The counter
The papers are free. The filing cabinet is six dollars.
Everything you can read on this site stays free. What costs money would be a machine that reads everything for you and sorts it — and that machine does not exist yet. Every entry here was filed by hand, and the queue of things waiting to be filed is real, though the desk that would show it to you is still an empty room. This is a subscription to a filing cabinet, not to a personality.
For everyone
The Counter
- All ten sections, all cards, all sources — no paywall, ever
- The Friday Signal, five cards and one take
- RSS, and every card's own link
- No account. Nothing to cancel.
Pays every bill on this site
Renewals
- The whole index: every card ever filed, cross-referenced by section, with the citation status of each
- The complete archive as JSON, yours to keep, to query, to cite
- The queue: every card the filter found that I have not ruled on yet, and what it is waiting for
- Cancel in one click. No email, no retention call, no sad face.
A loyalty card, for the unwritten parts
Ten Fridays, then the tenth one is on the house.
That is the whole offer. I do not have a tier four.
One-off, if you teach it
Classroom Pack — $49. Three 50-minute lessons built from the Case Files, with printable worksheets and a rubric. Not a subscription, not a tier — one purchase, yours to copy for a class of your own.
See the packTwo things I want to be straight about, because I know what this looks like from the outside.
One: the free part is genuinely free and I am not going to put the archive behind this in six months. If the site ever gets more popular, the thing that grows is the index, not the paywall.
Two: this is not a scheme to make you feel bad for not paying. Most of the people reading this will never renew and the site has to work for them anyway, because that is the deal. Six dollars is for the people who read it every day.
What you would actually be buying
Six dollars buys you a filing cabinet nobody else has.
The reason this can't be scraped is not the writing. It is the structure. Ten sections that hold idol culture and courtrooms and the teachers in my classroom. Seven laws that every card is filed against. A filter I run by hand against fifteen feeds, which files what it finds and leaves the rest in a queue I work through. And a shelf of novels, albums and videos that each card leans on when it needs to make a point. None of that is a blog post. It is an instrument, and I built it, and it is the only one.
Cross-referenced, not chronological
Every card points at its section, its law, and the piece of my work that got there first. Follow a law across four hundred cards and you get a shape that a reverse-chronological feed can never show you.
The queue too
Right now the filter has turned up sixty-odd things I have not ruled on, and it throws nothing away on its own — every one of them is waiting on me. Those are editorial decisions a human should be able to audit, and right now only I can see them. You would be able to as well. Nothing has been rejected yet, and I would rather say that than imply there is a pile of rejections waiting for you.
Yours to keep
The whole thing as JSON. If I stop, you still have it. That is not a retention tactic, it is what happens when you are a small site run by one person who has had things go offline before.
Take a number
Six a month, cancel whenever.
Checkout is a button that has not been wired to a processor yet, because I would rather tell you that than show you a fake form that eats your card and emails you nothing. That is the last honest thing left to build here.
Payment rails, once chosen, will be Stripe or Paddle. If you want to be told when they are live, the Friday Signal is where it will be said once and then never again.