Subscriptions & rate card
What it costs, and what it pays for
Reader plans, advertising rates and institutional licences on one page, in rupees, inclusive of GST. Subscription income pays reporters and bureaux; advertising never buys a headline. Cancel any plan in two clicks.
Reader subscriptions
Four tiers. No trial that quietly renews at a different price.
- Free — ₹0. Eight articles a month, advertising shown.
- Digital — ₹199 charged every month. Cancel before the next renewal date and you keep access to the end of the paid month.
- Digital Annual — not billed monthly; see the annual tab. Works out at ₹150 a month.
- All Access — ₹299 charged every month, or ₹2,999 once a year on the annual tab.
- Free — ₹0, no card required, no renewal.
- Digital — ₹1,799 for twelve months, a saving of ₹589 against the monthly rate.
- Digital Annual — ₹1,799 once a year, our most-taken plan, and the only one that includes the full archive.
- All Access — ₹2,999 once a year, a saving of ₹589 against monthly All Access.
All prices are in Indian rupees and include GST at the prevailing rate. Plans renew automatically until you cancel; we email a reminder seven days before every annual renewal. Reading limits reset at 00:00 IST on the first of each month.
Advertising rate card
Indicative rates for the July–September quarter. Written quotes are issued per campaign.
Run-of-site display
Leaderboard, in-article rectangle and rail units across every desk. Viewability measured on a third-party standard, billed on served-and-viewable impressions only.
- Indicative CPM: ₹340
- Monthly reach: 6.2 million unique readers
- Formats: 970×90, 300×250, 300×600
- Minimum booking: ₹1,50,000
Sponsored features
Long-form branded articles produced by our commercial studio, never by the newsroom. Every unit carries a persistent “Paid content” label above the headline and is excluded from news feeds.
- Indicative CPM: ₹720
- Reach per feature: 210,000 engaged readers
- Median dwell time: 2 minutes 41 seconds
- Lead time: 15 working days
Newsletter placements
A single sponsor slot below the second story in the Morning Brief or the Evening Ledger. One advertiser per send; no pixel tracking inside the email body.
- Indicative CPM: ₹1,150
- List size: 940,000 verified subscribers
- Median open rate: 44%
- Availability: one slot per edition, booked by the week
Podcast host reads
A 30-second read at the mid-roll of The Dunia Briefing or Ledger Lines. Copy is approved by the presenter, who will decline anything they cannot say plainly.
- Indicative CPM: ₹880
- Downloads per episode: 128,000 in the first 30 days
- Slots: pre-roll, mid-roll, end-card
- Minimum booking: four episodes
Video pre-roll
Six-second bumper or fifteen-second skippable pre-roll on NewsDunia explainers and studio interviews. Never placed against live coverage of casualties or disasters.
- Indicative CPM: ₹640
- Monthly video starts: 3.4 million
- Completion rate: 71% on six-second bumpers
- Minimum booking: ₹2,00,000
How a booking runs
- Brief and availability check — 2 working days
- Written quote with placement map and exclusions
- Creative review against our brand-safety list
- Live campaign with a weekly delivery report
- Post-campaign reconciliation; undelivered impressions are credited, not carried forward silently
Brand safety and editorial independence
Advertisers buy audience and placement. They do not buy coverage, they do not see stories before publication, and they cannot request that a story be delayed, softened or removed. No member of the commercial team attends the morning news conference, and no reporter is told who is advertising on their page.
We do not run advertising alongside coverage of deaths, accidents, communal violence or ongoing investigations. Advertisers may exclude keywords for their own safety, but exclusion lists are never used to suppress a subject from our reporting — if a keyword block would remove a story from monetisation, we publish the story and forgo the revenue.
Paid content is labelled “Paid content” in the same size as the headline, is excluded from search results and RSS feeds, and carries the name of the sponsor in the byline position. If we get a label wrong, the correction runs in the corrections log like any other error.
The wall: newsroom and commercial teams report to different directors and share no editorial systems. NewsDunia illustration.
Institutional & campus licences
Seat-based pricing for newsrooms, libraries, universities, schools and research teams.
Licences run for twelve months from the activation date. Public libraries, government schools and registered non-profits receive a further 25% reduction on the seat rate. Purchase orders are accepted; payment terms are 30 days from invoice. Write to info@catalystwebtrendz.com with your seat count and we will return a quote within two working days.
