A reasonable subscriber, looking at the architecture of this site, might ask the obvious question: if the methodology is public, and the source data is publicly filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the editors are perfectly willing to walk through the calculation for free on Coca-Cola each day, what exactly is the subscription paying for? It is a fair question and the editors would like to answer it plainly.

The methodology is free because the methodology is not the work. The methodology is the recipe. Any reasonably motivated investor with a spreadsheet, the relevant Berkshire annual letters, and a Bloomberg terminal could derive the same protocol from first principles in a long weekend. The methodology is also free because the editors believe, strongly, that one should never charge for the disclosure of one's analytical method. To do so is to suggest one is selling a secret, and one is not. There is no secret. There is, instead, a small set of well-publicised valuation principles applied with discipline. Discipline is what we sell.

The methodology is the recipe. The publication is the cooking, done every weekday morning, on schedule, on roughly a hundred businesses.

The work that lives behind the paywall is the daily application of the methodology to the universe — pulling every business's most recent quarterly cash-flow statement, running it through the eight-step protocol, comparing the result to the price the market is asking, and packaging the output in a form that reaches the subscriber's inbox before they finish their morning coffee. That is the work. It is not glamorous work. It is, however, work that requires consistency, machine-time, data subscriptions, and editorial judgment about where the protocol deserves a sector adjustment and where it does not. Those costs do not disappear when the subscriber arrives.

We have considered, and rejected, two alternative models. The first is the gated-recommendation model — the one Motley Fool and Zacks have used for decades. The model says: we tell you what to buy, and we charge you for the recommendation. We have rejected this model because we do not recommend stocks. We narrate Mr. Market's moods. The decision to buy or to pass on a business is the subscriber's, and we will not pretend otherwise. The second is the free-with-ads model. We have rejected this model because the moment one accepts advertising one's editorial integrity is compromised in a small and gradual way that, over time, becomes the entire publication. The brokerage that advertises on our site cannot become the brokerage we feel obligated to be polite about. So we will not accept their money.

What is left is the simplest possible model: people who find the daily reckoning useful pay us a small amount of money to keep producing it, and people who do not find it useful do not have to. The free version of the site is deliberately a complete tool, not a teaser; you can use it indefinitely and never pay us a cent and we will not nag you. The paid version is the publication itself — the daily email, the watchlist, the unblurred backtests, the full archive of these dispatches.

We are aware, finally, that the publication-as-subscription model has felt, for the past fifteen years or so, somewhat embattled. Newspapers shrank. Magazines folded. The internet replaced editorial judgment with engagement-optimised feeds. We do not think this trend is permanent and we are not optimised for it. We are optimised, instead, for the reader who wakes up at six in the morning and would rather have someone calmly tell them what the businesses they own are worth than someone breathlessly tell them what is trending. If that reader is you, the subscription is available below. If it is not, the free tape is yours to use as long as you like.

— The editors