Hello subscribers, fans, and well-wishers. Typebar Magazine founder & editor Matt Wolfbridge here with with our third financial recap of the year. We published our first way back in the halcyon days of March 2026 when lettuce was still safe to eat and diesel prices sat below the current record high of $5.85 a gallon. Keeping with a three month cadence, our second was this past June.
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Have things improved since the summer? Or have they gone disastrously awry? Let's investigate.
Expenses:
As I said in the March and June versions of this post: Typebar Magazine's editorial schedule keeps costs fixed. We publish at set intervals (four issues per year, with an essay or short story every two weeks in between issues) at a set pay rate (currently $75 per essay/story). Keeping costs predictable helps a solo-operated endeavor with a shoestring budget manage the books.
As far as the numbers in the table, the math hasn't changed from the prior two financial recaps so I'll quote myself directly, but will clarify that each issue usually contains 10 essays but sometimes may have one more or one fewer.
We pay $75 per essay or short story. Each issue contains 10 essays and one short story, so 11 published pieces in all.
$75*11 = $825
We also have to pay for the cover art! On average, it costs us around $400 to commission cover art from a real-live human artist (and we will always pay for the expertise of a human artist for our covers–forever).
$825+400 = $1,225
That brings the cost-per-issue of the magazine to $1,225. We do four issues per year.
$1,225*4 = $4,900
Typebar Magazine, in addition to quarterly issues, posts "Interstitial" essays every two weeks. That's roughly 26 per year at a $75 pay rate.
$75*26 = $1,950
But there's also digital infrastructure costs to consider. Typebar utilizes both the Ghost content management system as well as the suite of website enhancements offered by Outpost, a Ghost plugin used by several other independent media organizations like 404 Media and Hell Gate.
Ghost costs $35 per month and Outpost costs $45 per month.
$35*12 = $420 (ugh lol)
$45*12 = $540
$540+$420 = $960.
Thus, our total annual expenses for running the site come to $7,810.
$4,900 + $ 1,950 + $960 = $7,810.
Income:
Over the last 90 days we increased our paid subscriber number from 49 to 60, a 22% increase. That's fantastic! Huge thank you to anyone who subscribed. At the time of writing, our MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is $199. Annual income is easy to calculate from there: $199 x 12 = $2,388.
For verification and transparency, here's a screenshot of the Typebar Magazine Ghost dashboard:
Obviously there is still quite a significant shortfall between what we make and what we spend.
It costs $7,810 per year to keep the magazine running, but the magazine is only making $2,388 per year. Thus, the operation is losing $5,422 per year.
This considerable sum comes out of my own pocket. And as the year progresses, it will be harder to absorb that cost.
In March I started working a part-time job in addition to my full-time job to help with the magazine and other expenses. Two months later I was laid off from my full-time job. I didn't mention this in the June dispatch because I didn't want to worry anyone and I still had severance pay. Thankfully, I was able to find another full-time job about a month after my severance ran out.
However, Typebar's financial future is far from out of the woods. My contract at the part-time job is ends September 30th and will not be renewed. I may be able to negotiate for continued work at a lower rate but I wouldn't bet on it.
I want Typebar Magazine to live forever (or until readers find it uninteresting which hopefully doesn't happen at any point). But I have to consider financial realities. I pay my own rent and have no familial financial support system. I'm a sole digital media enthusiast in a shitty apartment doing his absolute best. If the site can sustain itself via subscriptions, it can keep running. While the sky isn't exactly falling yet, the sooner we are self-sustaining, the sooner Typebar can think about growth rather than survival.
Our 60 paid subscribers pay an average of $39.72 per year (199 MRR/60 subs = $3.31 per month. Times that by 12 and you get $39.72). At the current average subscription cost, Typebar Magazine needs 137 more subscribers to break even. It would be quite a delight if 137 of you decided to sign-up!