Feature comparison
Sixteen things people actually ask about, across the four reader tiers.
| Feature | Free | Digital | Digital Annual | All Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | ₹0 | ₹199 / month | ₹1,799 / year | ₹2,999 / year |
| Articles a month | 8 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Breaking news & live blogs | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Daily e-paper | Front page only | All editions | All editions + offline | All editions + offline |
| Newsletters | 1 | 5 | 5 | 8, including premium |
| Advertising | Standard | Ad-light | Ad-light | Ad-free |
| Searchable archive (2011–) | Headlines only | Last 12 months | Full archive | Full archive |
| Article PDF export | — | — | 50 a month | Unlimited |
| Data tables behind charts | — | Selected | All | All, with early access |
| Comment posting | Read only | Yes | Yes | Yes, plus editor Q&A threads |
| Devices signed in | 1 | 2 | 4 | 4 + a second household seat |
| Live editorial events | — | Recordings | Recordings + 2 live | All 12 live |
| Gift subscriptions | — | — | 1 a year | 2 a year |
| Reader-services response | 3 working days | 2 working days | 1 working day | Same working day |
| Refund window | Not applicable | 7 days | 14 days | 14 days |
| GST invoice with your details | — | Yes | Yes | Yes |
What your subscription funds
Roughly where every hundred rupees goes, before tax.
Above: the newsroom share of subscription revenue, financial year to date. NewsDunia illustration.
Reporters and bureaux
- ₹54 of every ₹100
Salaries for 148 full-time journalists across eleven Indian bureaux and three foreign postings, plus stringer payments in districts we cannot staff full time.
- ₹13 of every ₹100
Travel, translation and access — the unglamorous costs of getting a reporter to a place and back with a notebook that holds up.
- ₹9 of every ₹100
The fact-checking and standards desk: four editors who read every investigation line by line before it runs, and who maintain the corrections log.
Everything else
- ₹11 of every ₹100
Engineering, hosting and accessibility work — including the screen-reader audit we commission twice a year.
- ₹8 of every ₹100
Legal support for reporters, records requests and the cost of defending stories that attract pressure.
- ₹5 of every ₹100
Payment processing, customer service and administration.
“A subscription is not a donation. It is a claim on our attention, and we would rather be held to it than thanked for it.”
Leela Menon, Reader EditorEditorial independence, in practice
NewsDunia is owned by a single company, Catalyst Web Trendz Pvt. Ltd., and that ownership is disclosed on every page of the site. No political party, candidate, industry association or trade body holds any stake, and we do not accept funding from any of them for any purpose, including events.
Where a story touches our own owner, an advertiser or a licensing client, we say so inside the article in the same typeface as the copy around it. Reporters declare shareholdings annually. Nobody on the business side has editing rights in the publishing system, and access logs are reviewed each quarter by the standards editor.
Subscription revenue matters to us precisely because it is the least conditional money we take. It comes from readers who can leave, which is the only kind of accountability that works reliably.
Our commitments to subscribers
- We will never make cancellation harder than signing up. Two clicks, no phone call, no retention script.
- We will not raise your price during a paid term, and we will email you 30 days before any renewal price changes.
- We will not sell or rent your email address, ever.
- We will publish our corrections in full, including the ones nobody noticed.
- We will tell you when a story was updated and what changed.
- We will keep breaking news, public-safety information and election results outside the paywall.
Students and educators
Verified once a year, applied automatically at renewal.
70% off
Student rate
₹539 a year for anyone enrolled in a recognised school, college or university in India. It carries every Digital Annual feature, including the archive, because coursework needs the archive more than anything else we sell.
Verify with an institutional email address or a scanned enrolment letter. Renews at the student rate for as long as you remain enrolled, up to six years.
50% off
Educator rate
₹899 a year for serving teachers, lecturers, librarians and research staff. Includes classroom reprint rights for up to 25 articles a year and permission to reproduce our charts in teaching material with attribution.
Verify with an institutional email address or a letter from your head of department. Educator seats can be converted into a campus licence at any point, with the balance credited.
Free
Journalism schools
Full class sets are free for accredited journalism and mass-communication programmes, for one semester per cohort. We ask only that a member of our staff be allowed to sit in on one class and answer questions, on the record.
Apply through the reader-services desk with the course code and expected class size. Applications are reviewed within five working days.
Payment, invoices and cancellation
The parts of a subscription that usually go unwritten.
