What Dahlia costs

Nothing. There is no card, no trial that turns into a charge, and no answer held back behind a payment.

Free, and specifically what that means

• No payment method is required to ask a question or to create an account.
• Your first answer does not need an account at all. After that you create one, and it is still free.
• No answer is truncated, blurred, or withheld until you pay for it.
• There is no upgrade that makes an answer more complete. There is one version of every answer.
• You can delete your account and everything in it at any time, permanently.

Where the money comes from instead

Attorneys and accredited representatives pay a flat subscription to be listed in Dahlia's directory. That is advertising, and it is priced and structured as advertising: a fixed fee for a listing, unrelated to whether anyone contacts them and unrelated to what happens if they do.

Why you are not the product

There is no advertising business inside Dahlia. Your information is not sold or rented, and there are no third party trackers on this page or in the product waiting to build a profile of you. For most free products that sentence would be doing a lot of work. Here it is the reason the business model is a directory subscription and not something else.