With great self-awareness WinRAR releases official $150 merch: ‘What better way to support the software you’ve NEVER paid for than by buying a WinRAR bag?’

WinRAR, the compression and encryption software known for having a paid version that many users deftly dodge, has put out flashy new merch including a messenger bag modelled after its iconic logo. For $150, you can get some of the geekiest (and most fun) merch I’ve seen this year.

In an announcement tweet that has amassed well over 300,000 likes as of the time of writing, the WinRAR X account makes a pitch for why you should get its snazzy new WinRAR bag.

“What better way to support the software you’ve NEVER paid for than by buying a WinRAR bag? Do it! We dare y’all!”

The bag itself is based on the WinRAR book logo and uses the place of the magenta, indigo, and blue books as your storage. To thoroughly test how much space the 14 cm x 7 cm x 21.4 cm bag could fit, the team at Tern managed to fit 805 single-sleeved Yu-Gi-Oh cards into it. If you want to double-sleeve your cards to bring them to a tournament, you can expect to fit a little less. WinRAR later confirmed that the bag could fit three Diet Cokes. Though the original post doesn’t clarify, I assume they are talking about cans.

The WinRAR bag is officially supported merch made by the aforementioned site called Tern and, as well as stocking the aforementioned bag, you can get a $237 varsity jacket with WinRAR branding. Both WinRAR products are currently being made to order due to high demand so future orders won’t ship out until April.

Part of the reason this post went viral is because there’s quite a lot of early internet nostalgia around WinRAR. You don’t need a license to download or use WinRAR so the company has been seen as one of the good guys by sects of the internet for some time.

Even now, you can download WinRAR directly from its site without having to pay. You are encouraged to pay for WinRAR when you open the app but you can close the popout and continue to compress or extract your files. This is what the viral tweet is making a pretty tongue-in-cheek reference to.

However, with the adoption of native RAR support in Windows in 2023, WinRAR has become even more niche. This merch collaboration cashes in on the strong branding of WinRAR, and has resulted in a pretty cute bag at the same time. WinRAR has been interacting with customers showing theirs off over the last few days and the ‘high demands’ declaration on the website suggests the collaboration has started out strong.

My heart is definitely willing to pop this bookish bag into my cart but to be frank, my wallet might not be. A $150 bag wouldn’t usually be on my radar but I can’t say I’m not tempted.