The news-paywall economy has produced a fragmented landscape where any reader who wants a real cross-source view is paying $80+ a month for partial access to several walls. WeSearch refuses to be one of those walls. The site is free; the API is free; the discussion layer is free; the daily editorial is free; the topic hubs are free. Donations keep the lights on, and donations don't unlock anything because there's nothing to unlock.
What's free
- The home feed across 850+ sources
- Every category and topic hub
- Every story page
- Reactions on every story
- Threaded comments with GIFs
- Comment likes and replies
- Saving articles for later
- Push notifications
- The daily editorial archive
- The full source catalog
- The public read API
- Cross-device email recovery
What's not on WeSearch
- Premium tier
- Sponsored content placements
- "First three articles free" metered wall
- Newsletter sign-up wall
- Cookie-consent gating
- "Disable ad-blocker" prompt
- Email-required sign-up
How is this sustainable?
Operating costs are intentionally small—a compact origin, a limited set of disclosed service providers, and one human in the ops loop. Donations cover the cost. The audience is sized to the budget rather than to a growth target.
What about full articles?
WeSearch hosts a stable summary page per story with the publisher's headline, byline, source, an AI-generated TL;DR, and a link to the original. The full article lives on the publisher's site. If they have a paywall, you'll meet it. We don't bypass paywalls — that's the publisher's revenue model and we respect it. But the WeSearch surface itself is wall-free.
How modern news paywalls actually work
The major paywall types you'll encounter when clicking through from WeSearch:
- Hard paywall. Subscription required for almost everything. The Times (UK), the Information, FT, WSJ. Free portion is small.
- Metered paywall. A few free articles per month before the wall comes down. NYT, Washington Post, Atlantic, Wired, Bloomberg.
- Soft paywall (suggestion model). Most content free with periodic asks for contributions. The Guardian, ProPublica, Texas Tribune.
- Subscriber-first model. Free at headline level, paywalled in the body, with social-share unlocks for paying subscribers.
- Email gate. Free but requires an email signup — a soft wall that captures lead generation rather than payment.
- Cookie/consent gate. The article is technically free but the EU-style consent dialog blocks the page until you accept tracking. WeSearch surfaces these without the dialog because the WeSearch surface is the dialog-free version.
Why we don't bypass paywalls
Two reasons. First, paywalls are the publisher's revenue model — bypassing them would directly damage the journalism we depend on. Second, we operate above-board with publishers; if we became a paywall-bypass tool, the RSS access we depend on would (rightfully) get cut off. The cleaner approach is to publish a summary page on our side and link to the original; readers who want the full piece can decide whether to subscribe to that publisher.
What WeSearch's free model funds
The free model funds the aggregator, the discussion layer, the daily editorial, the search, the API, and the topic hubs. It doesn't fund original investigative reporting — that's a different, more expensive product, and we don't pretend to do it. The chain is: publishers do the journalism (paywalled or not), WeSearch aggregates and provides the discussion layer (free), readers donate to keep the aggregator alive (also free at the read level).
Bottom line
- WeSearch will never paywall any reader-facing surface. Period.
- WeSearch links to publishers; some publishers have paywalls. That's the publisher's call.
- The reader-facing experience on WeSearch is end-to-end wall-free — no metered limit, no consent dialog, no signup gate.
- If you want WeSearch to keep being free for everyone forever, the contribution mechanism is at /donate.
Frequently asked
Are you sure there's no premium tier?
Yes. The architecture has no concept of a paying reader vs. a non-paying reader at the read level. Everyone hits the same endpoints, gets the same response, sees the same content. The donate flow is one Stripe checkout link with no associated unlock.
What happens if I'm not allowed to subscribe to publishers from my country?
WeSearch is accessible from anywhere; the underlying publishers may have geo restrictions on their own sites. The summary pages on WeSearch don't have those restrictions.
Will the API stay free if usage grows?
The public read API has rate limits to prevent abuse but otherwise stays free. The paid Conduit API tier exists for high-volume integrations and helps fund the project.
What about the daily editorial — is that paywalled?
No. /daily is free, generated automatically each UTC morning, and archived back-cataloged forever.
If WeSearch is free, what's the catch?
No catch. The catch most "free" products have — that the reader is being sold to advertisers — doesn't apply because we don't have advertisers. The cost of the free product is reader donations covering the operating cost; donations are voluntary.
Does WeSearch get cheaper sources by paying publishers?
No. We pull from public RSS/Atom feeds that publishers themselves publish for syndication. Most publishers explicitly want their RSS to be read by aggregators and readers; that's why they publish it.