The Omg Lol Times · omg.lol membership price increases August 1

“All the News That’s Omg Lol”

The Omg Lol Times

Online Edition<br>As if we’d actually use ink for this?

Vol. 62 of 62

June 25, 2026 6:55 PM UTC

Free

omg.lol membership price increases August 1

Not going to beat around the bush or bury the lede: omg.lol’s annual membership will increase to $50/year on August 1, 2026.

I’ll go into more detail below, but here are the key things to know:

The new pricing will keep omg.lol healthy and will better position me to (hopefully) transition to working on it full-time (instead of just nights/weekends).

You can pre-pay for as much time as you’d like at the current $20/year price, just like with any domain.

Even at $50/year, omg.lol is a steal.

Why, and why now?

Prices on everything are going up, and it sucks. Lately it feels like there’s a new price increase announcement (or, if you’re Netflix, a “price update”, lol) every day. And I genuinely hate that I’m over here adding to that, myself, right now.

There are two main reasons for a price increase at this point. One is that the cost to run omg.lol has been steadily increasing as all of the infrastructure that runs the service is costing more. The other is that I really want to get to the point where I run omg.lol full-time, not as a night/weekend side project (which has been the case since 2019). And if you care about omg.lol and enjoy the service, you should want that too! More time and focus on the service means a better service for everyone. But it’s never going to happen at $20/year; the math just doesn’t work. So I could stubbornly keep pricing frozen where it is, continuing to eat the costs of increased service infrastructure, and keeping my goals moving at a snail’s pace... or I can bring prices closer to something more typical for the value (though still a crazy good deal) and make more meaningful progress on my broader long-term goals for the service. Again, if you care about this service, I think the better choice is pretty clear.

Why $50/year?

Finding the right price for omg.lol has always been a weird challenge, mostly because defining omg.lol is its own weird challenge. While other services offer one or two specific high-level features, omg.lol is a package of a bunch of stuff:

A super fun domain name (yes, your omg.lol domain is considered a domain, because omg.lol is a public suffix)

DNS control over that domain name

Email forwarding for your omg.lol address

A profile page with a bunch of neat editing features

A Statuslog for short status updates, flexibly embeddable in other web pages (status.lol)

A weblog feature (still in beta, but on the road to becoming ridiculously awesome!) (weblog.lol)

A permanent URL management (PURL) service and URL shortener (url.lol)

A pastebin with flexible output modes (paste.lol)

A code forge (source.tube)

A fully customizable photo gallery (some.pics)

A bookmark manager (later.place)

A web directory (url.town)

A Mastodon instance

An IRC server

An XMPP server

A powerful and flexible API for managing and automating your omg.lol content and configuration

And, somehow, still even more stuff (but this list is already too long!)

On top of that, perhaps our very best feature is our wonderful and special community of small web enthusiasts. Whether on Mastodon or IRC, this is a group of amazing people who hang out together, share fascinating things, learn from one another, and support each other.

Over the years, I’ve been asked repeatedly about splitting these features into separate/standalone services that can be paid for à la carte. But I’ve just never been interested in doing that. omg.lol is a single platform with many parts, and while not everyone uses every part of it, it’s still meant to be a package deal (and always will be). There are plenty of other services out there offering one or two of the features above but charging $5/month, which is $60/year. So I think a $50/year price point—which is $4.17/month—is still more than fair.

What if I can’t afford the new price?

We have a sponsorship program that can help, thanks to generous members. Nothing changes here; we’re still going to support our members who need a hand.

Final thoughts

I said it above, but I’ll say it again here: it sucks when prices go up. Unlike the streaming services or other megacorporations that are trying to extract every penny from their customers and don’t really care how they feel about it, I actually really do care how you feel. Some of you might learn about this price increase and be angry about it for the simple reason that your membership will cost more. And I think that’s a totally fair reaction. Others might decide that the value just isn’t there at the new price point, and that’s equally fair. This is why I’m providing more than a month’s notice and letting anyone stock up on years of service at the current price point—if you think omg.lol is worth $20/year but not $50/year, you can buy all of...