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by prepend
1134 days ago
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Thanks for making this app and it saves a few steps from downloading the books directly and playing them through Dropbox or some other app that plays mps3. I don’t understand the subscription angle from a user standpoint. Why is this $10/year? There’s no per user costs for you. I wanted to purchase the app as its quite convenient, but having a subscription for what I expect to use for the rest of my life doesn’t seem wise to me. Also coupled with the fact that I have a family so I’d need to pay $50/year just to listen to free librevox recordings. |
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Just wanted to clarify couple of points before explaining the $10/year for premium subscription for the app.
1) In iOS, there is a perk that developers can enable where if someone has a subscription for the app, the family members in iCloud settings (upto 6) are also automatically included with no additional cost. Many apps don't enable it though, but I've enabled it for all my apps since the day I introduced pricing.
2) The app itself is free, adhering to public domain ethos, even without the premium subscription there is no blocker to listen to thousands of books. I've included all the popular books, and in addition to the home page, explore section where you can filter by tags, languages will also enable anyone to listen with no ads or whatsoever. I'll explain more below regarding why I had to include $10 and some technical aspects.
In order to have seamless ux, I had to create and maintain a database and api with data which incur some cost but not earth shattering. The original problem I had with librivox is that there's a lot of metadata like description that's not searchable and if someone wants to read a book on a topic or keyword that's hidden deep inside description, it won't be shown on the website.
In order to solve this issue, I've created a service similar to elastic search, which proven to useful but a bit costly at the level where it means that I have to shut down the app in the long run.
So unhappily I introduced premium subscription that enables this feature. My plan was to introduce more features like importing audiobooks etc., however last time checked this app is not in breakeven range regarding the cost, so at the moment I'm focusing on other projects. Less than 0.01% buy the subscription which is not great but that at least reduce the risk of me incurring huge loss. The current state is that I do not want to take down the app for a simple reason that I've spent quite a bit time developing it, a lot of free users are still using it and leaving the door open for future if it at least gets in breakeven zone, so currently just doing minimal maintenance and fixing bugs if any occasionally.
A tip that I can share at my expense is that, even if you don't want to pay $10/year but want to use the advanced search, you can start the free trial that lasts for 7 days, just listen for few moments and download those keyword targeted audiobooks, so that they stay in your history. So even when you cancel the free trial, you can still enjoy your targeted audiobooks and thousands of books shown in home and explore screen. You have to cancel the trial before end of 6th day though.