Cafe Locked Out's Financial Statement

Dear Subscribers (both paid and free),

Cafe Locked Out started life as Cafe Locked Down in Melbourne, right in the middle of the Covid years.

Six years on, we’re still here — and we’re now reaching between five and six million people a month. That number isn’t just interviews. It includes the rants, the posts, the conversations, and everything else that happens in this space.

In a purely commercial sense, the smart move would be to lock everything behind a paywall. Why do all this work and give it away for free?

But we’re not a normal podcast. We’re closer to an online community — and a lot of people in this community are doing it really hard. Some of us are living in tents.

We simply can’t, in good conscience, cut those people off because they can’t afford a subscription.

So instead of going fully paid, we want to say this:

To everyone who already supports the work — thank you. You are the only reason we’re still able to keep going.

And if you regularly take something from what we put out, and you can comfortably afford to chip in, we’d be genuinely grateful if you did.

Your support doesn’t just keep the lights on. It keeps this space open for the people who need it most.

Thank you for being here.

Kelli and Michael

Cafe Locked Out