We have an important announcement to make: readup.com is now free again! As part of this change, we are canceling all existing reader subscriptions. We have also fully removed our reader-writer marketplace, which means we won’t pay out writer compensations anymore.

In short, our business model failed and we were unable to fundraise. We want to thank each and every one of you who believed in our vision and signed up for a subscription. Your support has made it possible for us to keep Readup online and find an alternative path forward for the platform.

We’re therefore glad to announce that we will refocus on the most successful aspect of Readup so far: the social reading app.

At the same time, we are gradually restructuring our company into a community-driven, non-profit organization. By readers, for readers.

Here are some of the changes:

  • Readup.com will become Readup.org, a community-driven reading service.
  • We have fully open-sourced the code of the Readup under the AGPLv3 license, and anyone can contribute. Find the code on GitHub.
  • You can financially support our continued development via the Readup Collective, the non-profit organization that now maintains Readup.
  • Readup is returning to the web via a new and improved web extension, as many readers have asked.

Read on to learn why we are making these changes, and how you can contribute.

What happened?

Since its inception in 2016, Readup has been a niche service for readers who care about deep-reading articles online. People could share and discuss articles in our community space that avoids knee-jerk reactions and algorithmic echo chambers by design.

We have not been able to break out of this niche market. After trying out several business models, we relaunched Readup as a direct reader-writer marketplace in June 2021, making it a paid service for the first time. It was a radically different and inclusive way of supporting writing on the internet: readers paid writers by reading their articles. We wanted this to evolve into a billion-dollar media business that would save journalism from competing with the social media attention machine.

Unfortunately, the implementation of our marketplace remained one-sided. By November 2021, almost a hundred readers were paying a subscription to read on Readup. But we were virtually unable to find writers or publishers who would accept our readers’ contributions. Yet, we needed their exclusive content and promotion to grow the business. A confluence of factors was not in our favor:

  • Our platform wasn’t credible enough.
  • Our readership was too small.
  • Writers and prospective readers didn’t understand what was going on.

At the same time, we were fundraising with the concept of this marketplace. We wanted to invest in further development, marketing, and partnerships. But tragically, with the eventual state of the business model, we realized these efforts were doomed despite some promising initial conversations. The lack of funding also meant we had hit the end of our runway. It didn’t look good for Readup.

In December, we scrambled to strip most of the marketplace from Readup. After that, we started this year by getting other jobs. Meanwhile, we pondered what place Readup has in the future.

Readup’s place in the future

With upcoming, well-funded social reading apps like Matter and Readwise Reader, it’s a fair question to ask whether Readup still has a reason to exist. Readup will likely never have the best features, the most comprehensive range of content, or the most slick user experience.

Still, we think Readup is different in a way that matters.

Readup wants you to really read it. Readup started from co-founder Bill’s frustration with the near inability to have a nuanced conversation about an article on the internet. The digital age has made it increasingly difficult to engage with text beyond the size of a tweet, and increasingly easy to blurt out the first thing that comes to one’s mind. Years of Readup have proven that requiring people to read an entire article before posting or commenting on it is a valuable design element. This restriction helps to keep knee-jerk reactions at bay, but it also motivates people with attention problems to focus on reading. Finishing an article on Readup gets you a medal. It’s what has brought many of us back to Readup daily.

Readup is a global community. In the end, Readup is made possible by its community of readers and writers: a group of humans from the US, India, Nigeria, Europe, and more! These humans regularly skip their filter-bubbled social media newsfeeds to read, share and discuss articles on Readup. It’s human magic, supported by technology. It brings us together in the way that social media was supposed to.

Readup has a firm stance against surveillance capitalism. Readup has cared about data privacy in ways that were obstructive to its business at times. We completely removed Google Analytics two years ago out of ethical concerns and installed no replacement. We tried to make the world’s best (that is, most readable) privacy policy. It’s hard to break out of this industry default, but Readup does so as much as possible.

All these reasons make Readup unique, and they make us committed to keeping the platform alive. We want Readup to flourish again, so you can keep reading in peace. And we’re excited to see where the community will take Readup.

What can you do?

First of all, we want to thank all five thousand current and past Readup readers for already having spent thousands of hours reading articles on Readup over the last years.

Reading is the lifeblood of Readup. It is the most important thing you can do to support us (and yourself!). Simply continue using the app, or try it again if you only tried it out once: it’s fully free now.

If you want to go a little further, help grow the community. Scout and post new articles, or share articles with friends & family. They can now also read without restrictions.

For financial support, we have opened the Readup Collective: we would be very grateful if you could spare a handful of dollars monthly to help us pay for our servers, maintenance and development. We have now cancelled all the subscriptions from our remaining generous subscribers, totalling about $450 monthly. Our server costs alone are currently between $200-300 per month (we are trying to reduce those as much as possible).

Finally, if you are a developer or are willing to contribute skills that you think would be useful to Readup (design, marketing, social media, …), please let us know on our Discord server.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll see you in the comments on Readup!

*Updated on June 23rd to link to the now existing GitHub and Open Collective pages.