True! But after all, they're not giving away swimsuits for free at Macy's :)

We are a small company and we're all recovering academics (mostly Ph.D.s in physics and computer science). We built Authorea because we are annoyed by the slowness and inefficiencies of both collaborative writing and scholarly publication. We believe that we built a product that is both useful (it makes collaborative writing faster, more seamless, and a bit less painful) and also visionary in its nature (we deconstructed LaTeX's old fashioned ways and allowed dynamic, interactive figures and data to be part of scholarly articles). We also think that if a product is good enough, researchers and universities should be willing to pay for it. The problem is: what do we charge for? Since we are passionate about Open Science, Open Access and Open Data, we figured that we would charge for privacy so that on the one hand, we have a sustainable business (which is important and great!) and on the other, we are encouraging scientists to write in the open (our mission, equally great and important!).

That is in a nutshell, why we are charging for privacy, i.e., "the swimsuit".

We have been, from day 1, open to suggestions, so I ask you: do you have ideas for alternative models?