- Starting price
- Free, then $10/mo or $108/yr
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web - iOS - Android - RSS - podcast
- Developer
- The Babylon Bee, LLC
- Launched
- 2020
- Updated
- Jul 26, 2026
The verdict
Not the Bee posts about sixteen times a day, collecting real news chosen because it sounds invented, from an openly conservative and openly Christian standpoint. Read it free if you want that beat and accept a heavily advertised page; pay the $108 a year only for the members-only social network, which is what the money buys. Skip it if you need a published sourcing standard, a corrections policy or a masthead - this site has none of the three.
Try Not the Bee ↗Opens notthebee.com
The premise confuses people, so start there. The Babylon Bee writes satire. Not the Bee does not. Every page carries the same meta description - "Not the Bee is your source for headlines that should be satire, but aren't" - and the job is to find real news absurd enough to pass for a Bee headline, then add the joke. Seth Dillon, who co-founded it with Adam Ford, calls it "a humor-based entertainment site that offers commentary on stories that are so outrageous they should be satire, but somehow aren't".
It launched on 31 August 2020, the date on Ford's welcome post; Wikipedia says 1 September. The entity in the terms is Not the Bee, LLC of Jupiter, Florida; the apps are published by The Babylon Bee, LLC. Wikipedia records that a November 2023 restructuring left Dan Dillon majority owner here and Seth Dillon in control of the Bee. The sites are separately owned but share a login, paywall, codebase and ad stack. A January 2024 amicus brief from both told the Supreme Court this one runs "entirely accurate headlines".
The scale is real: 35,088 article URLs in the sitemap on 26 July 2026, which over 2,155 days since launch averages 16.3 posts a day. The site's own category index states the beat more clearly than any outside summary could: Donald Trump 695 articles, Crime 675, Joe Biden 652, Opinion 533, Illegal Immigration 392, Abortion 355, Transgenderism 340. Christianity sits 24th at 204.
What is missing is the apparatus. The site is fifteen static pages and not one is an editorial policy, a sourcing standard, a corrections page or a masthead. The About page is the Bee's satire verbatim, the FAQ is one question about Firefox, and the embedded post a story is built on becomes a subscribe prompt at about four days old.
✓ The good
- Free and unmetered - all 35,088 article URLs open to a logged-out reader, no counter, no wall
- Does not pretend to be satire - the premise is in every page's meta description, and the satire lives on a separate domain
- Links primary documents when a story has one - 13 consecutive articles cited justice.gov, PubMed Central, Axios and nj.com
- Publishes its own beat in numbers - the category index gives article counts per topic, so the focus is visible before you pay
- Subscription is bought on the web - neither app store offers an in-app purchase, so billing avoids Apple and Google
- Community rules are specific rather than decorative - doxxing, profanity, hate symbols and alt accounts are banned by name
✗ Watch out
- The About page never describes Not the Bee - it is the Bee's satire page word for word, calling that site "totally inerrant in all its truth claims", on a site whose premise is that it is not satire
- Embedded evidence is paywalled by age - after about four days the source posts become "Embedded content hidden - Subscribe to view the full article, including all images, videos, and social media embeds"
- The identical Premium Bundle costs $20/month and $180/year on notthebee.com/join and $12/month and $120/year on babylonbee.com/plans, with no promotion flag set on either page
- Sourcing is inconsistent - 6 of 13 consecutive articles carried no outbound link, and one quoted the Associated Press at length without linking it
- Bylines are mostly pen names - 16 across the 60 newest articles, among them Harambe, Davy Crockett and Edward Teach, each resolving to an archive page with no bio or contact
- No standards, corrections or ownership page in the 15-page sitemap; Media Bias/Fact Check rates the site Right 8.1 with Mixed factual reporting 6.3, and nothing here responds
Best for
- Readers who already like The Babylon Bee and want the real-news companion
- Conservative Christian readers wanting a light daily scroll
- Anyone who wants a members-only alternative to mainstream social feeds
- Bee subscribers whose membership already includes this site
Avoid if
- You need a published sourcing or corrections policy
- You want religion coverage rather than politics and viral news
- You object to heavy display advertising while reading free
- You want news presented without an explicit political slant
What Not the Bee is
Not the Bee is aggregation and commentary. A typical post runs 150 to 400 words: a headline written for the absurdity, an embedded post or video, two or three lines of reaction, often a link to whoever broke it. A stolen armoured SWAT vehicle links nj.com; a Medicaid fraud sentencing links justice.gov; people stinging themselves with bees to treat Lyme disease links a PubMed Central paper.
Attached is the paid social network, which is what a subscription buys: member posts, article comments, groups, following, bookmarks, badges and guest invitations. The public Discover page lists four featured groups at 1.5K, 1.3K, 917 and 829 members - all four of them meme groups. There is also a podcast and a shop.
