WeSearch is paid for by donations. There is one revenue surface — a Stripe checkout link at /donate — and there are no advertisers, no investors, no premium plan, no enterprise tier, no API resale tier, and no sponsored content in the feed. The math is simple enough to describe in a few paragraphs, and that is part of the point: a news project's funding model is part of its editorial position, and ours is plain.
Why donation-funded
The two dominant funding models for news online are advertising and subscription. Both create perverse alignment with the reader. Advertising rewards engagement above informedness; subscription rewards exclusivity above access. We wanted a model where the publisher's incentive was simply to keep the room readable enough that people would chip in — closer to community-radio underwriting than to a media company.
The trade-off is scale. A donation-funded site has a smaller revenue ceiling than an ad-funded one and a smaller predictable revenue floor than a subscription-funded one. We are willing to live with that. The site is sized to a budget that donations can plausibly cover, not to a growth target that they can't.
What donations buy
- Hosting. A single DigitalOcean droplet, currently around $24/month.
- Bandwidth. Egress for serving HTML, JSON, OG cards, and OG-image proxy. Scales with traffic.
- Domain registration. wesearch.press, billed annually.
- Stripe processing fees. ~2.9% + $0.30 per donation, paid to Stripe.
- Optional third-party APIs. Currently zero — we use BYOK for AI features so we don't pay AI per-token costs from the operating budget.
- Occasional dev time. Surplus goes toward improvements, not founder salary.
The full operating cost is published transparently on the donate page. If donations exceed cost, the surplus rolls into improvements (more sources, better moderation tooling, native mobile apps); if donations fall short, we cut features or raise the donation banner volume. We do not take debt to grow.
What donations do not buy
Donations don't unlock any features. There is no membership tier. The reader who can't afford to donate gets the same site as the reader who donates monthly. We made this choice deliberately because tier-gating is a paywall by another name, and a paywall is the model we chose against.
Donors don't get editorial influence. We don't tell donors which stories will run. We don't run a "donor wall" with names. We don't give donors early access to the daily editorial. Donations are a way to keep the lights on, not a way to buy the platform's attention.
What we won't take money for
- Advertising. No display ads, no native ads, no sponsored content in the feed. Read more.
- Sponsored stories. No "this story brought to you by X" placements.
- Affiliate links inside news pages. If we ever recommend a product on a non-news page, we will use our own affiliate code only and disclose plainly.
- Selling reader data. We don't have any to sell.
- Premium API resale. The public read endpoints stay free with generous rate limits.
- Investor capital. No equity round. The model only works if it doesn't have to satisfy a return.
Why this works at small scale
The unit economics of a small community-funded news aggregator are different from the unit economics of a 200-person media company. Our cost per reader is dominated by bandwidth, not headcount. A reader who donates $5 once roughly pays for a month of their own bandwidth and modest contribution toward moderation. A reader who donates $10/month is, in effect, sponsoring 200 readers who can't or don't.
That math holds while WeSearch stays small enough to be readable. If we grew to a million daily readers, the model would need to evolve — probably toward a foundation structure with a public board. We'll cross that bridge if we get there. For now, donation-funded works because the size is honest.
How to support
If you read WeSearch and want to keep it open, the way to help is /donate. One-time, monthly, whatever fits. Donations of any size help. If you can't donate, recommending the site to one friend who reads news regularly is, in expectation, more valuable than $5.
If you want to help technically, the project is open in spirit and there are issues that need eyes — better moderation tooling, native iOS/Android apps, comments search, smarter cross-publisher deduplication. Reach out via /support and we'll point you at something useful.
Frequently asked
How is WeSearch funded?
By community donations, processed through Stripe at /donate. One-time or monthly. There are no advertisers, no investors, no premium plan.
What does the operating budget cover?
DigitalOcean hosting, bandwidth, domain registration, Stripe processing fees, and occasional dev time. The full cost breakdown is published transparently on the donate page.
Do donations unlock features?
No. The site is identical for every reader regardless of whether they've donated. Donations keep the lights on; they don't buy access or influence.
Can I sponsor a specific section or story?
No. We don't accept sponsored placements anywhere on the site, including in section heads or hubs.