The Meridian is a subscription business. Most of our journalism sits behind a metered paywall: you can read a handful of articles a month for free, and after that we ask you to subscribe. We want to explain how that meter works, because paywalls are often deliberately mysterious and we would rather ours not be.
Our meter is simple and fixed. You get a set number of free articles in a rolling window, tracked in your browser. When you reach the limit, the article you are reading fades into a subscribe prompt. There is no dark pattern, no fake countdown, no secret personalization deciding you look wealthy today. Everyone gets the same allowance, and we tell you your count as you go.
We are aware that larger publishers run far more sophisticated systems — machine-learning meters that set each reader's allowance individually, predicting the exact moment you are most likely to pay. We have chosen not to build that, and not only because it would be technically involved. A meter that manipulates each reader differently is a meter that treats readers as marks. Our fixed meter is less clever and, we think, more honest.
The daily game sits outside the paywall entirely, and always will. FIVES is free, every day, for everyone, forever. The subscription buys the surround — the archive, the analysis, the full set of puzzles — not the daily habit itself. If you never pay us a cent, you should still have a small good reason to visit every morning. That is the deal, and we intend to keep it.
◆