About

About

Are.na is a place to save content, create collections over time and connect ideas. Privately or with other people.

Students (highly curious and open to new information), hobbyists (deeply into a topic or topics, narrowly focused) or what we call connected knowledge collectors (those more experienced but highly curious information gatherers who can make disparate connections between disciplines) have been the core of our community for 13 years and 122 days.

Are.na is a mindful space where you can work through any project over time. It's a place to structure your ideas and build new forms of knowledge together.

Think better together
New thoughts rarely happen in a vacuum — collaborate with others and build from existing libraries of references

Pricing & Features

All plans include

  • Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on specific channels
  • Export channels as PDF, ZIP, and HTML
  • Make channels open to anyone, closed to just collaborators, or private
  • Use our API to display content elsewhere
  • Add links or text snippets while browsing the web
  • Save web pages, images, PDFs, videos, more
  • Upload any file type
  • Unlimited public and private blocks
  • Advanced search filters
  • Pin blocks to the top of channels
  • Full text for links and articles
  • Presentation mode
  • Table view
  • Hide from search engines
  • Priority support
  • Early access to new features
  • Complimentary Are.na Annual
  • Bi-annual company reports
  • The fuzzy feeling of giving a little extra to support an independent company
Supporter
  • Unlimited public and private blocks
  • Advanced search filters
  • Pin blocks to the top of channels
  • Full text for links and articles
  • Presentation mode
  • Table view
  • Hide from search engines
  • Priority support
  • Early access to new features
  • Complimentary Are.na Annual
  • Bi-annual company reports
  • The fuzzy feeling of giving a little extra to support an independent company
  • A good option to test Are.na
  • Up to 200 total blocks*
  • Unlimited public and private blocks
  • Advanced search filters
  • Pin blocks to the top of channels
  • Full text for links and articles
  • Presentation mode
  • Table view
  • Hide from search engines
  • Priority support
  • Early access to new features
  • Complimentary Are.na Annual
  • Bi-annual company reports
  • The fuzzy feeling of giving a little extra to support an independent company

*A block is an individual piece of content. Blocks can be images, text, links, attachments, or embeds.

Do you use Are.na with a group? Learn how upgrading group members works.

Pricing FAQs

Education

Learn more about how students and teachers use Are.na in their classes and workshops. If you're a student, you can get 50% off the price of any Premium plan for two years. If you're a teacher and use Are.na with your class, contact us for assistance and custom discounts for your students.

Team

Are.na has many co-founders. Currently, a small team is building the platform: Charles Broskoski and Daniel Pianetti deal full-time with product and operations. Damon Zucconi is full-time on Engineering, Meg Miller takes care of everything editorial including our Annual book and Laurel Schwulst is in charge of our Gift Shop.

You can chat with them most Fridays mornings ET on Discord.

We are fortunate to have the constant support and advice from past co-founders and contributors Chris Sherron, Chris Barley, John Michael Boling, and Dena Yago.

Business model

We've worked hard to make sure that our business model is aligned with the people who use Are.na.

We focus on making Are.na a place that provides utility, health and happiness.

We ask our members to pay a small subscription to help us maintain and grow the platform. In exchange for your support, we offer unlimited blocks and a growing set of extra features and tools.

We are the only social media company whose only customers are the people who use it.

Currently, 16,277 people currently support via Premium our mission to build a self-sustained community for shared knowledge.

In 2018 we ran a crowdfunding campaign where 850 people invested on Are.na, ~75% of those who invested were already members of our platform. We rely on no other external funding.

Roadmap

Here you can see what we’ve shipped recently, what we’re building next, and how we’re doing as a company.

By sharing this information we aim to demystify the process of working on a (mostly) bootstrapped web company. We’re working our hardest to build a space that’s mindful, respectful, and accountable to our members.

This is meant to be as transparent as reasonably possible. If there’s something you don’t see here that you’d like to know, just email us: [email protected].

Road to self-sustainability

Are.na’s mission is to continue to cultivate a member-supported community. Since we're accountable only to our members, our incentive is always to build a tool that fosters learning and genuine collaboration.

