The Great Expiration

At the time, we concluded that we needed about 4000 subscribers to begin to see LWN as a stable enterprise. We're still a bit short of that - there's just under 3000 individual subscribers, currently - but we're still here. Things seem to be headed in the right direction.

Much depends on what happens in the next month or so, however. Many of you went for one-year subscriptions when they first became available. That money has sustained us over the last year, and we are more than grateful for that. But those subscriptions are now about to expire. Over the next month or so, almost one third of our subscriptions will come to an end. If the renewal rate is high enough, we should get a cash infusion that will prove most helpful in taking LWN to the next level, and we can continue our march toward 4000 subscribers (and beyond). If it's not, well...

We're optimistic. We came out of the "mini expiration" last spring (when the first set of six-month subscriptions ran out) with as many subscribers as we had going in. With luck, the same will hold true this time.

Please note that, if you signed up for an automatic monthly subscription, you, too, will have to renew it. Some businesses, once they get your credit card, feel entitled to keep charging to it until you show up on the premises with a baseball bat and make them stop. We've never felt we had that right, so automatic subscriptions include a maximum number of authorized charges. That maximum was capped at twelve months (we've since raised it to 24), and will be running out for those of you who subscribed a year ago. Many of you will have already received the "last charge" message we send when the authorized payments run out. Renewing is just a matter of going to the My Account page and enabling more charges.

The rest of you will not get mail from us until your subscription actually ends and the grace period begins.

Many of you, however, will not get mail from us at all. We have never made any attempt to force people to give us a real email address when they set up an account; if you really don't want us to have it, we can live with that. But, if we do not have your email address, we cannot communicate with you regarding subscription expiration. Some of you may also lose our email because your mailboxes are full of SoBig output; we also simply do not have the time to be feeding cookies to challenge/response systems. If any of the above situations apply to you, please keep an eye out for the "renew your subscription" link that will show up in the left column. Or just head over the the "My Account" page and top up your subscription ahead of time.

Finally, please note that we will soon stop offering automatic monthly subscriptions at the "starving hacker" level. When we make credit card charges that small, the processing fees eat up a substantial amount of the money we get. Honestly, we'd rather that subscriber money (your money!) went to us, rather than credit card processing companies. The "starving hacker" level will continue to exist, but subscriptions will need to be prepaid at least three months at a time. Existing monthly subscriptions at that level will not be affected as long as they are maintained.

Once again, please accept our thanks for supporting LWN so strongly over the last year. We will continue to try to show our appreciation by making LWN the best resource that it can be.