How Cuppa works

Last updated 18 September 2026

Cuppa is a daily news and games site for Australians, built and run by a small independent team. This page explains where the news comes from, how stories are chosen, what our software writes, what a person checks, and how we make money. If anything here is unclear, ask us.

Who makes Cuppa

Cuppa is owned and operated by Sideprojects Unit Trust (ABN 37 511 050 834), an Australian business. The people behind it also run Seniors Discount Club and YourLifeChoices. The team that builds Cuppa also edits it. There is no separate newsroom and no outside investor, which is why the site can change quickly when readers ask for something.

Where the news comes from

Cuppa does not employ reporters. Every news story starts with a published article from an Australian or international news organisation. We find those stories two ways: through a licensed news search service that indexes Australian mastheads, and through the public RSS feeds that publishers such as Mamamia, Kidspot, the Australian Women's Weekly, Now To Love and Guardian Australia offer for exactly this purpose.

For most stories, Cuppa shows a short summary and links to the original article so you can read it where it was written. We never copy a publisher's article in full and we never show a publisher's photographs.

The exception is the ABC. Under a commercial text-and-image licence with ABC Commercial, Cuppa republishes the full text and photographs of selected ABC News stories. Those pages are marked First published by ABC News, credit the ABC reporter, link to the story on abc.net.au, and are updated or removed within an hour if the ABC revises or withdraws the story.

How stories are chosen

Several hundred articles arrive every hour. Cuppa uses an editorial model, a piece of software that applies rules the team wrote, to score each one for relevance to Australian readers, especially women in their thirties to sixties, and to reject stories that are behind a hard paywall, are advertorial, are satire, or are UK or US domestic news with no Australian angle. Stories that score well appear in the feed, ranked by relevance, recency and how many readers are engaging with them. Members can also tune their own feed by choosing topics and hiding sources.

The team reviews the rules and the results regularly and adjusts them when the feed drifts. What you see in the feed is a selection, not everything published.

What our software writes

Cuppa uses artificial intelligence to write short text that helps you decide whether a story is worth your time. On each story that can mean:

• a one-sentence summary of the headline story;
• a Quick Sip, one line on why the story matters to you;
• a Long Sip, three short labelled paragraphs that tell the story for readers who will not click through. It is written only from the source article, never from other sources, and is withheld when the source is too short or paywalled to summarise fairly.

The morning briefing at the top of the feed and the First Sip newsletter are assembled the same way. Every piece of generated text passes automated checks for length, contact details, links and repetition of the headline, and any that fails is dropped rather than published. Generated text is a summary of someone else's reporting; the reporting itself belongs to the publisher we link to.

Some of the comments under stories are written by Cuppa's AI conversation starters, characters created to open a discussion the way a talkative friend would. Members' own comments and replies appear alongside them. The generated comments are written from the story alone and pass the same automated checks as the summaries. If one seems wrong or out of line, tell us and we will remove it.

Daily puzzles, quizzes and trivia are built by the team. Word lists, clues and answers are generated with software help and checked before they are published, and readers who spot an error can tell us through the contact page.

Corrections

If a summary misrepresents the article it came from, or a puzzle answer is wrong, tell us through the contact page or the feedback link in the site menu. We correct or remove errors as soon as we see them. Because the underlying reporting belongs to the original publisher, corrections to the facts of a story are theirs to make, and we update our summary when they do.

How Cuppa makes money

Cuppa is free and has no paywall or subscription. It is funded by advertising and by partnerships, and every paid placement is labelled:

• Sponsored articles, when they run, are marked Sponsored and name the brand that paid for them.
• Comparison forms for insurance and energy are provided with a partner, Compare Club, and say so on the form.
• Display advertising, where present, is served by third-party ad networks and is separate from editorial content.

Advertisers do not choose which news stories appear, and no story is included or removed because of an advertiser.

Your data

What we collect and why is set out in the privacy policy. Cuppa does not sell personal information.