[JeanMertz]

Interesting questions.

Re: Do you require users to purchase a certain number of credits up front after the trial?

The "trial" is really $2,50 that we give you upon signup. You get another $2,50 after your first "top up". We show the prices in your own currency, so no "credits", but top-ups start at $5, and go up from there. You can choose to auto-topup when your wallet drops below $0.

Re: I see you offer refunds if you don't like the story. What prevents a person from just reading all they like and then asking for a refund?

The refund mechanism is an important tool to generate trust with the reader. We don't want you to feel "nickel-and-dimed" and if publisher promised a certain article through the heading and intro, but didn't live up to those expectations after reading the article, we encourage you to refund, and tell the publishers why you asked a refund (through a dialog), so publishers can learn as well.

We have certain mechanisms in place to prevent abuse of this system, but we're lenient, and in general we see only about 10% of purchases are refunded this way.

Re: Is it possible to copy and paste text from the articles to share on social media? (I assume you have a share mechanism, but this is more specific).

You can. Again, it's built on a mutual-trust system. So far it has worked out great, if we ever notice the balance tipping, we'll have to tweak the system.

Re: Once I pay for the article, does it stay in my account forever, or could it be pulled by the publisher?

It does stay in your account. We don't have any mechanism to actually remove articles from our platform. Highly occasionally, we remove the content of an article, because it was published by accident (f.e. a newspaper delivering next days newspaper too early, and it containing the score of a pre-recorded contest).

[intopieces]

Thank you for your reply! One more question: there was some kerfuffle about The New York Times changing a story they had already published [0]. Will your platform allow this? I find it to be highly unethical, but I could see publishers demanding to have that ability. To put it simply, there is value in publications printing retractions, and I hate to see them go in favor of sneaky edits.

[0]http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/360545/new-york-times-...

[rogeryu]

As content is visible via your webbrowser as well, copying content is possible that way, even if the app doesn't allow it.

What happened to the articles from the Volkskrant that were removed because the editor copied them from elsewhere? Are they removed from Blendle?