News without a paywall.

Most independent news projects in 2026 fund themselves with a paywall. The argument is straightforward: serious reporting costs money, advertising no longer pays for it, and the only readers who actually value the work are the ones who'll pay for it. The argument has merit. We disagree with the conclusion.

WeSearch is fully free. There is no paywall on any page. There is no metered free trial that asks you to subscribe after three articles. There is no membership tier with extra features. There is no premium plan with longer retention or fewer rate limits. Everything the site can do, it can do for the reader who showed up an hour ago and the reader who's been here for a year.

Why no paywall

The paywall solves the publisher's revenue problem and exports a different problem to the reader: a fragmented archipelago of subscriptions, each charging for partial access to a partial slice of the news. A serious reader who wants The Times, The Post, The Guardian, the Atlantic, the FT, Bloomberg, and a couple of newsletter subs is at $80/month before they've read a single story. The price-to-information ratio is so bad that the rational move is to skim what you can find free, and the result is a public conversation built on whatever leaks past the wall.

WeSearch is a layer above that. We don't republish the full articles — we link to them, with a stable summary page at /s/<slug> that includes the publisher's headline, byline, source, an AI-generated TL;DR, key facts, and a link to the original. If you want the full piece, you click through. If the publisher has a paywall, you'll meet it. We don't pretend to bypass it.

What "free" means here

• The home feed is free. All categories, all sources, all the time.
• Reactions are free. Tap any reaction on any story. We don't gate reactions behind an account or a tier.
• Comments are free. Threaded discussion with GIF support, comment likes, replies, deletes — all open.
• Push notifications are free. Configure exactly what you want pinged. No premium-only categories.
• Save / bookmark is free. Bookmarks live on your local key, not behind a paywall.
• Daily editorial is free. A daily 350–550 word editorial note at /daily, free for everyone.
• Topic hubs are free. All twelve topic hub pages — politics, world, tech, science, business, markets, health, climate, AI, culture, US, media — are open.
• The API is free. Yes, even the dev side. Public read endpoints have generous rate limits.

Then how do you pay for it?

WeSearch is community-funded by donations. There is one button: /donate. One-time or monthly. Stripe checkout is the only payment surface; we don't store cards. The donation page is honest about what the money buys: hosting on a single DigitalOcean droplet, the bandwidth bill, occasional dev time. There is no equity to fund, no growth team to staff, no investor to satisfy.

The math works because the costs are intentionally small. We run on a single droplet. We have one human in the loop. There is no third-party SaaS in the request path that needs paying. The audience is small enough to remain readable. The unit economics of a community-funded news aggregator at this scale are forgiving in a way that a 200-person VC-backed media company's are not.

Will this scale forever?

Probably not. If WeSearch grows ten times, the math gets harder. Bandwidth bills go up. The single-human ops model breaks. We'll cross that bridge if we get there. The current plan is to keep the site small enough to stay readable and the cost low enough to stay free, rather than chase scale and reintroduce the engagement game we left.

What about ads?

No ads. No display ads, no native ads, no sponsored content in the feed. If we ever publish something paid, it will be on a clearly labeled separate page, never inline with the news.

What about a "support" tier with extras?

No tiers. Donating doesn't unlock anything. The reader who can't afford to donate gets the same site as the reader who donates $10/month. We made this choice deliberately because the moment we start gating features behind a tier, we have a paywall by another name and a different audience for each.

What about a "no-ads" version of the site?

That is the site. Everyone gets it.

Frequently asked