Three honest tiers, no advertising on any of them

How billing actually works

The two paid tiers are billed in US dollars, monthly or annually, through a Cairo-based payment processor that supports international Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay. Egyptian-issued cards (Banque Misr, NBE, CIB and the major retail banks) are supported in EGP at the prevailing CBE rate. We do not store card numbers on our servers; the processor tokenises every transaction. The processor's compliance level is PCI DSS Level 1, which is the highest tier and the same level used by major Egyptian banks.

Receipts are issued automatically by email after every successful payment. The receipt is suitable as a business expense voucher in most jurisdictions; the legal entity on the receipt is Muse Quick Field Guide L.L.C., with the Egyptian tax registration 684-159-723 visible at the bottom. Readers who need a more detailed VAT invoice (rare, but a few corporate readers have asked) can request one by emailing the desk; we issue it manually within two working days.

Cancellation, refunds and changes

You can cancel any tier from inside your account, at any time, with two clicks and no questions asked. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period — there is no immediate cut-off and no pro-rata calculation, because we are not running a usage-based service. If you have paid annually and want a refund, we offer a clean pro-rata refund of the unused months within the first thirty days of the annual term; after thirty days, we credit the unused months as a future-month credit rather than a refund. The reasoning is simple operational: the editors have already been paid for the months you used.

Switching between tiers is immediate. If you upgrade from Notes Plus to Field Plus mid-month, you are billed a pro-rata top-up for the rest of the month and the printed booklet is added to the next quarterly post run. If you downgrade from Field Plus to Notes Plus, the downgrade takes effect at the end of the current billing period and the next quarterly booklet shipment is the last one you receive.

If you need to pause the subscription for travel or for any other reason, write to the desk. We can pause Notes Plus and Field Plus for up to three months per year at the reader's request, with no proration penalty. This is operational generosity rather than a marketing promise — we do it because keeping good readers across an interruption is cheaper than acquiring new ones.

For groups, schools and institutions

If you are running a teaching programme, a museum studies department, an institutional library or a tour operation that needs Muse Quick access for a team of people, we offer a flat institutional rate. The current institutional rate is $290 a year for up to ten named readers, $640 a year for up to thirty, and a custom quote above that. Institutional access is at the Notes Plus level; we do not ship the printed Field Plus booklet to ten different addresses (it is logistically painful), but we will ship to a single coordinating address.

Press use — quoting our cards in journalism, citing our editors in academic work or excerpting in a book or longer-form guide — is free and unrestricted, with attribution. We do not require advance permission and do not charge for press use. A courtesy note before publication is welcome but not required.

Reader FAQ on tiers