Pricing
Open Archives is free to use. Save any card to your account and drop it into a deck. When you want your name and avatar on the front — as the card's Patron — that's where the monthly fee comes in.
For the curious. Browse the whole archive, save any card to your account, build small decks.
Be the one person whose name appears on the front of a card. Hold up to one hundred Patron cards at once.
For schools, libraries, museums, and foundations who want shared collections, custom branding, and curated student safety.
How being a Patron works
Any subscriber can claim a card and become its Patron. Your avatar and name sit on the front of the card for everyone who finds it. After 60 days the card returns to the open shelf for someone else to claim.
Each Patron card you hold runs for 60 days. Renew to keep it, or let it return to the shelf for the next person to discover.
One Patron subscription covers up to 100 active Patron cards at a time. Drop one, claim another.
Why this works: it keeps the archive moving. Cards don't sit forever in collections they've been forgotten in. The people who actually care about a subject end up its long-term stewards.
Cloud storage, image mirroring, and the engineering required to keep the archive running aren't free. A small fee from people who get the most out of the platform lets the rest stay free for everyone — and lets us send real money to Wikimedia.
The card returns to the open shelf and anyone else can claim it. It stays saved to your account so you can still use it in decks, but a new Patron takes the front-of-card credit.
Soon. We're building private collections — family photos, organizational ephemera, oral histories — with separate storage-based pricing. Reader and Patron plans will both include a starter allotment.
Yes. A meaningful share of every paid plan goes directly to the Wikimedia Foundation. The archive only exists because they do.