Ancestry seems to be moving toward tiered and segmented offerings. Ancestry bought newspaper.com and rolled it into their data but Ancestry members need to pay

Ancestry seems to be moving toward tiered and segmented offerings. Ancestry bought newspaper.com and rolled it into their data but Ancestry members need to pay extra (or extra x3) to access that data. Existing NPcom subscribers clip articles and make them available. However, I often see those clips get downsampled to the point where they're ~unreadable. It's so common I suspect Ancestry is purposefully crapping on people's good will. But then yesterday, I followed the 'free trial' breadcrumb bait (card req) from a result and unexpectedly found an OCR of the clipping I needed. The text was NPcom's usual globawful machine-reading gibberish - but I could suss out the info I needed. All that said, building out a free tier seems to be part of Ancestry's strategy - to bait as many people as possible to the subscriber door. There are more subscriber doors behind it but prospective users won't know that. Meanwhile FamilySearch is free but it's one-community-tree. I (many users) make a point of working out difficult/confusing families and recording them there. FS records are worth the cost of admission though. The existing profiles are no worse than you'll find on Ancestry (generally better). source: 25k profiles on Ancestry, 15k on FS.