Here we go: The Verge now has a subscription

Okay, we’re doing this. 

Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It’ll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design. (Our art team is delightfully good at print; we’ve even won a major magazine award for it.)

A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we’re happy to deliver. If you don’t want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we’re thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else.

If you’re a Verge reader, you know we’ve been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now. Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn’t want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they’d do well on social media. And we definitely didn’t want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses.

So we decided to make our own site as valuable to you, our beloved audience, as we could. We bet that our redesign, and the introduction of Quick Posts and the Storystream news feed on the homepage, would let us stay focused on our readers and our work instead of traffic and metrics. Our goal was pretty simple: we wanted to make our site something worth coming back to over and over again. We wanted to be worth your time, every day. 

I’m happy to say that this worked: we’ve maintained a massive loyal audience despite industry-wide declines in Google referrals and big social platforms downranking links. The Verge’s homepage has always been the most popular single page at all of Vox Media, and now the average time spent on our homepage is more than six minutes. Half a million people read The Verge at least once a week — and those people read an average of 14 stories a month. 55,000 of you have come to the site every single day this year. A lot of you really like The Verge, and we’re eternally grateful for that — we intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time.

So many of you like The Verge that we’ve actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It’s no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out regularly, whether you pay us or not. 

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.

I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.

Subscribers will also get access to full-text RSS feeds and early access to some big ideas about the future of media. Our vision has always been to build The Verge like a software product, and we have a big roadmap of features to come, like a true dark mode toggle, the ability to personalize the homepage feed, and a lot of wacky ideas about what it might mean to follow authors, topics, and streams across the site and — eventually — decentralized social platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. We have big plans here, and we’re excited to test them out with all of you.

The Verge is 13 years old now, which feels remarkable to say — we’ve outlasted a lot of our peers, and we’ve mostly done it because we’re stubborn as hell. We’ve never chased metrics, we’ve never taken money to say what other people want us to say, and we’ve never shied away from caring deeply about technology and how it makes people feel. Launching a subscription is a big change, but it’s the foundation of how we’ll stubbornly make it another 13 years.

I hope you can help support us — and if you can’t, we’ll do our best to earn your support in the future.