Chip in

Mundane Read is free, and it is staying free: no advertising, no tiers, no article limit once you make an account — which is also free, now and later — and nothing held back for the people who pay. If you would like it to keep going, you can help pay for a bit of it.

Pick an amount

Any of these is a real help, and the smallest one is not a token gesture — it is a month of hosting.

How much

$5 $15 $30 Another amount

Amount in dollars

$

Anything from $2 to $1,000.

How often

Every monthUntil you stop it, which you can do at any time. Just onceOne payment, and that is the end of it.

Continue to payment

You get nothing back for this, on purpose — see what you get. The amount you choose is the amount you pay: prices are in Australian dollars and include GST, with nothing added at the card form. Payment is handled by Stripe and we never see your card. A monthly contribution can be stopped whenever you like, from the receipt Stripe emails you or by writing to support@mundaneread.com.

Why we are asking rather than selling

Every way of funding a news site pulls the writing somewhere, and we would rather you knew which way ours pulls. Advertising pays for attention, so it rewards the headline that makes you click and the story that makes you angry — which is the thing this site exists to measure and take out. We would be measuring a problem we were also being paid to cause, and you would be right not to believe a word of it.

Tiers are the same trap in a nicer jacket. The moment part of the site sits behind a wall, the job quietly becomes deciding what to put behind the wall. So there is one version of this site and everybody gets it, whether or not you ever give us anything.

There are two things we do sell, and neither of them changes what you see here: the browser extension, which scores articles on other people's sites, and the API, which businesses pay for. This page is the third way to fund it, and the only one that asks for nothing in return.

What we will use it for

Where the money goes, without a fundraising thermometer.

• Licences from the newsrooms whose reporting this site measures. This is the big one and the one that decides how much of an article we may show you. We would rather pay a masthead than argue with one.
• Keeping it running — the servers, the domain, and the weather, fuel and transport data the local pages are built on.
• Making the writing better. Plainer language, easier reading, and taking more of the drama out without taking any of the facts with it. That work is never finished: every change is measured against real articles before it ships, and a version that reads worse than the report it came from is never published.
• Apps. We want Mundane Read on your phone — an iOS app and an Android app — and after those, macOS and iPadOS.

What you get

Nothing, and we mean that kindly. There is no badge, no supporter feed, no early access and no ad-free version, because there are no ads to remove. Everything on this site is already yours. The day we start handing out benefits is the day we have built the first tier, and not building tiers is the whole promise.

What does change is that the thing keeps existing, and that we can go to a newsroom and ask to pay them properly for their work.

The small print, in plain words

• Creditcrest Technologies Pty Ltd is an ordinary company, not a registered charity, so a contribution is not tax-deductible. Anyone telling you otherwise about a site like this one is wrong, and we would rather say so here than leave you to find out later.
• You are not buying anything. If you would rather buy something, the extension is a real product with a real price.
• We do not publish a list of contributors, and your name goes on nothing without us asking you first.

And if you never chip in, that is genuinely fine. The site is exactly the same either way — go and read something.