The non-satire half of a satire company, sharing its plumbing
Nobody else holds this position: a newsroom whose selection criterion is that a true story sounds fabricated, run by the company that fabricates stories for a living. The Bee needs its satire to stay unmistakably satire, so real news gets its own domain, LLC and ad stack, and the joke is that the two look alike. Its podcast promises "the headlines that make you question whether you're reading CNN or The Babylon Bee".
The separation collapses in odd places. notthebee.com/about serves the Bee's satirical About page unchanged, notthebee.com/advertise is headed "Advertise on The Babylon Bee - Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire", and the figures there - 10 million monthly users, 20 million monthly page views, 61 percent of the audience aged 18 to 34 - are never attributed to one site or the other. For a publication whose value depends on readers knowing which site they are on, those are the wrong two pages to share.
How it signals that it is not satire, and where the signal fails
The signalling that works is structural. The satire sits on another domain. Every page's meta description says the headlines "should be satire, but aren't". The NetChoice amicus brief told the Supreme Court this site runs "entirely accurate headlines". Stories carry real datelines and real names.
The signalling that fails is the About page. Ask notthebee.com what it is and you get the Bee's satirical self-description: "the world's best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims", created "ex nihilo on the eighth day of the creation week", "100% verified by Snopes.com", with complaints to be taken up with God. The officers named are the Bee's; no editor is named for this site at all. A reader at the page meant to explain the difference is told, as a joke, that the other site is inerrant.
The embed paywall, and why it matters more here
On most sites a paywall hides prose. Here it hides the evidence. Sampling by age on 26 July 2026: articles dated 23 to 26 July rendered every embed, one from 22 July hid a single embed, and from 21 July back the counts climbed to 3, 5, 6, 12 and 20. Of fifteen articles drawn at random from the archive, all fifteen hid between 1 and 17.
The consequence is specific. On a story whose whole claim is "watch this video", a free reader gets the writer's description and a label where the video should be. One piece on an attack in Germany quoted the Associated Press at length, named it, linked nothing, and set the lines "More from Berlin police:" and "More about the suspect:" above embeds - exactly what disappears at day five.
The social network is the product you are paying for
The pitch has held since 2020: "the real magic comes with a subscription to our premium content and social platform", called in the same post "the best social network for Christians/conservatives out there" and "like Twitter meets Facebook, but without the toxicity or hostility toward conservative values", gated so members can post without being identified.
Community Score Points accrue for posting, commenting and reacting; each premium subscriber gets two guest accounts and unlocks more at thresholds set at the company's "sole and absolute discretion"; points can be voided on termination. The guidelines, updated 5 July 2023, ban profanity outright - asterisks included - plus hate symbols, doxxing and alt accounts, and forbid claiming to be a prophet. Commenters may not swear, while the App Store lists the app's own advisories as including "Infrequent/Mild Profanity".
Pricing
Free
Free
Every article, no meter, no account. Advertising funds it: pages load Google Publisher Tag, Prebid, Aditude and 4dsply, and the Play listing is flagged "Contains ads". Free readers cannot comment or use the social network, and on articles older than about four days the embedded posts and videos become a subscribe prompt.
Single Site (Not the Bee only)
$10.00/month or $108/year
From notthebee.com/join, which preselects annual. Benefits: an ad-free site, the social network, bookmarking, members-only content. $10.00 x 12 = $120.00 against the $108 annual plan saves $12.00, or 10 percent - while the subscribe component in the shipped bundle hard-codes "Switch to annual and save 17%".
Premium Bundle (both sites)
$20/mo or $180/yr on notthebee.com; $12/mo or $120/yr on babylonbee.com
One bundle, two prices, both read on 26 July 2026 with promo empty and the monthly-promo flag false. Benefits: both sites ad-free, members-only content on both, the Bee Headline Forum where subscribers pitch headlines to writers, and two guest accounts. $20 x 12 = $240 against $180 is 25 percent; $12 x 12 = $144 against $120 is 16.7 percent.
Included with a Bee membership
No extra charge
Babylon Bee premium subscribers and former Disrn subscribers have been told since launch that "you get a Not the Bee subscription for free", activated by registering here through the Bee login. Check an existing membership before paying.
Free is the default and genuinely usable - no meter, no wall, no limit across 35,088 URLs. The advertise page describes the inventory plainly: sponsored posts with a 300x250 banner or video, plus a "Prominent, always-visible anchor ad that stays pinned to the bottom of the screen, across the entire site".
Paid removes the ads and opens the community: $10.00 a month or $108 a year for this site, $20 a month or $180 a year for the bundle on notthebee.com/join.
That same bundle is $12 a month or $120 a year on babylonbee.com/plans. Both pages were read on 26 July 2026, both pass an empty promo string and a false monthly-promo flag, both describe two-site access. Both figures stand as printed. The bundle bought from the Bee therefore costs $12 a year less than the single-site plan sold here, for twice the sites.