Here's how we're doing so far, with your help:

Today
$108,111.00 Monthly recurring revenue
31376 Monthly active members
1.42M Monthly connections
16277 Total paying members
Goal by Dec 31, 2024
$110,000.00 Monthly recurring revenue

Expenses

Currently this is how our expenses are distributed relative to our $96,687.00 monthly revenue:

  • 54% Salaries:

    • 4 full-time (engineering, product/operations, editorial)

    • 2 part-time (special projects and design)

  • 21% Taxes

  • 14% Hosting, servers, domain and bandwidth

  • 4% Software and third party services

  • 4% Business insurance and health benefits

  • 3% Legal, compliance and other

Product Plan
In progress and upcoming
  • Indication that a URL was already saved in browser extension

  • Quick save channel in browser extension

  • Spam management

  • Sort (recently created/recently updated/random) in Profile view

  • Bulk editing

  • Re-implement "Load more" connections on lightbox

  • Sorting in table view

  • Sticky header when scrolling

  • Extended keyboard shortcuts and cheat sheet

  • Re-implement custom style for Tweets

  • Multi-select and rearrange blocks

  • Maintain show/hide state of the sidebar [feature request]

  • Search: Image tagging

  • Icons and other settings for accessibility

  • Warning if you exit a text block on edit mode [feature request]

  • Mobile app: Add reset password button

  • Link to Wayback machine source

  • Mobile app: Add sorting in channels and profile [feature request]

  • Let channel collaborators to edit metadata and content of a mutual block, add “someone’s editing this block" warning.

  • Mobile app: Start redesign

Completed
  • Pinned blocks

  • Presentation mode

  • Comment mentions

  • New foundations for Editorial

  • Refactor front-end for speed, review accessibility, themes

  • Fix export issues

  • Mobile app: Access Following [feature request]

  • Video thumbnails [feature request]

  • Re-implementing block URL connected to other channels

  • Pagination fixes on web

  • Search: search by File Type filter

  • Table View: support for Groups

  • Better Twitter previews with searchable text

  • Fix reverse google search

  • Change date format to Month DD, YYYY in our Billing pages

  • Access to invoices from the Billing page

  • Speed: Porter migration

  • Updates to Roadmap and About pages to add more transparency

  • Advanced search filters on web and mobile

  • Restrict account functionality

  • Flag content

  • Search infrastructure refactor

  • Table view for channels

  • Onboarding improvements

  • Email confirmation improvements

  • Upgraded GraphQL API

  • Updated home and about pages

  • Android and updated iOS share extension

  • Asynchronous job queue refactoring

  • Hide notification counter on mobile

  • Delete comments on mobile

  • Mobile premium management

  • Mobile navigation upgrades

  • Mobile infrastructure upgrades

  • Settings for connect search

  • Reader mode (web and mobile)

  • Extract Reader mode for links

  • SPA performance upgrades

  • Revised text styling

  • Updated dark mode

  • Group invite links

  • Sunday Review emails

  • Integrate Ad-blocked screenshot service

  • Weekly digest email

  • Deep links / Universal links for iOS and Android apps

  • Safari Extension

  • Updated print.are.na

  • Explore block filters

  • Android App

  • Your connections

  • iOS dark mode

  • Replace thumbnail on links, embeds and attachments

  • iOS app / iPad landscape mode

  • Group feeds

  • oEmbed endpoints

  • Following views by type

  • Port extension code to bookmarklet

  • Connection limit updates

  • Browser extension / bookmarklet refactor

  • Channel grid view refactor

  • Publish Firefox extension

  • Channel embed infrastructure

  • Custom badges

  • Revamped block lightbox view

  • Sign-up optimizations

  • Group profiles

  • Channel preview

  • Onboarding banners 🏳️

  • Icon audit

  • Optimized billing flow

Changelog
Company Vision
Revenue & Strategy
  • Reach $110K in monthly revenue by end of 2024

  • Continue improving the conversion portion of Premium members vs Active members (currently ~47%)

  • Continue reducing the infrastructure costs portion of monthly expenses (currently ~30%)

Ethics
  • Become a public benefit corporation or an alternative community-benefiting entity in order to legally protect our mission.

  • Work to promote ad-free businesses and ethical design principles in the tech industry

  • Explore possible avenues for a more cooperative membership structure

Community
  • Create stronger community benefits for Premium members

  • Make grants to foster creative research by Are.na members

  • Create a structure for compensating our member-investors

Team

Our team is currently composed by two full-time engineering/product people, two part-time in charge of community initiatives and three advisors. Our goals are:

  • Pay our current team living wages with benefits

  • Hire 2 more developers to work on product infrastructure

  • Prioritize diversity for additional hires

API and Community Projects

Are.na is "Open Source by Default" and we're always excited to see people using the platform in new ways. You can find a list of projects built with Are.na and find more resources in the Arena Community Dev Lounge, and browse through our API documentation.

print.are.na
by Mindy Seu and Ekene Ijeoma Turn your Are.na channels into books.

Editorial Projects and Events

We regularly feature essays, interviews, and other writing from the Are.na community, and we publish a printed Annual once a year.

Annual

For the last two years, we’ve published collections of writings and essays from the people in our community.

Mobile apps

Browser extensions