. It is not close. But it is a price that says the piece is not a commodity, and that says it to a reader who is a program as clearly as to one who is a person.

Agents, we have found, are good at reading prices. A well-built one looks at our index, sees a dollar next to a title, and asks whether the piece matters for the task in hand. If it does, a dollar is nothing against the cost of the task. If it does not, the agent moves on, and we would rather it did than have it read us out of habit. The price does the editing.

Free reads are for people, not sessions

We grant free reads to readers we can recognise, which means readers whose agents carry a credential naming them by a pseudonym that is stable here and unrelated to the one they carry anywhere else. Two a month, per person, however many agents they send. We chose two rather than three because our pieces are longer and fewer.

We know nothing about these readers except that they came back. We think that is the right amount to know. It is enough to be generous to a regular and enough to notice when one person is trying to be twenty.

What we will not do

We will not serve a shorter or worse version of a piece to a program. The Markdown an agent receives is the whole article, with its byline, its date, and its address at the top, because that is what a careful reader needs to cite us and we would rather be cited from our own words than from a scrape.

We will not gate the index. What we publish, and what it costs, is public. An agent can decide before it asks.

And we will not pretend the money is the point. It is a magazine about software that acts for people. The interesting thing about being paid a dollar by a program is not the dollar. It is that the program was sent by someone, paid on their behalf, and read the piece for a reason. We would like to know more about the reason. We have chosen a design in which we cannot know who sent it. Both of those are deliberate.