We are taking a day off to celebrate our Silver Anniversary with colleagues and friends who have helped us build this news service

We will have limited service today.

The interest.co.nz team is off on its annual end of year function. This one is a bit special because it marks 25 years of our service.

It's been a great journey so far, and we are just getting started it seems.

We have seen off many challengers and learned a lot on the way. And we face formidable challenges ahead, like any news operation (and especially from the AI challenge where the tech giants just steal our content), and made tougher by our choice to keep all our content open and free. But we believe in our approach and will do so for as long as readers show their support.

To celebrate we are not only getting everyone together, we are returning to Waiheke as the venue, where many of our previous end-of-year celebrations have been held.

And we have invited a range of alumni to join us, all of whom have gone on to forge notable careers that they built on their interest.co.nz experience. They have all contributed to our development, both 'in front' as journalists, or 'behind the scenes' as developers and analysts. We are privileged that they agreed to come to mark our silver anniversary with us.

Like in every business there are milestones that you only realise are important in hindsight. And we have had many. We try many things, and most don't work, but some turn out to be important. Both types of initiatives involve the work of a team, and we are very lucky to have people committed to our mantra - explaining the economy to New Zealanders in a way that helps you make better financial decisions.

Over 2025 we have changed the benefits to Supporters (ad-free, comments, and email newsletters became exclusive for them), added an important new mortgage calculator that accounts for fees and incentives, we added a new regular quiz feature, and a new tool to help with car insurance. Behind the scenes we upgraded many processes. And we invested in a major investigation that we have yet to release.

Apologies for the limited updates today. But we will be back into it tomorrow. And we will have uninterrupted coverage and updates all the way through the holiday period.

Happy holidays to all.