A note on subscription prices from LWN | Hacker News Reader

A note on subscription prices from LWN

lwn.net

733 pointsrwky151 comments

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.

Not only that but lwn is one of the main sites that gets submitted to HN all year round (not daily, but maybe nearish to daily). So the audience here on HN has been exposed to it over the years. I'm not sure what more they could do to get new subscribers, I certainly hope they figure that out or how to get new ways to earn revenue without having to go the ad route.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lwn.net

That's the thing though. You can get all the value from LWN through here. Even if it wasn't for them tolerating subscriber links being posted on HN, the week-long delay isn't nearly enough an incentive to actually subscribe, rationally speaking.

I think the generosity and straightforwardness are a big part of the attraction for many subscribers.

They've always respected their readers and I hope that continues to pay off.

Agree. I don't read it every week, but I greatly appreciate the quality (both of the technical content and the lack of advertising/sensationalism/clickbait) when I do read an article. Happy to pay to support this style of tech reporting and journalism.

Easy to say until they have to eventually make the hard decision to shut down.

Rationally-speaking, maybe not. I’ve been a long-time subscriber. When I first subscribed, my day-to-day involved embedded Linux and getting the “breaking news” was pretty valuable. These days I still do that somewhat but I’m stuck on a crusty vendor kernel and anything I read about a kernel newer than 5.15 is going to land on my desk in approximately 2028… but I still subscribe, mostly with a patronage mindset: I don’t acutely get value from the subscription every week, but I think it’s a community service and I’m happy to pitch in a few bucks to keep it alive.

Same as me. I started subscribing LWN when I was a Linux enthusiast from my early college days, because the content was so good and interesting. Nowadays I barely read it but I still keep my subscription alive, just because I think the content is worth it.

Wouldn’t rationally speaking you’d want to support them to keep them around? Or did you mean selfishly speaking?

not saying parent feels this way but the target class of this website often does not separate the two. we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism, i guess.

we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism

Are we though? I certainly don't sense the volume of FYIGM entitlement decreasing.

They literally fearmonger for a permanent underclass, it’s definitely not decreasing

(FYIGM = F* You, I Got Mine)

based on other replies to the parent, at least some folks feel differently :) but generally i'm not very optimistic about it.

Well for me, at least, it's those features that make me a subscriber. If not for those I wouldn't do it

Rationally speaking, if you're getting value from it, you should be interested in its continued existence and therefore subscribe.

Selfishly speaking is the word you were looking for.

This is why nobody likes economists.

TBF, economists, if any group, would understand the freerider problem and what it leads to if there are too many of them.

You’d think, but in practice their entire policy prescription seems to come down to “well if they didn’t want me to have it, they should’ve bolted it down, this is really an incentives problem, if you look at it.”

This is pretty close to "I shall stand under this tree during the storm to stay dry, and if this tree starts to drip on me I'll just run over to that other tree and stay dry there" thinking. If LWN goes away, that value leaves HN too. Rationally speaking.

Rational thinking includes thinking about the long term.

I’m occasional lwn reader and I had no idea there are subscriptions there!

They lock down new articles for about a week I think, so subscribers get the first one, though if you're a subscriber I think they let you SHARE the article with others, so here on HN sometimes a brand new article will be shared by a subscriber with a code so anyone without a subscription can see it.

I don't use Linux (on the desktop, I use it on headless machines), yet I still agree with this statement.

When I saw that title, I thought the note would be about their "incredible journey", fortunately that is not the case.

Agreed!

Absolutely. Very happy 10+ years subscribed here and I'll keep subscribing.

(As someone pointed out in the comments, the title of this specific post could have been less heart-attack-inducing, but still... :) )

Super happy subscriber for years... One of those magazines that I open on a Sunday morning with a good cup of coffee and sleeping cats next to me before the family wakes up.

If you enjoy well-written technical content, please subscribe and support them. I hope they continue making the great articles.

Just checking, are they print magazines? Or are you referring to the online articles instead?

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.

Sorry to be that guy, but... Please consider donating a significant amount to them, given that they have been a cornerstone of your very successful career.

I did something similar in the past, in relation to Ubuntu, and I never regretted it, even if that money would have been very useful if spent in other ways.

I will be doing just that today.

I couldn't find anything about donation on the site. Just in case I'm blind, is there one or is subscribing or getting a gift certificate the only way? I should also definitely put lwn on my "charity list".

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.

You'll be happy to know the title has been updated. Apologies for any undue concerns we have caused. :)

Now we need the HN mods to come in and edit the title of this thread, I had the same thought as OP when I first saw it lol

Just curious: what was the original title?

"A Note from LWN"

> even though I can only afford the cheapest tier

Their pricing is at US levels not world levels.

HN needs to update the title too!

> 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.

I just noticed that too.

Do they offer a facility for automatically mailing the epub file to a specified e-mail address (I'm thinking the Amazon Kindle conversion e-mail) --- that might push me over into a subscription.

