Membership
Websarb stays free to read. Membership is how it gets paid for.
Websarb is free to read and will stay that way. There is no paywall and there never will be one — an article nobody can read is not journalism, it is a leaflet.
What it costs
- $5 a month. Cancel any time, from your account page, in one click.
- $50 a year. The same thing, two months cheaper.
Payment is handled by Stripe. Websarb never sees or stores your card details.
What membership does
Two things, and only two:
- It switches advertising off for you, on every device you sign in on.
- It pays writers. Every article here carries a name, and the people behind those names are paid for the work.
What it does not do
It does not unlock articles, because none are locked. Members and non-members read exactly the same site — the same pieces, the same day, in full. You are not buying access to something other readers cannot see. You are paying so the thing can exist without being funded entirely by advertising.
There is no members-only newsletter, no early access and no badge. If any of those ever appear, this page will say so before they do.
Cancelling, and what happens after
Cancel whenever you like. Your membership runs to the end of the period you have already paid for and then stops — there is no final part-month charge and nothing to email anyone about. Articles you saved stay saved. Nothing you could read as a member becomes unreadable afterwards, because nothing was member-only in the first place.
Refunds on a period already under way are not automatic, but if something has gone wrong, write to us and we will sort it out.
How the site is paid for otherwise
Advertising. Every ad slot is marked, and the advertising and disclosure page sets out who can buy one and what they can never buy — an advertiser has no say in what gets written, or in how a product is described. Websarb is published by Arbsbuy LLC, which also runs a marketing agency; where an article touches that business, the article says so.