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The argument is free. The archive search is not.

Every inquiry searches real archives, and each one costs us money to answer. So the desk gives everybody 2 free questions, then it is $9.99 a month for as many as you like. The forum is free either way.

Free

$0forever

The forum in full, and enough of the desk to judge it.

  • The forum, in full: read it, post, reply, vote, message, and open a community of your own.
  • 2 inquiries at the reference desk, with everything a paid inquiry returns.
  • A workspace holding up to 10 saved artifacts, with your own notes against each one.
Create a free account

Premium

For research

$9.99per month

The reference desk without a meter running.

  • Unlimited inquiries. Follow a question as far as it goes, across as many conversations as you need.
  • Unlimited saves. Keep every artifact you find, organized in a workspace of your own.
  • Room to work: a subscriber's hourly ceiling is set where scripted use starts, not where a productive afternoon does.
  • Everything in Free, including the whole forum, which stays free either way.

Subscriptions are not switched on for this deployment yet, so there is nothing to buy here today. The reference desk still answers your free inquiries, and the forum is unaffected.

  • Billed $9.99 USD each month. Cancel at any time from your subscription page.
  • Canceling keeps your access until the end of the month you have paid for, and takes nothing you have already found.
  • Payment is handled on Stripe's own pages. We never see your card.

On both plans

A free inquiry is the same inquiry

Paying changes how many questions you can ask, not what the desk does with one. Nothing below is held back from the free tier.

Documents, not summaries
Every answer is built from catalog records the desk retrieved while answering you. A source it did not find is a source it will not name, and it tells you when it found nothing.
The text, in full
Where a digitized transcription exists, you read it on the page rather than only the catalog entry describing it.
Translated beside the original
A source that is not in English is rendered into English next to the text it came from, with the translator's note on what it could not carry across.
Provenance on every result
The object itself, a later edition, a translation, or writing about it. Every result says which, shows the reasoning, and names the institution holding it.

What a subscription never touches