The annual saving is stated inconsistently too. The shipped subscribe component hard-codes "Switch to annual and save 17%", which matches the Bee-side maths ($6.00 x 12 = $72.00 against $60) but neither figure this site supplies: 10 percent single, 25 percent bundle.
Free accounts look time-limited, and this is undocumented. The guidelines say "For free users, when your 30 day trial expires, you may not open a new account, even with another email address", and the code separates free trial users from paid subscribers - yet no trial terms appear on the subscribe page.
Where Not the Bee falls behind
Self-description. Fifteen static pages and not one says who edits this site, how stories are chosen, what the sourcing standard is, or how errors are corrected. The About page is the sister site's satire; the FAQ is one entry about Firefox blocking X embeds. WORLD News Group and The Christian Post publish a masthead and a standards page.
Sourcing discipline. Where a document exists it is usually linked - justice.gov, PubMed Central and bls.gov all appeared in sampling. But 6 of 13 consecutive articles carried no outbound link, resting entirely on embeds that vanish for free readers after four days, and one quoted the Associated Press at length with no link. An aggregator's value is the trail back to the original.
Attribution. Sixteen bylines across the sixty newest articles, most of them pen names: Harambe, Mister Retrops, Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, Doc Holliday, Edward Teach, Neo. Each links to a page listing that writer's articles and nothing else - no bio, credentials or contact. On a site asking readers to believe improbable stories, anonymous authorship is a cost.
Answering its critics. Media Bias/Fact Check rates the site Right 8.1 and Factual Reporting Mixed 6.3, calls it low credibility and cites failed fact checks. Accept that or not, there is no corrections log, no response and no standards page against which any of it could be tested - and a publisher that argued to the Supreme Court about inconsistently applied content standards publishes none of its own.
Breadth against the Christian framing. A reader arriving for theology or religion reporting finds a politics and viral-news site that shares their faith, not a religion desk - Christianity is 24th in its own category index, at 204 articles against 695 for Trump. A description, not a complaint, and the thing most often misread here.
Not the Bee vs. The Babylon Bee vs. The Pour Over vs. The Christian Post
The Bee is the reference point and the difference is simple: everything there is invented, everything here is meant to be real. This site rates the Bee 4.0. Running since 1 March 2016, it sells premium from $6.00 a month or $60 a year, and its $120 annual bundle covers both sites - $12 less than the $108 single-site plan sold here. A Bee headline can be quoted as a joke; a Not the Bee headline is offered as fact, which loads weight onto sourcing and corrections the Bee never carries.
The Pour Over serves a similar reader the opposite way and rates 4.7 here: a thrice-weekly email summarising the major stories without taking a political side, closing each with a turn back to Christ, free with premium around $8 a month. Not the Bee is sixteen posts a day, openly conservative, built to be scrolled. Want news without a political team, take The Pour Over; want absurdities with a conservative punchline, take this.
The Christian Post, 4.0 here, is the closest like-for-like: free, no paywall, no login, daily, conservative-evangelical in lens and right-of-center in opinion, but built as a newsroom with reporters and religion beats. It tells you what a denomination decided; Not the Bee tells you what a city council did that nobody could have invented. WORLD News Group (4.4) charges about $59 a year digital and names its worldview as policy - the model this site could adopt and has not.
The bottom line
Not the Bee does what it says: real, mostly sourced news that reads like Bee satire, written up fast, about sixteen times a day, from a conservative and Christian standpoint it never hides - its own category index puts Trump, crime and Biden ahead of Christianity by three to one. Free readers get the whole archive with heavy advertising and lose the embedded evidence on anything older than about four days. $108 a year buys an ad-free site and a members-only social network, though the same bundle costs $120 on babylonbee.com and $180 here. What stops this being an easy recommendation is not the politics, stated plainly, but the missing furniture of a news outlet: no masthead, no sourcing standard, no corrections page, and an About page that is still the satire site's joke.
Alternatives to Not the Bee
The Babylon BeeThe satire original, running since March 2016, from $6.00 a month or $60 a year - and its $120 annual bundle includes Not the Bee, $60 less than the same bundle sold on notthebee.com.
The Pour OverThrice-weekly Christian news email summarising the big stories without picking a political side, closing each with a turn back to Christ. Free, premium around $8 a month, ten minutes an edition.
The Christian PostFree daily evangelical newsroom, no paywall, no login, no meter. Conservative-evangelical lens and right-of-center opinion, but staffed as a newsroom with actual religion beats.
WORLD News GroupPaid conservative evangelical journalism, about $59 a year digital or $99 with print. Names its worldview as policy and publishes standards - the model Not the Bee has not adopted.
