Why do I have to pay for Open Diary?

The fee for Open Diary membership is $3.99 per month, or $39.99 if you buy an annual subscription. As a member, you can pay month-to-month – and when you join, you get your first thirty days free. So, why do you have to pay to use OD?

We understand that a lot of the rest of the Internet is “free”, and that you don’t usually pay for the other websites you use. However, there’s a lot of reasons why making Open Diary a paid site made sense to us. There are benefits for all of Open Diary, and for you as a member:

1. Open Diary will never have ads on our diaries and member pages. Paid memberships mean that we don’t have to pollute your experience with advertising, clickbait, and sponsored content that clutter up and dilute the community.
2. Since we don’t have to satisfy advertisers, we don’t manipulate your feed. There are no algorithms or calculations changing what you see or don’t see in your feed and on the site – all of that is completely in your control, you decide what you see.
3. Open Diary does not and will not collect personal data on your usage patterns, your interests, your entries, or anything else you do on the site. We don’t resell data like this, or post it into cookies for other search engines and advertising systems to find.
4. Having paid memberships helps us to keep a safe and friendly community. Since members are paying for their experience, we avoid having people who will join just to cause trouble or attack other members. Since all members invest in the OD experience, they are more likely to respect it.
5. Most internet businesses have to rely on advertising and sponsor revenue to survive – and this means that their number one priority is making more ad sales and getting more sponsors. By having paid memberships, we can concentrate our business on you, the member – so we can make our number one goal that you have a great Open Diary experience.

In exchange for your payment for an Open Diary subscription, we make this pledge to you:

Open Diary will be focused on delivering the best experience possible for you as our number one priority. We will not sell your personal data or manipulate your user experience to make more money for the site. Our members commit to the same philosophy by supporting Open Diary and the Open Diary Rules.