The honest trade-offs of each model, and why a puzzle site is one of the few places where offering both is genuinely reasonable.
Free sites run on advertising, and advertising has real costs for the reader. Subscription-only sites avoid that and lose almost everyone. We spent a while on this and landed on both.
Here is the reasoning, including the parts that are unflattering to us.
Advertising pays for everyone, including people who pay nothing
The argument for ads is straightforward: the site stays free and open, and the cost is borne by whoever is willing to put up with them.
The cost is real though. Ads slow pages down and pull attention away from a puzzle, which is a particularly bad fit for a game about concentration.
Subscriptions align incentives but shrink the audience
A subscription means the reader is the customer, which is a much healthier relationship. The downside is that a paywall on a daily puzzle stops the habit before it starts.
For a product whose entire value depends on you coming back every day, gating the core experience is self-defeating.
So: ads for the free tier, Pro for the extras
Every daily puzzle, all nine games and the leaderboard stay free forever. Pro removes ads and opens the full archive — things that do not block the habit.
That is the compromise. If you never pay us anything, you still get the complete daily experience, and we think that is the right line to draw.