alt Hacker NewsA note on subscription prices from LWN
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LWN is one of the cornerstones of my very successful career.
Starting from the beginning, I have (at least) read through every story and every article, every week, since 1998. Especially in the beginning, there was a lot in each article I didn't understand. I would try to do some digging into those topics.
One way or another, just the weekly exposure to absolutely top notch technical writing was foundational to me.
When newer folk would ask me how to really get good with Linux, I would always point them to LWN.net.
I've been a subscriber since the beginning. That small investment is the least I can do given the incalculable value LWN has brought to me.
I know the editors visit these discussions: please, next time use a more descriptive title! I nearly had a fit when I saw that, really thought LWN is going down like it almost did 20 years ago.
Happy to pay the new price, even though I can only afford the cheapest tier.
> The LWN site has been improved in a number of ways, with features like articles in EPUB format,
This is the single biggest feature that makes me keep my subscription going. The convenience to read longer form offline on my ebook reader makes me wish all other long form content websites would have the same.
Are there more things like LWN for other fields/subjects? A math LWN of sorts, for example? I would happily pay for it too if it follows this model.
Seems like only yesterday when they last increased their prices but it was, in fact, back in January 2022 - time flies!
I'll have been an LWN subscriber for 22 years as of next week, and am very happy to continue to be one. It's easily the most worthwhile subscription I currently have.
Thanks LWN team for the honest and straightforward post! The prices you ask are well worth it for the incredible value that LWN provides.
I forgot to renew my subscription a while back and it has been a bit busy, will renew now.
Speaking of high quality publications, I wish we could get AnandTech back :( On some older blogs, I still stumble on dead links, and very few of them are on internet archive..
Also, if you have any sort of buying power: make sure you company pays for a group subscription, and maintains it over the years. I try do that here. Nudge your colleagues to use the subscription and send them the occasional article!
I'm happy to see such a positive response from the HN crowd! I'm not affiliated with lwn I'm just a subscriber. It looks like a few people have subscribed/renewed from this. I hope that helps lwn keep producing excellent content for years to come. They truly put an outstanding effort into their articles. It's one of the few sites I vist daily (HN also being on that list).
Also thanks to the editors and mods updating the title so people don't have to change their underwear.
I will be paying the new rate, and with pleasure. LWN is great.
How about new sources of revenue?
I -- and perhaps many -- would be interested in buying an archive of all the past issues (as PDFs and XML sources).
You could also license to AI corps.
I think LWN is not just the best linux news site or the best tech news site, or the best new site. I think it's actually the best website. I just can't think of anything else that comes close in terms of quality of information.
If you have any professional connection at all to Linux then $11/mo is an absolute bargain!
LWN is The publication for serious Linux kernel news. It's well worth the money.
i'd been meaning to subscribe for…the better part of my life. just did, and if you're reading this and have the means you should too
better late than never, and especially good now that every single day most of us are reading so many words that don't mean anything
The lesson is that if you keep writing good content, people will keep paying
If you want stuff to exist in the world, pay for it. Work is work, and expecting things to be free, or to never raise their prices, is a good way to ensure that they don't last.
This reminded me that I'd let my LWN subscription lapse after a credit card expired. Just renewed for a year and turned on automatic renewals (at least until the next credit card expiration).
Since having my HN account I always read LWN articles shared here, but this has convinced me to finally subscribe !
I've been a long term subscriber. I don't read it every day, but more like a few times a week and there is always good stuff.
I highly recommend subscribing if you can. It's really one of the great ones and it's still oldshool style, not a lot of fluff, just nerds presenting nerdy news.
I would totally subscribe to a print edition.
If LWN isn't your exact thing, consider donating to a project you get outsized value from. For me it's neovim, for you it might be something else!
This is fine with me. Like many of the other comments said, my fear when I saw the headline was "OMG, is LWN shutting down or something???"
