The Sonoma Index-Tribune has dropped the $5-a-month fee it had been charging readers to access its news site for the past three months after AOL’s Patch.com started a free local news site, according to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

When the Index-Tribune put up the paywall, editor and publisher Bill Lynch said that free access to news stories “is a business model for newspapers that cannot be sustained.” Lynch did not return a call to the Press Democrat to explain his change of heart.