Typebar Magazine is unique in that we encourage the study of older literature. We specialize in critical reevaluation, even if (especially if!) it means going against the cultural grain by saying Rent is Good, Actually or that George Saunders is the patron saint of impotent-yet-sneering centrism. We pay little attention to industry hype cycles, preferring to discuss legitimately innovative or genuinely emotional works that have proven to be lasting. Perhaps what I'm most proud of is we treat under-respected fields like YouTube and tabletop gaming as legitimate cultural artifacts worthy of the critical gaze. That's not to mention the stunning, found-nowhere-else fiction we publish like RS Benedict's haunting (yet hilariously titled) Tiddies and Karlo Yeager Rodríguez's chilling, tragic Foreign Objects. We also write about adopting pet rats!
We do this all this with a staff of one, and we only charge $50 a year. No slop. No surveillance. No corporate bullshit.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing. I see other independent websites about the same age as Typebar Magazine with paid subscriber counts literally more than 5,000% above ours and I wonder what I'm doing wrong (Did I setup a weak welcome flow? Do I not sell hard enough?). In fairness those places have more staff and the staff all have significantly larger followings than me individually and in some cases more than Typebar as a whole.
Anyway, please help us prove a publication like ours can survive the ruling class assault on literacy. An annual subscription only costs $50/year which breaks down to just $4.16 a month.
A subscription comes with the following benefits:
- All subscriber-only content. This means MOST of what we publish (past, present, and future)!
- 4 issues per year of 10 essays each (sometimes 1 more/less), plus a short story.
- Approximately 26 "interstitial" pieces that publish in between issues, every two weeks.
- NEW: Fortnightly dispatches from our editor only emailed to subscribers.
- Access to our extensive archive stretching back to March 2024.
- eBook versions of every issue.
- Commenting privileges.
I know the world is constantly falling apart at the seams, but if you love literature, literacy, and cultural discussion, please consider funding a publication devoted to their preservation and expansion.
Future Plans and Goals:
You may have noticed the big, bold NEW in the above bullet point list. Your eyes are not deceiving you. I will be writing a dispatch to our subscribers every two weeks. I'm calling it The Editor's Desk and it'll be a direct line of sight into my thoughts on running the magazine, what I'm reading, what I'm watching, what I'm thinking about in regards to contemporary culture, etc. If you like Typebar Magazine, why not take a peek into the mind of the guy who invented it?
This series will be emailed out exclusively to subscribers and begins on Friday, 9/11 with my review of Coyote vs. Acme. And in the second outing of The Editor's Desk on 9/25, I'll be writing about my pathological fear of being "Doug Walker for smart people." Subscribe if that sounds interesting because subscribing will be the only way to see those essays, ever!
One of the only negatives about running Typebar Magazine over the last 2.5 years has been: I have so little time to write.
Writing is yoga for the brain. Using that same (perhaps inelegant) metaphor, I can feel the muscle knots restricting the movements of my mind. I feel animated and happy to have writing deadlines again. I hope what I share will be worthwhile.
Other plans and goals:
I hosted Typebar's first-ever seminar in July, about how to craft excellent pitches. I was thrilled with the turnout and most of the paid subscriber growth in the last 90 days came from that event (which was free to attend–people subscribed when they found out more about us and our mission).
I'd like to host another in October, but I don't know if I have the time to draft an entirely new presentation for a different topic. While I do want to rerun a slightly tweaked version of the "How to Pitch" seminar in the future, I don't necessarily want to rerun it immediately if I can help it. We'll see what happens.
With the cost of living crisis surging, I'd love to raise pay to $100 per essay/story. But in order to do that we'd need quite a bit more subscribers!
Aside from that, mark your calendars because...
🥳Typebar Magazine Issue 11 Debuts on Monday, 10/26!🥳
We will be revealing the cover in due time, but I can already tell you it's going to be one of our coolest and most creative yet, an excellent nod to Typebar's love of analog media as well as our interest in fantasy.
Thank you all for helping me accomplish the mission of running a visually clean, unobtrusive cultural destination for thoughtful readers. We'll return to your inbox Monday, 9/6 with an excellent piece of music criticism from Jesse Raub titled Phoebe Bridgers, Lost Weekend, and How to Deal with Jack Antonoff.
See you then!
