It's two years old and has half a million users in a country of 16 million people? Although it's recently expanded to Germany and growing really quickly there too, so that might skew the percentage a bit.

Back in 2014, when they had 100,000 users, roughly 20% was a paying customer.

While it does seem like they're doing well and they have gotten some very nice backing from the NYT, I would also like to know what their revenue is. They throw out the number of users everywhere, but they don't mention the important numbers like how many are actually paying and how many are paying with regularity. It just feels like they're hiding behind a high user number.

I'd assume it's to keep things easier, especially for a young company. It should be much easier to deal with publishers when you can agree on cost per view, rather than trying to work out some magic subscriptions share model, like the one used by spotify, which is pretty hard to do and keep everyone happy.

But that's just an educated guess :)

... with a one-click refund if you don't like the article.

In regular use, you don't go through the process of paying - opening an article automatically pays the price, so it's very easy to do. However, you can always get a refund.

It's a tiny detail, but it changes the whole flow. A nice side-effect is that clickbait is punished very harshly by the customers.