We can't email a PDF now, but it wouldn't be that hard of a feature to add; I've put it onto the list.

Not a PDF, the ePub --- each Amazon Kindle has associated with it an e-mail address, which when a file is e-mailed to it, will be automatically converted and loaded (once the sender is white-listed) --- that way, each new issue would just automagically appear.

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.

In general high quality niche stuff is very expensive e.g. Heavy Reading for teleco or Willmot magazine for quant finance.

I'd pay for something that was 'SemiAnalysis, but high quality'. Perhaps that's getting too much into insider territory?

Depends on what you're looking for. In a previous life we subscribed to some semiconductor analysis pubs that we're insanely deep dives into the industry. But they weren't so much technical deep dives as stuff a industry sector trader wants to know. And AFAIK they were very, very expensive.

Yeah, I'm aware a lot of stuff is catered towards traders. I'm someone who's more interested in the technology itself.

I'm there with you. I keep an eye out for IEEE pubs, and papers out of schools that have microelectronics specialist programs, and the occasional vendor pub that isn't marketing, but there doesn't seem to be a rollup site for curated deep dives.

“Phoronix, but high quality” would also be great.

People kept asking if they could pay for AnandTech, and they said “we'll think about it” for years until they shut down instead because it was financially unsustainable.

> “Phoronix, but high quality” would also be great.

Pretty sure there are many Oktoberfest travel bloggers, at least some of them must be "high quality".

https://chipsandcheese.com/ ?

For math, try https://www.quantamagazine.org/

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..

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).

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.

Ah, can't help but think of Atlas Shrugged. For all its flaws, it had a few chapters that described this idea well.

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!

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 will be paying the new rate, and with pleasure. LWN is great.

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.

LWN is The publication for serious Linux kernel news. It's well worth the money.

Since having my HN account I always read LWN articles shared here, but this has convinced me to finally subscribe !

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

> prices have changed considerably

I'm not doubting it, but I wonder what costs have changed for them?

Food and shelter if nothing else. Gotta pay the upkeep on the meat robots!

Have you seen the price of hard drives these days?

Only 200 subscriber months at their previous lowest tier for a 28 TiB drive. How much storage do you think a text-heavy site like LWN needs?

They archive A LOT of mailing lists… it's not only about the articles they write themselves.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, more scrapers. They're trying to keep things accessible without JavaScript, which mostly rules out the typical proof of work solutions like Anubis (which they're definitely aware of, as they had an article on it).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864252

LWN is a poster child for something that could be entirely static pre-generated HTML for literally all unauthenticated requests at a server cost lower than serving and verifying anti-bot checks. If Anubis provides any benefit at all then they are really doing something wrong like fetching a bunch of comments from a database and generating the resulting HTML for each visitor.

Subscribed. For the next year, goal is to spend more time on lwn and less time on hn lol

The lesson is that if you keep writing good content, people will keep paying

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.

The server was fine, but we have a throttle that kicks in if we get a flood of new account creations at once to ward off spammers and scammers. We're keeping an eye on the queue now to ensure that these are waved through quickly. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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!

I'm sorry to break it to you, but Neovim isn't the best project to donate to. The lead maintainer supports numerous far right figures and recently went ballistic in the issue tracker when someone merely suggested removing a quote of endorsement on the Neovim website from someone who literally compared brown people to wolves that should be shot for the protection of the "human" population.

- https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/issues/501

- http://archive.is/3cNBr

There was no pushback for the toxic behavior from his fellow maintainers, as the team includes both a speaker at a conference hosted by the person the lead maintainer so vehemently defended, and a Palantir employee who proudly displays their employer on their GitHub profile.

FOSS donations are awesome, but maybe not Neovim. I think Vim is a better choice for donations. All of the money goes to helping children in Uganda.

- https://www.vim.org/sponsor/index.php

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???"

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.

> 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?

The title has changed to A note on subscription prices from LWN. It may be worth editing this title to match.

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.

Although I seldom use Linux as main desktop, LWN is one of the services I keep subscribing to.

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.

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.

the archives are free (their issues are un-paywalled ~2 weeks after publishing)

Bu they are missing out on the long tail of people who might subscribe at lower prices. Especially for something called a starving student tier (no doubt to shame people into paying more), $5 or not $6 per month is a really big recurring fee for something that is at best nice to have. That's more than half of what I pay for my mobile phone SIM and LWN doesn't even come close to compete in the value that provides to me. These "small" subscriptions really add up quickly so a lot of people rightfully avoid them.

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.

It is fairly Linux-focused fwiw

They've also done good coverage of CPython development, like the JIT story currently on their home page.

If you are not working with Linux kernel you don't need it. Those who are, are likely already subscribed

I would totally subscribe to a print edition.

> 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.

Inflation means that hosting costs increase. On the site they also mention being under heavy scraper load which also isn’t free.

Then the writers probably also need compensation increase, at the very least to be a responsible employer so that the employees can deal with inflation.

