One of the mistakes I made the first time around was making the entrance to Perzik free.
At the time, it felt right. I wanted Perzik to be accessible. I wanted as few barriers as possible between someone discovering the community and becoming part of it.
What I underestimated was the cost of running a community like this.
Servers need to run. Storage costs money. Development costs money. Moderation takes time. Keeping a platform alive, safe and functional isn't free, even when using it is.
For a long time, I covered those costs myself. Perzik became a personal investment that kept growing until, eventually, I could no longer confidently carry it on my own.
But money wasn't the only problem.
Free also means easy to enter
When joining a community requires nothing more than an email address, the threshold is incredibly low. That's wonderful when everyone arrives with good intentions.
Not everyone does.
An email address can be anonymous. It can be created in minutes and discarded just as quickly. There is very little accountability attached to it.
And when you're building a community around bodies, vulnerability, intimacy, self-expression and consent, accountability matters.
A lot.
I learned that the hard way.
So with the new version of Perzik, I want to build a little more friction into the door.
Not to make Perzik exclusive. Not because I believe paying automatically makes someone a good person. But because joining should be intentional.
I want people to make a small investment in being here. I want membership to mean something more than I had an email address and was curious.
And yes, there is also the very practical reason:
Someone has to pay for Perzik
There is another principle I don't want to compromise on while rebuilding this platform:
I don't want to sell your data.
That was a promise I made before, and it's one I intend to keep.
We've all heard the phrase: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
The internet has trained us to expect communities, social networks and platforms for free. But they aren't actually free. Someone, somewhere, is paying for them.
Sometimes that's advertisers. Sometimes it's investors. Sometimes it's through collecting, analysing and monetising the people using the platform.
And sometimes, as happened with Perzik, it's simply the person building it paying the bills until they can't anymore. I don't want any of those to be the foundation of the new Perzik.
I'd rather be straightforward about the exchange: you pay to be part of Perzik.
That money helps keep the servers running, the platform independent and the community sustainable. It also creates a small but meaningful barrier between the people who genuinely want to participate and some of the bad apples who simply want easy access.
Will payment magically keep every person with ill intentions out? Of course not. But it is one part of creating accountability.
Building something that can actually last
Recreating Perzik means looking honestly at what didn't work the first time instead of simply rebuilding the same thing and hoping for a different result.
I want a community that can sustain itself. I want stronger boundaries. I want accountability. I want to protect the people who choose to be vulnerable here.
And I want Perzik to exist without having to turn the people using it into the thing being sold.
So yes, the new Perzik will come at a price. The short version of why is in the FAQ.
Because independence has a cost. Privacy has a cost. Servers definitely have a cost.
And if we're going to build this again, I want to build it in a way that gives it a chance to stay.
