Plans
The forum is free. The reference desk costs us money.
Every enquiry searches real archives and reads real catalogue records, and each one has a bill attached to it. So the desk answers 2 questions for anybody, and unlimited questions for $9.99 a month. The forum — reading it, posting in it, replying to anyone — stays free with an account, and always will.
Premium
$9.99per month
Unlimited use of the reference desk, and everything it finds.
- Unlimited enquiries at the reference desk — real digitised documents, letters, registers and archive records, not summaries of them.
- Unlimited saves. Keep every artefact you find in a workspace of your own, with your own notes against each one.
- Ask any historical question you like. The desk answers from sources it retrieved while answering you, and says so when it found nothing.
- Read the transcribed text of a source in full on the page, rather than only its catalogue record.
- Sources that are not in English, translated beside the original — with the translator's caveat about what it could not render.
- Provenance on every result: the object itself, a later edition, a translation, or writing about it, with the reasoning shown.
Subscriptions are not switched on for this deployment yet, so there is nothing to buy here today. The reference desk still answers your free enquiries, and the forum is unaffected.
- Billed $9.99 USD each month. Cancel at any time from your subscription page.
- Cancelling keeps your access until the end of the month you have paid for.
- The forum stays free, with or without this.
What stays free
- Reading the forum, with no account at all. Posting and replying need an account, and nothing more than that.
- 2 enquiries at the reference desk, whether or not you sign up. Signing up is what keeps them: a visitor's answers are not saved anywhere.
- Everything you have already found. A subscription that ends takes nothing away — your enquiries and your saved artefacts stay where they are.