Tried making an account but seems to take quite a while (forever?) getting the corresponding email. I guess their server is taking a beating due to this article.
Update: received it after ~40 minutes.
> Since the 2022 price change, according to the undoubtedly reliable numbers from the US government, consumer-price inflation has added up to almost exactly 20%.
Enjoyed the sarcasm, but does anyone actually believe these numbers? Is there a more reliable metric that isn't affected by Goodhart's law and can be trusted?
Although I seldom use Linux as main desktop, LWN is one of the services I keep subscribing to.
> There are few things we like less than raising prices, which is why we have done it so rarely. It would be far better to keep LWN as inexpensive as possible and make it up in volume. Subscriber growth has stalled, though, in recent years, making that strategy unworkable for now. We are working on schemes to bring in more subscribers again, but that is a long-term process; getting there requires some short-term help.
I can see why they’d want to keep bumping prices occasionally (to keep up with inflation). Why do they need plans to increase subscriber growth, though, are they not currently profitable? It seems like they must have hit a steady-state by now.
Subscribed. For the next year, goal is to spend more time on lwn and less time on hn lol
> prices have changed considerably
I'm not doubting it, but I wonder what costs have changed for them?
Kudos to them for their longevity, integrity, high quality journalism, and the ability to continue to self publish. Most other journalists are depending on publishing apps (e.g. Medium / YouTube/ Social Media /etc) that are volatile and heavily influence business.
I wish every journalism topic (politics, science reporting, arts , etc) had an equivalent independent trade publication.
Subscribed.
The title has changed to A note on subscription prices from LWN. It may be worth editing this title to match.
This is literally the first I've ever heard of LWN (in over 20 years of being a professional engineer) so clearly they could be doing better marketing.
Anyone still opening distrowatch.com? Another classic
Good. Increase the subscription prices against what the users think. There are no ads at all. But of course not everyone will agree and want it for free.
Many know they want it for free. If you don't pay at all then it will force LWN to begin to place ads on their newsletter to cover the costs.
There is no realistic in-between other than actually paying for your services.
til: lwn offers their content in `epub`.
I been self hosting many tools, one them an ebook manager called `kavita`, and downloading the epub format and consuming it via kavita would be interesting.
tl;dr - LWN is raising their prices 20%.
I have no opinion since I'm not a subscriber, just adding for clarity since the title is ambiguous.
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They could also consider paying their employees less.
What subscription level will finally make them increase their article CSS's line-height from "affront to eyes" to "actually legible"?
> A note on subscription prices from LWN
Not enough of a spine to say "We're increasing LWN subscription prices"?
Also, nice editorializing in the submission: "A Note from LWN". Yeah, a "note".
I guess most people are about to unsubscribe from LWN.
I don't think there news articles are even worthy enough to be paywalled at all this days.
Wow $6 a month is really a lot for a tech site at least for someone from a lower income country in Europe. And that's only the cheapest tier
I think the issue there is that they're based in the US so they have expenses in that economy too, but it will lead to less foreign subscribers I think. There seems to be a lot of pricing disconnect between the US and Europe. Like when a vision pro is $3500... I've never even spent more than 2400 euro on a car in my life.
But I wish them luck. I don't know the site very well, I've only seen a few links from there here. I'm a big Linux user but I don't really follow specific sites except aggregators like this one.
LWN, probably about to discover people are paying high prices for all manner of things and will find that LWN is, sadly, a disposable entity to pay for.
I did not use LWN ago, and am worried the future of it.
It outputs content and the users read the articles. I think the value of the model is not big.
The most important knowledge and experience is from your own practice, thinking, experiment, and reality.
If the price is too high, many users maybe think it is not worthy of the price, especially because there are many free and useful knowledge on Internet.
LWN is one of the, if not the single, highest signal tech publications around. I hope they're able to maintain a stable subscription service. Being user funded, and avoiding having to maintain allegiance to advertisers, is likely part of why their quality is so high.