Hello, friends! December snuck up on us or else I would have posted this a few days ago, but since it is December, long-term users know what I'm about to say: it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

IMPORTANT: I have some extra news for you about payments and paid time costs, so please read the whole entry even if you're already familiar with the annual promotion.

This bonus is active now: for the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

The fine print: If you buy paid time for a friend or for another one of your own accounts, the bonus points will be sent to you (the account that placed the order), not to the account the gift was sent to. The order must be completed in the month of December. IMPORTANT: when we say "the month of December", we mean by server time (which is in UTC), not by your local time zone. If you plan to take advantage of this bonus, it's a good idea to do it before the last minute.

The important news: back in September's news update, I mentioned in passing that the fact that we haven't raised our prices in 15 years, despite inflation and cost increases, has made it more important to ask people to support us if they can so we can continue to offer the site for everyone. The majority of y'all who commented were extremely supportive about the thought of us raising our prices in order to adjust for inflation, and although we really hate to do it, we think that adjusting our prices for inflation now is a good way to make sure "your support still covers our costs" stays true for longer in the future. (It's true now! But at the current trajectory, we can't guarantee that it will stay true.)

What you need to know:

• We will increase our prices in 2025 to more closely match the inflation-adjusted original launch prices for paid accounts and premium paid accounts. (We're still debating whether or not we will also increase for icon slots and rename tokens, but the cost of paid accounts and premium paid accounts will definitely increase.)
  
• We have not finalized the exact date prices will increase. We'll let you know at least a month ahead of time when we settle on the exact date. It will probably be in the first half of 2025.
  
• We have not finalized the exact new prices yet. (There are a lot of factors I have to balance!)
  
• Despite the new prices not being final yet, expect them to fall somewhere between $52.50-$55 for 12 months of regular paid time and $75-$77.50 for 12 months of premium paid time, which means somewhere between $4.40 and $4.60 for 1 month of regular paid time.
  
• The value of points will not change: each new point will still cost $0.10 USD and all existing points will still be redeemable for $0.10 USD worth of services. For instance, if the cost of 1 month of regular paid time goes from its current "$3 USD or 30 points" to $4.50 USD, that will be "$4.50 USD or 45 points".

(This would be a hell of a lot easier and I'd have finalized it already by now if we didn't need to keep points worth $.10 USD and if we didn't care so much about trying to keep the ratio between paid and premium paid as close to the 70% conversion that exists now and trying to keep it so that you aren't penalized for paying month-by-month instead of 12 months at a time. Most places offer a modest-to-significant discount for paying 12 months at a time: we really don't want to do that. These constraints all taken together mean that I've spent a lot of time staring at spreadsheets and calculators these past two months.)

I know any kind of price increase can be a hardship for people, so I'm announcing this well ahead of time so that people have a chance to stock up on points and/or buy paid time in advance during this points bonus month (which we will continue to offer even after prices increase!) You can buy as much paid time as you want in advance: any extra time you buy gets added to your existing paid time and makes your expiration date extend further into the future, so if, for instance, you put 5 "12 months of paid time" items into your cart right now and complete the payment, you'll get 60 months of paid time added to your account. Because of how the payment system works, it's not possible to transfer paid time from one account to another, but you can convert existing paid time back into points in the future and then use those points for a future order.

As always, we remain incredibly grateful to you all for your support. We're one of the only sites out there that has no advertising, has taken no venture capital, and does no intrusive data brokering: our only income comes from you all saying "yes, we value this site enough to keep it running", and the fact enough of you keep saying "yes, we value this site enough to keep it running" to, well, keep it running means so much to us. We are going to keep stubbornly insisting that there is a better, more ethical way to do social media for as long as we possibly can, and it's thanks to you that we can keep proving to doubters that it works.

A reminder to everyone to check out dw_advocacy for updates on our legal efforts to defend your right to privacy and anonymity online! We know that things look (rightfully) bleak to a lot of folks right now and the next few years are likely to be full of a lot of shenanigans I am struggling to find a more professional way to describe than "legal fuckery", but I promise you that we're committed to fighting fuckery whenever it rears its head. On behalf of Mark, Jen, and Robby, I wish you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and I hope that everyone can enter 2025 with the same stubborn dedication to trying to find a better way that we've made one of our core priorities for as long as we've been around.