What costs money
Almost nothing. Two features call paid services on your behalf, and everything else is free because it costs us almost nothing to run.
There is no subscription tier that unlocks the format, no watermark to remove, and no export limit. A story you make is a file you own.
| What | Cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Reading and playing stories | Free | Runs entirely in your browser. No account needed. |
| Browsing the Gazette | Free | A public index. No account needed. |
| Writing and opening .ov files | Free | The format is open and the library is MIT. You can do this without us. |
| Publishing and sharing | Free | A story is a few kilobytes of text. Storage is not the expensive part. |
| Exporting video | Free | Rendered and encoded in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and no server does the work. |
| Browser narration | Free | Your browser speaks the text in the document. No service involved. |
| Illustrate — generated images | Paid | Each picture is generated by an image model, charged per image. Nothing is generated until you press Generate on a specific scene. |
| Narration in exported video | Paid | Real speech is generated through ElevenLabs, charged per character. Only when you switch Narrate on for an export; the browser's own voice stays free for playback. |
| AI Studio generation | Paid | Building a story from a piece of writing calls a language model, charged per request. |
Why those two
The pattern is simple: anything that runs on your machine is free, because it costs nothing to let you do it. Anything that calls a third-party API has a real per-use price attached, and pretending otherwise would mean either capping it quietly or raising it on everyone.
Video export is the clearest example of the first kind. It renders frame by frame in your browser and encodes with WebCodecs — no server touches it, so there is nothing to charge for. The narration inside that video is the second kind, because a human-sounding voice comes from a service that bills per character.
Open, open source, and free are three different things
Worth separating, because projects often blur them:
- The format is open. The specification is published in full. Anyone can implement it, and nothing about it belongs to this website.
- The library is open source.
@openverb/geostoryis MIT licensed and on npm. It parses, validates, serialises and compiles stories, and you can build your own tools with it. - This platform is free to use — which is not the same as open source. GeoGazette is a hosted service with infrastructure behind it. The two paid features above exist because they cost real money per use.
If you would rather not pay for anything
You do not have to. Write the .ov yourself, let your browser narrate it, export the video, and publish it — all free, and all of it producing exactly the same file. The quickstart shows a complete story in about thirty lines.