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 139 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.
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
- 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:
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
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
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
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%)
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
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
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.
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.
