What is free and what is paid?
Free — reading and taking part. Registering, an account, comments, forums, belonging to someone else's community: no charge, anywhere, ever.
Paid — creating your own. A page, a site, a fan society. Access to the control panel where you make and run them is a subscription, sold by the regional representative for your market.
Who actually takes money in this project?
- The HILDUS foundation develops the software and earns nothing — it sells nothing, hosts nothing, takes no share.
- This platform is not built to make money either; it defines the tiers.
- Regional representatives sell the panel subscription. That is the recurring money.
- Partner studios charge once, for installing the site on your hosting. After that they are out of the payment chain entirely — you subscribe directly with the representative. Extra work later is billed separately and is likewise outside the subscription.
Why are there no figures on this site?
Because the subscription is priced per market, by the representative serving it, and a number without a market attached is misleading. This site describes the tiers and what is in them. The same goes for installation: the studios charge the same as each other for the same job, but the figure belongs to their market, not to this page.
Do I pay for the software itself?
No. The software is developed and distributed by the foundation, which earns nothing from it. What you pay for is access to the panel, and — if you want someone else to do the setup — a studio's labour.
What is the AI in the subscription?
An assistant in the panel: drafting and editing, planning what to publish next, reading your statistics back in plain language. At Start it is switched on but tokens are bought as you need them; at Standard and Creative a token allowance — a million tokens — comes with the subscription. The reasoning is simple: a blogger with one page does not need a daily assistant, a site does.
Do you take a percentage of what my writing earns?
No. Nobody at any level takes a share of what your site or community earns — subscriptions, advertising, books sold, whatever it is — and no advertising is injected into your pages by us.
What does the Server tier cost?
Agreed case by case — it is a tier for organisations, and the work behind it differs every time. See the Server page.