From the Matter blog:

How will Matter make money? That's a question we get asked with increasing frequency, and reasonably so. People want clarity when they adopt a new tool, especially when they’ll be investing in it over time. Today, we’ll finally answer that question!

The gist is that Matter will retain its free option, but a lot of it’s nicer features will be going behind a subscription. There isn’t a chart showing the exact changes, but they describe the paywalled features as:

HD text-to-speech, fluid highlighting and note-taking, integrations, full-text search, options to personalize Matter, and priority support.

Basically, it sounds like you can continue to save articles and read them in Matter, but you’ll lose text-to-speech, highlights, sync to apps like Obsidian/Notion/Readwise, and full text search.

Worth noting that the free tier will remain ad-free, which is great.

Ads – the standard business model for the previous generation of reading/media products – smuggle in bad incentives. When revenue is a function of impressions, it becomes harder to justify sweating tiny details ("will refining this interaction really increase engagement?") and easier to justify engagement hacks that degrade the experience ("let's send more push notifications").

Finally, and cost the subscription is your choice of:

1. $8/month
2. $60/year
3. $150 for 3 years

Personally, I can’t imagine using another tool to read as much as I do, and the Obsidian sync is absolutely essential to my blogging workflow, so I kinda feel like I will need to subscribe next month.

This kicks in January 15, 2023, so check out Matter now if you’re curious and get an “extended free trial” to see if you like it.