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Comment by rdudek | Hacker News Reader

"Subscribe to news without paying $30/month per website"

I don't think there is a legal way of actually doing this.

Yeah, I've personally been wanting something like that as well, but I wouldn't want to implement it. It would be something like 10% actually writing the system and 90% dealing with news outlets to actually get them on board.

There is, if you are willing to restrict yourself to monthly/weeklies: Texture app is $14.99 and includes a dozen news magazines (and a couple hundred other magazines.)

Of course, to set up a new service like this with different sources is going to be a huge up-front cost in negotiating and building integration with content owners, capital to subsidize costs until your user base is big enough that you can negotiate low per-user licensing based on the volume you bring, etc. It's not a realistic side project.

https://launch.blendle.com/ kind of gets there; though it's based on microtransactions per article instead of an overall subscription fee.

Well, a "Spotify for news" could be made. I know of several attempts.

https://blendle.com/ seems to be the most promising one from what I've seen

Had to think of this right away.

This looks very, very cool. Thanks for posting.

Actually that has kinda been solved already by http://blendle.com

Yeah, that one isn't a programming task at all. It's a business problem, and not one that's likely to be solved anytime soon.

Yup, kinda like the massive undertaking Steve Jobs did to make iTunes a reality (getting the content from competing Music Corps.). An 'iNews' seems as much of a Herculean job of convincing competing news outlet to lay out their content piecemeal alongside their competitors content... tough sell!

But I do like the idea and would also gladly pay for it!

Ironically, Apple has something along the lines of what you're describing. It's just not available outside of iOS.

https://www.apple.com/news/

Google has something along these lines that not many folks seem to know about:

https://play.google.com/store/newsstand and https://newsstand.google.com/

It happens any time the same class of content producers expect to get paid for their content. It gets channeled through brokers, who inevitably end up with the power. People find it annoying to pay 10 people $10 every month; they just want to pay the Content Person $100/mo instead.

In TV land, this is called "cable". Many people apparently do not realize they have re-invented this for websites.

We need a platform that facilitates payments easily and transparently _without_ seeking to bloat itself to extremes. Then content authors and content consumers can still interact more-or-less directly and we won't have the problems that are typical with big content brokers.

Also a task of finding what already exists.

Seems like a "Classpass-for-journalism" model to me. It's getting the content providers to agree that's the hard part.

I've been sitting on a paywall-killer browser extension I wrote for a while... concerned about a potential CFAA violation from a big org, especially if I were to charge for it.

I mean, you are essentially charging others for access to something that's not yours to provide access for (paywalled news).

I think the word you were looking for was "Stealing".

Oof, mea culpa - let me be clear, I would not charge for a circumvention tool, on moral /and/ legal grounds. That sentence was intended to allude to the original post's entry calling for "a more cost effective way to never see a news paywall again."

Make the extension generic and give away "rules" separately for specific sites. For instance, if it's just a "referer" header injector, just release it as that. And no, unless it's novel, don't try and charge for it.

I made an extension that does just that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xray/dgkdfehohjdbm...

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