👩‍🌾🤑 Why I Charge: The Farmer Fantasy vs. The Wolf Rule.

🔥 RSO™ | The polite lie is that charging is for you. This is why I don’t play shepherd.

Sep 17, 2025

This little prompt has been blinking at me for two weeks now. The polite announcement. The ‘explain yourself’ with community buzzwords and the founder speech. The softly-lit ‘why I’ve gone paid’ post.

It wants me to play the part.
The builder. The community leader. The reluctant capitalist.

I’m meant to give you THE script.

You know the one.

It starts with soft-focus sincerity. A humble thank-you. A quiet ode to the journey. A whispered love letter to ‘community’. All a polite lie. Then the pivot:

‘After much thought… I’ve decided to introduce a paywall’.

Cue the violins. Cue the emoji. Cue the performance of emotional struggle dressed up as moral maturity. All choreography. All rehearsed. All probably from ‘how to and when to turn on sub guides on’ here, Reddit, wherever else, whisper the same bedtime story of the gentle grift.

The Good Old Fable of Free.

The blessed bedtime story:

‘Give everything away. Reach your audience. Win their hearts. Build trust. Then, when the numbers are right, drop a paywall. But do it gently. Do it humbly. Do it ‘for them’.

It sounds noble. Strategic. Even kind.

But it’s just modern snake oil. A spiritualised funnel. The ritual of conversion dressed up as generosity. No matter where you look, Substack, Reddit, TikTok, Fansly, Twitch, Insta, Patreon, the list is endless and the same myth persists:

Creators are saints. Audiences are family. And money is a weird, awkward thing that must be smuggled in under the false pretence of I’m charging for your benefit.

What a load of shite.

The Farmer Fantasy.

Let me tell you the PG version I grew up with:

Sheep fear the wolf. But they adore Miss Little Bo Peep. The darling shepherdess who sings lullabies while leading them straight to slaughter.

That’s the farmer’s fantasy right there. Keep the sheep fat. Docile. Multiplying. Promise them long lush green, green grass of home. All darling. All smiles. All softness. ‘It’s for you’. How graciously selfless.

Patience, here, isn’t a virtue, it’s a business model.

Let them graze. Let them gorge. Keep whispering about freedom and community and togetherness. Virtue feeds. And when they’re fully domesticated? Count clicks. Fence the field. Smile wider. Call it a favor. And mass harvest.

The Three-Step Grift.

STEP 1: The Free Feast
Everyone’s welcome. All-you-can-eat sincerity. It’s ‘about the writing’. ‘About connection’. ‘Just vibes’. Everything looks so generous. Free goodies. Nom noms.

STEP 2: Fatten the Herd
Engagement spikes. Numbers swell. The creator beams: ‘We’re building something together’. Everyone’s invested. The herd’s hooked, lovely stuff.

STEP 3: The Reveal
Suddenly, the paywall goes up. The music softens. The excited message emerges:

‘This was never about money, but… to keep this sustainable, worth my time, I need your help. And so. Great news! I’ve decided to do something for YOU.
WE’VE worked so hard to build this market, sorry, *community. That I love so much. I’ve decided YOU can pay to keep grazing the same fodder. Isn’t that brilliant? YOU will support ME, sorry, *THE COMMUNITY.
Congrats, WE made it!’

Yeah, congrats. You’ve been sold the same grass, now behind a paywall, and told it’s your duty to buy in. Support the creator. Support the dream. Support the ‘community’. What a generous little trap.

Now.

I couldn’t give a toss about singing you lullabies while calculating your lifetime value. Fattening anyone with freebies only to flip the switch. Performing generosity to justify survival. And I’m definitely not interested in pretending that charging is something I do for you instead of me.

The paywall isn’t a pivot. It isn’t a reveal. It isn’t a ‘tough decision’.
It’s just the model. Since the very first RSO post.

Some is free. Some isn’t.
Simple.

Why? Because every post costs something. Not just time. Not just effort. It costs decision. Focus. Teeth.

Writing isn’t a byproduct of vibes. It’s work. Work that can slice hours from your life and throw them into a furnace to maybe, just maybe, come out with something sharp and alive on the other end. Or shite. That’s also a very real possibility.

So yeah. I charge. Because the real betrayal is not putting up a paywall.

It’s pretending not to while plotting the whole time.
It’s staging generosity as a launch funnel.
It’s marketing manipulation as moral strategy.

People stage asking for money as selfish by posing as above it; ‘I just want to write‘, or ‘I want to find my people’ the guise of higher virtue. But I don’t do switcheroos. I don’t do patience-for-profit. I don’t do that softly-softly cult of virtue.

No bait. No switch. No drama. The field is fenced. The grass costs. At least I don’t dress it up as a generous switcheroo. Wolves survive. Farmers fatten. I charge. End of story.

If You’re Reading This — Ta Very Much. Truly.

Whether you end up paying, sharing, or just lurking silently — cheers.

I might not coat this in sugar, but I do recognise what it means for anyone to spend time on words I wrote.

And if you end up supporting it with actual money? That’s real. I don’t take it lightly. But I won’t pretend we’re a collective. I don’t even know if people are capable of being a collective anymore, outside of my own. But I do value the hell out of it.

Try the single-use unlock. If you like it, great.
If you subscribe for more, bloody amazing.
Don’t like it? No problem. It is what it is. This isn’t a hostage situation.

I won’t waste either of our time with pretence.

Some is free. Some isn’t.
That’s it.

— RSO