MoviePass for news, $12 a month for NYT, FT, Economist and more (code: IFREAD) | Hacker News Reader

MoviePass for news, $12 a month for NYT, FT, Economist and more (code: IFREAD)

getfread.com

19 pointsivanatfread16 comments

I'm not convinced that there are real business partnerships between Fread and these journals. It's likely that this just violates their ToS by reselling a single subscription

It's not obvious who is behind the site, there's no "this is how we make money" statement, there's nothing at all indicating that they have any partnerships with any of the publications listed.

So it seems pretty likely they're violating these publications' terms of service.

Also- and this is petty- it's hosted on Wix. So there's that.

How they make money - they don’t, they lose it per user. A lot.

I think the non-technical founder does most of the front end work in Wix to free up the very small development team to work on the rest of the stack. Something about a lean startup.

You are speaking like you are an outsider, but you have "fread" in your username? A 3 month account but you don't have any comments until today?

haha, you are right ! I'm actually impressed... It's a fine one pager. I didn't know you could get something that clean with Wix, but I guess there is no reason why not. Now that I think about it, it's probably the kind of stuff it should actually be great at.

I'm also not convinced this is above-board with the organizations whose works are being resold.

Once upon a time, we had newspaper machines where you put in a quarter to open the machine. You'd take one and leave the rest for others. This feels like the equivalent of paying a quarter, taking all the newspapers out and reselling them for $12/month (If anyone involved with the project can explain how the $12/month goes towards the journalists, I'd love to know).

I've also wanted to do something like this, but the problem in getting this started isn't technological, it's institutional.

Basically you need to find a fair way of distributing the cost of subscriptions to the various organizations in a way that isn't pure traffic views, because then you'd create clickbait incentives again.

In the end, you need some sort of 'the user decides who x% goes to, and y% is based on reading/use' with optimal values for x and y, but also in a way that you don't cannibalize each other's customers.

Agree with with you about the best way re distributing costs - that's why Fread tried to figure out a way to make micropayments work. Since this problem is institutional, it is taking time. With Unlimited, Fread are trying to put out a product that people will use to prove the unit economics on a per article basis - which no one in the industry wants to discuss.

Fread operates a MoviePass model - where we fund each user’s subscription cost for every publisher, in full. The publisher gets a full price subscription per user.

In 97% of cases, these users have answered a questionnaire saying that they do not have an existing subscription - so they are generating publishers surplus revenue in these cases.

How they make money - they don’t, they lose it per user. A lot.

The math [0] for this service doesn't seem to work very well. Many of these publications are priced at multiples of Fread. Won't this either bankrupt Freed or cannibalize sales of the more expensive publications on the list?

[0] https://www.getfread.com/the-maths

Most of them have corporate or bulk subscription discount, and I'm sure you can also negotiate the contract with their sales.

A referral code is required to sign up. Agreed with other commenters this doesn't seem above board and likely violates the publications terms.

I would love to see a service like this. I used Google contributor for a while and have look into others. Blendle is one that sells articles vs full access I occasionally use now.

The referral code is in the HN title: IFREAD

It looks like this is the same as the Fread micropayments service [1], which is a real company [2] but is similarly quiet about whatever business partnerships it has established. They have some blog posts [3] that give background but don't answer the "do you actually have permission to do this?" question.

[1] https://www.fread.io/ [2] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10965782 [3] https://medium.com/fread-blog

This is a great idea. I've thought a lot about starting a similar business, but wouldn't have the sales chops to do that aspect of it/hire a team skilled in it.

I have absolutely no issues with supporting quality media; the duplication of content and the cost of individual subscriptions makes that difficult. This is a great solution.

Definitely sets off warning bells: it's cheaper than a digital subscription to the Economist alone.

Edit: not quite. Economist is USD127/year, this would be USD144 per year.

How does this work?

Looks like they give you an email/password you can use on all of those sites

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