Announcing a New Subscription Pricing Structure for Ruminato

Tiers of joy in a tough economy? Plus, a couple of polls

First off, holy smokes, my last post had several misspellings. Probably not a great time to talk about paid subscriptions.

More on the misspellings in a bit. This short newsletter is just to let you know that, since my Substack is a bit more per month than many (it seems like most are about $5), and with the economy looking bleak, I decided that it’s time to rethink my pricing. But I also want to be fair to those who’ve paid the $8/$80 price, so I’m keeping the basic price, but giving you a chance to decide what you’d prefer to pay if that feels a bit steep or is simply outside of your budget.

Here are the new subscription pricing options. If you received this post in your email inbox, you’ve already seen them at the top of the email:

Full price: $8 per month — click the link to subscribe at that price
$7 per month — one dollar off
$6 per month — two dollars off
$5 per month — three dollars off
$4 per month — four dollars off
$3 per month — five dollars off
$2 per month — six dollars off! Jeepers!

This pricing will show up at the top of all the newsletter emails for a few weeks. After that, I’ll move them down to the end of the newsletter.

Licensed from Adobe Stock

I also fiddled with the “Endowment” plan, aka Founding plan, as Substack calls it. You can enter any amount over the yearly plan. The new “suggested” amount of $150 is a drop from $450. I don’t think many people know they can enter a custom number in there. So the number you see there is just a suggestion (or, fantasy?).

I’m intimately familiar with tough economic times (a major medical event will do that), so I want to be sensitive to that, hence the changes.

Let’s do a poll

Here’s another…

Note that you can change your newsletter preferences so that you only receive, for example, “Fiction” newsletters and no Political stuff if you wish. Newsletter topics are distinguished by the top of the web-based menu items.

About yesterday’s spelling mishaps

Misspellings are a big pet peeve of mine. Ever since my vision got messed up from my medical event, I’ve been missing a lot of them when proofreading. Grammarly helps, but for some reason, it has not been working well on Substack lately. I’ve been leaning on Grammarly a lot for typos since my vision started getting stupid, but lately it’s been failing. It’s not redlining a lot of typos. I only discovered the errors from yesterday’s post when I cross-posted to Medium, where the errors showed up in Grammarly. Strange days indeed.

I’ve always been a good speller, but not a good typist. Fast, yes, but not good. So misspellings happen. So, although I don’t need Grammarly to catch typos, it does make things a lot easier. If misspellings bother you as much as they bother me, I promise to work harder on that issue. It’s happened a couple of times recently.

I hope you’ll consider taking advantage of the new pricing tier, anyway.

With that out of the way, Thanks for all your support! See a roundup of my most recent posts after the music/dance interlude.

Let’s end this newsletter with a dance…

A Roundup of my most recent posts

The Ghost of Sam Hain (Fiction): Sam’s Halloween plans this year were destined to make some noise

We Need to Buy CNN: If it falls into the hands of the radical right, we are Russia

Sad Samsung Wants the Last Drop of Texas Water: One BlueSky reader called said of this look into how data centers are sucking Texas dry, “This is an insanely good read on the coming disaster.” Thank, OG! If you like my heavily researched essays, this one’s for you.

How to Meet Women in the Age of Trump (Political Humor): A two-step guide for the lonely hetero MAGA male

When Platonic Relationships Begin with a Spark (Memoir Essay): The joys of a flirty platonic friendship

The AWS Outage Was the Oligarch Stranglers Reaching for Substack’s Neck: A single point of failure shows that Substack writers and readers aren’t prepared for a coordinated attack, direct censorship, or even simple tech mishaps

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Obligatory Subscribe button (but see above for the new tiers)