By Dinis Cruz · November 7, 2026

Pay after the value: a business model without ads

How PrompTugal means to make money: readers pay a few cents a page after they have had the value, customisation at events comes first, and there is no advertising and no tracking.

Most publishing asks people to pay for value they have not had yet. A subscription, for what they might read. As I wrote in September, with a subscription "you pay 100% for the 10% you actually wanted".

At PrompTugal we do the opposite. Others ask people to pay for future value. We let them have the value first.

How it works for a reader

You come to the summit pages and you get something: the talk you would have missed, where to go, who is there, something you did not know. You spend time on the site. You come back tomorrow.

Then the meter:

• A starting credit. No account and no card to begin. No wall.
• Cents per page, by how much of the page you actually read. You pay for what you read, not for the bundle.
• Never blocked. The balance can go below zero. You keep reading.
• Top up, once. When it was worth it, you top up a few euros by card. Nothing renews.

Everything stays in your browser: the meter, the history, the receipts. A reader can also rate a page, and a rating re-prices it; a reader can decline to pay and say why.

By the time you pay, you are already glad you did. That is the whole idea. People pay because they already got something, not for a promise.

This is not a mock-up. The reading meter has been live on my first newsroom, newsroom.sgit.ai, since 11 October 2026, and the account and top-up are live on promptugal.news today.

Why not advertising

Since the penny press of 1833, the reader has been the product. In 2005, 82% of American newspaper revenue was advertising. Then the web took that monopoly, and the industry went to rent: subscriptions and paywalls, and more tracking to personalise and sell.

We will never do that. No advertising. No tracking of readers: no IP address, no cookie, no profile sold. No paying for coverage. We sell time, the experience and trust. Never the reader.

It is not a policy, it is the architecture. The site is static pages, with no back end that sees readers. Personalisation runs on the reader's own device, at the level of the semantic graph, and what a reader keeps lives in their own encrypted vault.

Where we start: customisation at events

Pay per use is the first stream, but not the biggest. The most powerful one is customisation. For this summit alone: the logistics of a team going (who goes where, what each will see), the briefing before a talk and after it, a version of the site with only what one person will see, their day and their meetings. A person coming for one day gets their day.

Most of that is not far from what already runs. It is what we will sell first, with readers paying after the value alongside.

The other streams

Once those sell, the same platform carries more:

• Other events. Events happen every week, and most handle their data badly before, during and after.
• The agentic team, deployed for a project, an event or a body of content.
• Agentic workflows, taught and installed for companies that want to run their own, safely.
• Data for agents. Feeds, triplets, JSON and graph objects that make agents faster and cheaper. Agents that save their owners money should pay for it.
• Intelligence packs. Who is who in AI in Portugal, mapped and kept current.
• Publishers. Helping existing publications run the same way.
• Licensing. Our open-source technology on a company's own terms, maintained by us.

Why it can be profitable

The stack costs very little to run: pages built from data, served statically, serverless, with no servers to run for readers. Agents do the repeatable work under a person's direction, so a new edition (an event, a sector, a language) is a configuration and a team, not a newsroom of hires. And every part was built before, on earlier projects, and is reused here.

An aim, not a result

My aim, in my own words, is to be profitable in the next couple of months, and take it from there. That is an aim. Today there is no revenue to report beyond the first reading top-ups, and we publish no projections because we do not have those numbers to give honestly yet.

Web Summit Lisbon, 9 to 12 November 2026, is the test: do people use it, come back and pay? We will publish what happens either way. If it works, we go faster. If it does not, we learn in public, change the product and try the next event. The cost to try again is low.

Tell me where it breaks

I want to hear from you, especially if you think this model fails. Would you pay a few cents a page for news you can check? What would stop you? If you run an event, would you pay for a version cut to your team?

Try it at promptugal.news, read the business plan on the investor site at promptugal.news/investors, and write to me through the contact page. Or find me at Web Summit Lisbon, 9 to 12 November 2026.