Announcing our Announcing our business model
How will Matter make money?
That's a question we get asked with increasing frequency, and reasonably so. People want clarity when they adopt a new tool, especially when they’ll be investing in it over time.
Today, we’ll finally answer that question, starting with a few words on how we think about our business model.
Charging directly > Ads
Our mission is to increase the reach of ideas that matter by building the best reading software in the world.
Building quality software is hard. It takes skill, taste, and a surprising degree of grit. How closely we hit the mark is ultimately for you, our users, to judge. What we can say is that quality is our highest calling.
Shipping quality over the long term requires a business model that aligns economic success with commitment to craft.
Ads – the standard business model for the previous generation of reading/media products – smuggle in bad incentives. When revenue is a function of impressions, it becomes harder to justify sweating tiny details ("will refining this interaction really increase engagement?") and easier to justify engagement hacks that degrade the experience ("let's send more push notifications").
That's why it's always been our plan to charge directly. Charging for our product is simple, honest, and lets us put all our energy into building something you love and value.
Free & Premium: The details
We've decided to offer a free version of Matter.
Why? We want Matter to be the on-ramp of choice for the millions of readers who are new to read-it-later. Since there are free read-it-later alternatives, we think it makes sense to price match (free!) on this basic feature set.
So, the free version of Matter will consist of basic read-it-later: an unlimited library, the ability to save all types of content with our mobile and web extensions, best-in-class parsing and readability, unlimited tags, and other organizational features.
Matter Premium will cost $8/month or $60/year and will include features that go beyond the basics: HD text-to-speech, fluid highlighting and note-taking, integrations, full-text search, options to personalize Matter, and priority support.
Premium is also a vote
As a Premium subscriber, you cement a special relationship with Matter — the team, product, and company — and indicate your commitment to its long term flourishing.
In 20, 30, 50 years, we don't want Matter to merely exist. We want it to be dramatically better than it is today, helping hundreds of millions of people develop better models of the world through reading. As a subscriber, you cast a vote for that future.