TravelFeed was always meant to be open. Sign up, start posting, then get a free Hive account. That was the idea.
Over the years, we built up solid search rankings. If you write about hiking in Patagonia or street food in Bangkok, Google actually finds it. Real travelers land on your posts. That part worked.
Spammers figured this out.
We're getting dozens of fake signups daily now. AI makes it trivial to beat captchas and confirm throwaway emails. These accounts post SEO spam, sketchy affiliate links, sometimes outright phishing. All riding on our domain authority.
We tried other fixes first. We stopped indexing posts from new accounts until they proved legitimate. We added more verification steps. The spammers just adapted. They always do.
Our curation team is volunteer-run. They do manual review of every post because that's how we've always done it - no algorithms deciding what's "quality." But they can't review 50 spam posts for every real one. Nobody could.
What's changing
New accounts signing up with email or Google need to pick a paid plan. Starts at $19/year.
This doesn't affect:
- Existing accounts - nothing changes for you
- Hive users - log in with your Hive account like always, no payment needed
The Starter plan
$19/year gets you:
- Posting access
- Verified badge on your profile
- 50,000 AI writing credits monthly
- Priority support
The badge tells curators and readers you're a real person who put down $19, not a bot farm.
To be clear: paying doesn't buy you a pass. The same curation rules apply to everyone. Spam gets removed, paid or not.
Already have an account?
You're fine. But if you want to grab a badge or help keep the lights on, there's an upgrade page. Already subscribed to TravelFeed Hosting? Your plan now includes the verified badge.
Look, we didn't want to do this. Free and open was the whole point. But we spent years building search rankings that actually help travel writers get discovered, and watching bots exploit that for phishing links isn't an option.
Thanks for sticking with us.
— The TravelFeed Team