u/RubinKin

Hey guys! The team is aware of the issue with selfies and currently working with one of our GPU providers to get a fix in place. Thank you for your patience!

We are putting out some thinking on the free tier. Nothing here is decided, I want to lay out the problem and the options as we see them and hear your thoughts on the following. What stays the same regardless:

• The initial preview with the premium model for users in select regions
• The 3 day full access trial

We believe anyone evaluating Kindroid should get a real taste of the actual product before deciding to commit, and the preview + trial structure does that well.

The part we're rethinking is indefinite free Lite access after the trial as well as the indefinite selfies that replenish daily. To be clear about the economics first: Lite is reasonable for us to serve as is, but as Kindroid grows every day we are aware at scale this model has misalignments and cracks in it. Some issues with it:

First, fairness. Perpetual free usage is funded by paying subscribers. Right now your subscription money partially supports a long tail of users who, under the current setup, have either chosen never to pay or are priced out entirely. That's charity by default rather than by design, and it doesn't sit right either way. Most free platforms square this circle by selling user data to keep free users monetized, which we don’t want to do, or showing tons of ads which we think is less bad, but also degrades the experience to some extent.

Second, the product itself. Lite as it stands is a worse experience and one we're honestly not proud of. It gets reviewed on app stores and discussed in the community as if it represents Kindroid, so a free user walks away thinking Kindroid is bad when what they actually experienced is Lite in its current state. A good amount of recurring complaints we see in tickets, memory especially, trace back to Lite limitations when digging deeper. We're effectively running two products and the weaker one is shaping perception.

Third, the current setup gives long-term free users no real reason to ever convert, which is how we ended up here.

So, two directions we've been weighing:

Option A: end indefinite Lite access, and alongside it introduce a low priced tier built on a significantly improved Lite model (better memory, cascaded memory, the works). Unlimited text for the better Lite, selfies at around free tier levels, no audio. For people who can't afford the full sub, including folks in lower income countries we've never properly priced for, this would be a legitimate product at a fair price instead of a degraded free one. Existing free users would get a reasonable grace period, no abrupt cutoff. We're also considering an alternative which would be limited usage on the flagship model potentially as well.

Option B: rewarded ads to unlock usage. We've looked at this and we're cold on it. It's annoying, the revenue is low at our scale, it carries platform and policy unknowns, and more than anything it undercuts the premium positioning we've built Kindroid on. Maybe worth revisiting at much larger scale someday, but the economics don't make sense for us right now.

We're leaning toward A, but the details are genuinely open. None of this affects paid subscribers directly, but you're the ones funding the platform. For long time free users, interested in your thoughts on the low priced tier (what it should include, what feels like a fair price) and what a fair transition looks like for current free users.