Almost two years ago, shortly after launching blogs and accounts, we created our Casual subscription. At $10, this is the perfect plan for people who want a little more than what our free tier offers, but don't need much more. In fact, today it's just as popular as our Pro plan.
Since then, we've added SSL support to the custom domains you can add to your Casual blogs, and Read Write.as has grown to an audience of thousands per month, including readers across Twitter and the fediverse and those who visit Write.as just for the stories.
Because of this, and largely to get rid of the awkward “$0.83 per month” pricing, the price for new Casual subscriptions will go up to $12 per year starting August 1. Existing Casual users, including any who upgrade before August 1, will keep their $10/year rate for as long as their subscription is active.
After this, you likely won't see any changes to the Casual rate, except perhaps with a new multi-year payment option. If you'd be interested in this, let us know on the forum!
We love open source software at Write.as. We use it every day, from the operating systems our developers use, to the servers and bits of code our platform runs on. We open source many of our libraries and clients, and are moving towards open sourcing our entire web application.
Recently we saw an open source project, Liberapay, suddenly had their Medium publication taken down with only 12 hours notice — apparently the result of some automated process — and we stepped up to offer them a discount. They ultimately had other plans, but we thought we should make that offer official, and open to the entire web.
So we did. If you maintain an open source project and need a maintenance-free place to write about it, now you can get our Casual features for free (or 25% off of Pro)!
Our Casual plan lets you use your own domain name (with SSL included) and publish to an audience on Read Write.as — so your hosted blog can still be yours, and you'll have readers from day one. We also take a strong stand for free speech on Write.as, don't let algorithms remove content, and are funded by our founder and customers — so your words will be safe here.
We hope this will help more open source software maintainers effortlessly get their words on the web, so they can spend more time creating awesome software that powers the world. And if you're a student, non-profit, or educational institution, ask us about other discounts we offer!
We've gotten questions from users since the beginning asking how they could see others' posts. We've always planned to explore what a community of pseudonymous writers would look like, but we've also known the amount of work that comes with that territory. How do we provide a safe place where people can speak freely but grow from their interactions? And if we did create it, what could we do better than what already exists?
Most of these questions remain unanswered. We don't want to be another social network filled with impersonal likes and reblogs. We want to help people connect over writing, and form the most human bonds they can, even if it's happening over a wire.
So while we contemplate that, we're taking tiny steps towards that goal. It started last month when we created a Twitter account called @readwriteas. And today we're proud to launch the read.write.as site, as well as public blogs for publishing to it.
Right now, you'll need to be a subscriber (starting at $10/year) to publish. If you already are, you'll simply go to your blog's customize page and choose Public for your blog type. From there, any posts you publish (or have recently published) will go to read.write.as for everyone to check out. We'll also pick some interesting ones to send out on the Twitter account.
This is all still an experiment. With it, we hope to lay the foundation of a future community here on Write.as. If you're reading this, you're at the right place to help form a new tiny culture on the web — and we can't wait to see what you do with it.