Inflation happens regularly, normally, or when world leaders emit another chaos bomb, and they do not raise prices immediately causing a lower income/costs ratio. In order to keep up with that without raising the prices in between you need more income and that comes from more payers.

Hosting is probably ~0% of the cost lol.

The costs of the writers is what makes journalism expensive.

If we can grow the number of subscribers, we don't need to raise prices for the ones that have supported us all this time; I would find that preferable. Besides, who doesn't want a broader reach?

Sure. Just, raising prices in line with inflation is not really raising them in a real sense. You are trying to give people a discount. :)

> Besides, who doesn't want a broader reach?

Anyone who does something for the love of it. At some point, more reach can only be gained by making compromises and that point is usually earlier rather than later.

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.

What subscription level will finally make them increase their article CSS's line-height from "affront to eyes" to "actually legible"?

Firefox plugin? Script Monkey? Ctrl+ to zoom the page? Reader mode?

Sure, but I meant for all the site's visitors

If you read LWN, surely you are not scared to use a few "advanced" options in your browser...?

I was a web dev for ~20 years, so well aware of options available.

> I meant for all the site's visitors

Is it Ctrl++ or Ctrl+scroll an advanced option?

Yeah, I meant in a general sense - I doubt any LWN reader is not aware of ctrl-+. I think they'd be more concerned if the site became more heavily CSSified - because it would become harder to read with terminal-based browsers.

Nobody has ever asked us to do that; I take it you would prefer a larger line spacing?

If nothing else, we can easily add a customization option for that.

Compare and contrast:

Existing line-height:

https://i.ibb.co/dJc14J7G/Screenshot-2026-09-02-at-08-35-06....

With "line-height: 1.25" on <p> tags:

https://i.ibb.co/RkGBQF0D/Screenshot-2026-09-02-at-08-36-17....

on this article:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1092229/

Times New Roman (and STIX Two Text, Libertinus Serif clones) has been designed with increased x-height while keeping the same line height, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman#/media/File:Ti...

It's normal for it to appear denser vertically. Your example of increased line height looks suitable for subheadings, but in no way represents the typographic tradition of its use.

Use a user style sheet instead of trying to force your preferences onto others. Or better yet, fix your monitor settings.

Sorry guys, for my inequity, but whats LWN

It is one click from that article to the homepage, which offers a blurb on the site.

https://lwn.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net

I was guessing Linux World News, but TIL it was Linux Weekly News. But currently, they say it's just LWN, a tech news site, etc.

ITYM ”iniquity”?

Subscribed.

Anyone still opening distrowatch.com? Another classic

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.

They could also consider paying their employees less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38106227

I'd argue otherwise.

Crab-bucket mentality aside, what they do is extremely important and hard to do.

I can't write an occasional blog post without wrestling with my ideas and words, and they constantly churn out this high quality material, without ever slowing down. They deserve what they earn.

OTOH, thanks for nudging me towards subscribing to LWN a bit more.

Edit: Just subscribed. Thank you.

If I can't have something, you shouldn't either, why didn't I think of that! Chud

That's such a weird take away, you're comparing Mozilla which has a diverse set of employees, versus an organization whose sole purpose is to hire high quality technical writers, which is already pretty niche.

That person posted this two years later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870881 so I don't think they're going to agree with your interpretation of the comment.

Ah yes, reward the people generating the value less, that should be a neutral move vis a vis the value of the product.

Seriously? You joined HN 2 hours ago just to post "tech writers are little people unworthy of a decent living"?

Classy.

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.

Do you have a third thing to be wrong about so we can declare "ignorance trifecta complete"?

> 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 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.

No open mind, Cannot tolerate criticism， Only donwvote.

The future looks even bleaker.

LWN is a tightly run site for preserving the open source status quo hierarchies. They don't want discussion.

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.

Based on the initial response, it does not, in fact, seem like this is the conclusion.

They could always bump down a tier if needed, they have 6 months to decide anyway.

You could also see if it's something your employer allows you to expense. It's still cheap enough that it's something most managers can just approve directly, depending on organizational structures.

I suspect everybody likely to do so has already done so. Anybody who thinks $6 a month is a lot of money will also think $5 a month is a lot of money for something that they can get for free by waiting a week.

5 to 6 dollars is not much in terms of a donation. In terms of a subscription, though...One thing is voluntary if you find value, the other is mandatory to get to the value unless you are willing to wait.

I think you're reinforcing my point. Both $5 and $6 a month are a lot of money to many people. LWN isn't "about to discover" this, they've likely already discovered this in their release + 1 week traffic over the years since they set the price at $5/month.

It's been my experience most people, regardless of what point you make, feel like you are reinforcing their points these days.

Yes, $5 recurring payments really add up quickly to something you feel.

A dummy take on the LWN subscription price increase without valid reasons why.

This account, `thataccount` has only negative comments that contribute naught.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com