Ways to pay
- UPI — any app, with an auto-pay mandate you can revoke from your bank
- Credit and debit cards — Visa, Mastercard, RuPay, American Express
- Net banking — 54 Indian banks
- Wallets for one-off annual payments
- NEFT or purchase order for institutional licences
GST invoices
- Every paid plan issues a GST invoice within 24 hours
- Add your company name and GSTIN in billing settings before the charge date
- Invoices are downloadable for 84 months
- Place of supply is taken from the address on your account
- Institutional invoices can be raised against a purchase order number
Auto-renewal
- Monthly plans renew on the same date each month
- Annual plans renew twelve months from purchase
- We email a reminder 7 days before every annual renewal
- Turn auto-renewal off and access simply ends at the term date
- A failed payment retries three times over ten days before access pauses
Cancelling and refunds
- Cancel in two clicks from Account → Subscription. No phone call
- Access continues to the end of the paid period
- Full refund within 14 days on annual plans, 7 days on monthly
- After the window, annual plans are refunded pro rata on request in cases of bereavement, relocation or hardship
- Refunds return to the original payment method within 5–7 working days
The numbers behind the plans
Audited for the financial year to 30 June 2026.
0
Paying subscribers
0
Full-time journalists
0
Annual renewal rate
0
Bureaux in India
Subscriber count excludes free registrations and complimentary campus seats. Renewal rate is measured on annual plans that reached their first renewal date in the period.
Why subscribers stay
Three readers, quoted with permission.
Deepa Rane Digital Annual, Pune — subscriber since 2022
“The archive is the reason I renew. I write policy briefs, and being able to pull the original reporting from four years ago — with the corrections attached — saves me a week of work each quarter.”
Sameer Vaidyanathan All Access, Kochi — subscriber since 2019
“I pay for the plain labelling as much as the reporting. When something is sponsored it says so at the top, and when something changed after publication the note tells me exactly what changed.”
Ritika Bora Student rate, Guwahati — subscriber since 2025
“₹539 for the year with full archive access is less than my monthly travel card. The verification took one email and the PDF export handles all my citations.”
Pricing questions
Eight we are asked most. The rest live on the full FAQ page.
Start with Free. Eight articles a month covers roughly two a week, and breaking news, live blogs, election results and public-safety notices never count against the meter. If you find yourself hitting the limit in the third week of the month, Digital at ₹199 is the natural next step, and you can drop back down at any renewal without penalty.
Digital Annual adds the full searchable archive back to 2011, PDF export of up to 50 articles a month, all data tables behind our charts, four device sign-ins instead of two and a one-day reader-services queue. It also costs ₹589 less over twelve months than paying monthly.
If the archive does not matter to you, monthly Digital is the honest recommendation — we would rather you paid less and stayed.
Yes, in both directions. Upgrading takes effect immediately and we charge only the difference, calculated pro rata to the day. Downgrading takes effect at your next renewal date, so you keep the higher tier for the time you have already paid for. Neither change resets your subscriber-since date or your saved lists.
Every price on this page is inclusive of GST at the prevailing rate, so the amount shown is the amount debited. Add your company name and GSTIN under Account → Billing before the charge date and the invoice will carry them; invoices are issued within 24 hours and remain downloadable for 84 months.
Account → Subscription → Cancel. It is two clicks, there is no retention questionnaire and nobody will telephone you. Access runs to the end of the period you have paid for, after which the account reverts to the free tier with your saved lists intact. Cancel within 14 days of an annual charge, or 7 days of a monthly one, and we refund in full.
Not during a term you have already paid for. If the list price changes, existing annual subscribers keep their current rate for the life of the subscription unless they change tier. If we ever do need to move a renewal price, you will get an email 30 days before the charge with the old price, the new price and a one-click way to cancel.
No. Advertisers do not see stories before publication and cannot ask for one to be changed, delayed or withdrawn. The commercial team has no editing rights in the publishing system and does not attend the news conference. Sponsored material is produced by a separate studio, labelled “Paid content” at headline size and kept out of news feeds and search results.
Where a story concerns an advertiser or our owner, the relationship is disclosed inside the article itself.
A licence is billed once against a single GST invoice or purchase order, uses domain sign-in or single sign-on rather than shared passwords, and adds rights individual plans do not carry — classroom reprints, IP-range access in reading rooms and, at 200 seats and above, coursework access to our data tables. Per-seat pricing falls from ₹1,299 to ₹699 as the seat count rises, with a further 25% reduction for public libraries, government schools and registered non-profits.
Not sure which plan fits?
Tell us how you read — a few stories a week, a whole newsroom, or a class of sixty — and the subscriptions desk will recommend the cheapest plan that actually covers it. We answer every enquiry within one working day, Monday to Friday, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM IST.