Religion News ServiceFree, donor-supported, non-sectarian religion newswire covering many traditions from outside any of them. Easiest option here for a reader who shares none of Not the Bee's politics.Frequently asked questions
Is Not the Bee satire?
No, and that is the whole premise. The Bee publishes satire; Not the Bee publishes real news selected because it sounds like satire. Every page's meta description reads "Not the Bee is your source for headlines that should be satire, but aren't". The confusion comes from its About page, which serves the Bee's satirical self-description instead - "totally inerrant in all its truth claims", "100% verified by Snopes.com".
What does it cost, and is it free?
Reading is free and unmetered - no account, no limit, ads on every page. A subscription is $10.00 a month or $108 a year: ads gone, comments and the social network open. The bundle covering both sites is $20 a month or $180 a year on notthebee.com/join and $12 a month or $120 a year on babylonbee.com/plans; both were read on 26 July 2026 with no promotion flag set, and both stand as printed. Babylon Bee premium subscribers are told this site is included free.
Does it link to the original sources?
Often, but not consistently, and free readers lose part of the trail. Across 13 consecutive articles the body links included nj.com, justice.gov, People, a PubMed Central paper, Axios and Fox News - while 6 of the 13 carried no outbound link at all, resting on embedded posts and videos as their evidence. Those embeds show for about four days, then become an "Embedded content hidden" placeholder with a subscribe prompt.
Who writes it, and is there an editor?
The 60 newest articles carry 16 bylines, most of them pen names - Harambe, Mister Retrops, Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, Doc Holliday, Edward Teach, Neo - beside named writers such as Joel Abbott, Harris Rigby and, in opinion, Peter Heck. Each links to a page listing that writer's articles and nothing else: no bio, credentials or contact. No editor is named for this site anywhere; the officers on the About page are the Bee's, and Wikipedia records Dan Dillon becoming majority owner in a November 2023 restructuring.
What is its editorial stance?
Openly conservative and openly Christian, and the site quantifies it better than any outside description could. Its category index lists Donald Trump 695 articles, Crime 675, Joe Biden 652, Illegal Immigration 392, Abortion 355, Transgenderism 340 - Christianity 24th at 204. The community is pitched as "the best social network for Christians/conservatives out there". Media Bias/Fact Check rates the site Right 8.1 with Mixed factual reporting 6.3, and no standards page exists against which that could be tested. None of it is offered here as praise or criticism.
Why is our rating lower than the app store score?
Because they measure different things. Our 4.2 is editorial and it rates the publication. The 4.9 from 7,415 ratings is the App Store aggregate for the iOS app - a high figure on a large sample - and it measures a well-built free wrapper, not a newsroom, so we do not publish it as this review's rating. Google Play shows 4.6 from 1,488 ratings on 10,000-plus downloads and flags the app "Contains ads". Neither store sells an in-app purchase, so the subscription is bought on the website.
Sources & further reading
- Not the Bee homepage ↗
- Not the Bee - About Us ↗
- Not the Bee - Join / Subscribe (plan prices) ↗
- The Babylon Bee - Plans (same component, different prices) ↗
- Not the Bee - Terms of Use ↗
- Not the Bee - Community Guidelines ↗
- Not the Bee - Advertise ↗
- Welcome to Not the Bee, by Adam Ford, 31 Aug 2020 ↗
- A complete balloonhead's guide to Not the Bee ↗
- Not the Bee - Categories index ↗
- Google Play listing - Not the Bee ↗
- Apple App Store listing, id 1549587642 (iTunes lookup) ↗
- Wikipedia - The Babylon Bee (ownership and launch dates) ↗
- Media Bias/Fact Check - Not the Bee ↗
- First Liberty - Bee and Not the Bee amicus brief, 24 Jan 2024 ↗
More Christian News Websites
The Pour OverThe thrice-weekly Christian news email that summarizes major stories without picking a political team, then closes each one with a paragraph pointing readers back to Christ - and it has quietly become the default news source for a generation of Christians sick of tribal outrage.
Christianity TodayChristianity Today has quietly become the closest thing global evangelicalism has to a paper of record - and the podcast network it built on top of it is doing more cultural work than the magazine itself.WORLD News GroupA 45-year-old Christian newsroom with a flagship daily podcast and a family-wide news ecosystem - and an editorial stance it states out loud rather than hides.Religion News ServiceThe largest non-sectarian religion newswire in America, founded in 1934 and quietly cited by Reuters, AP, and The New York Times - and a different kind of resource than almost everything else on this site.
First ThingsThe intellectual heavyweight of religion-and-public-life journalism in America - ecumenical in contributors, conservative in editorial sensibility, and unembarrassed about taking ideas seriously.
Premier Christian NewsThe UK's leading Christian news service has quietly become the go-to outlet for readers who want church news that isn’t filtered through an American lens - and that single difference reshapes the entire feed.