📢First month for $1, new pricing policy, free month for every patron, and free for content creators (soon).

Almost a month has passed since we released the early alpha for the Browser Mode feature, and it is now time to exit the 'chaos' stage and consider how we should proceed sustainably in the future.

It was not our choice to kill the original extension.

It took us 11 days to just realize that a third party had terminated our project, making the start quite difficult. Rebuilding a 4-year-old codebase from scratch is a tough job, especially with the added pressure of a big project being dead in production.

There are many things we would have done differently, but it is never too late to start. We are beginning by rethinking our Patreon tiers, which have not changed much since 2023.

The general idea is that we want our base tier to be extremely affordable, while our top tiers ($8/$16) should be filled with additional features that are worth supporting our project for, but all necessary features should still be free / present in the base tier.

We have faced issues with our current tier policy, as Patreon has not yet given us access to annual options, making our base tier unaffordable for countries with low wages. Additionally, all our resources were dedicated to recovering in an extremely short time, which has made it difficult to deliver on promises for our higher tiers.

We now need additional time to address some critical core issues before implementing new features, such as a list of high-tier patrons, etc.

We want to share our thoughts on the future pricing policy and announce that we are PAUSING BILLING FOR ONE MONTH for all existing paid members. This pause is to compensate for the chaos and bugs you encountered in the first month, as well as for the temporary pricing change for our base tier.

We may extend this pause if we are not satisfied with the state of the product in a month.

Summary of changes

• Billing is paused for one month to allow us to address critical issues in a healthy manner.

  • New members should still be charged; however, if you are an active patron expected to renew during the paused month, you should not be charged.

• Browser Mode tier is temporarily reduced to $2 per month until we gain access to the annual option.

  • The annual option is expected to be available in March 2025 at a rate of $2 per month (when paid annually).

  • $2 per month means operating at a loss; our $4 base monthly price will be reinstated the moment the annual option becomes available.

  • Existing members should enjoy one free month, as billing for them is paused.

  • We won't be changing the price of the legacy Browser Mode tier because we can't do that while the free trial is active, and changing prices might confuse people. The price of the new Browser Mode tier will go up to $4 as soon as the annual option becomes available. However, if you want to save $2, you can downgrade to the new Browser Mode tier.

• The free 7-day trial has been replaced with a $1 offer for the first month.

• The $8 and $16 tiers are temporarily hidden until we are happy with extra features implementation (billing for existing patrons is paused for one month).

• We are also developing a system to grant free access to all content creators, enabling them to utilize a limited version of Browser Mode without technical support, with the hope that each creator will bring us at least one paying user.

Browser Mode

Our base monthly price is $4 and is not going anywhere, as it is the minimal amount that makes sense.

Patreon is a U.S. platform that recommends $5 as a minimum tier, and our primary user base is also in the U.S., so we believe that $4 as a monthly price is completely reasonable.

However, our original idea was to make our base tier much more affordable for annual commitments, meaning that if you pay annually, you could receive 3 or even 6 months for free.

People often dislike monthly subscriptions, and not everyone is willing to use our product every single month while maintaining active patreon subscription. Therefore, a yearly commitment with an absurd discount seemed appropriate to us.

We want our base tier to be affordable; we don't aim to make a lot of money from it, which is why our top tiers should exist. The base tier serves as a way for us to ensure safety and proper support for a manageable number of users, while also limiting our presence on hostile websites to only those users who really need it.

However, if we set the price to just $1 or $2 per month, we are unlikely to receive any meaningful amount of money after all the fees. In contrast, $2 or $3 per month paid annually is a completely different story.

So, why don’t we offer an annual option now?

The problem is that we have to wait two months before Patreon grants us access to the annual option. Previously, we relied solely on donations, which were not enough to qualify for it.

Temporary solution

We are changing the monthly price for our base tier to $2 per month until we gain access to the annual option (March 2025). At that point, the price will return to $4 per month, or $2 per month if paid annually.

If you have already paid $4, don’t worry! We have paused billing for one month, meaning you will skip one billing cycle without losing access.

We will not be changing our legacy base tier price to $2 because we can't do that until last free trial user completes their trial, and if we change the price from $4 to $2, then back to $4 it might confuse people, which is a bigger issue than saving just $2. However, if you still want to save $2, you can downgrade to the new Browser Mode tier as there should be at least one billing cycle before we go with the annual path.

Free trial is replaced with try first month for $1

The free trial seemed like a great idea when we saw the appealing switch in the tier options.

Our Patreon integration was already in the extension, and we needed a way for people who couldn't wait to try the product and provide early feedback.

However, in practice, it turned out to be a bad choice, as the large number of free 7-day trials put significant pressure on us to fix issues as quickly as possible to retain as many users as we could.

This is not a healthy situation, especially since this is just a side project for us. Therefore, we are going to experiment with an alternative: instead of a 7-day free trial, we will try offering the first month for $1.

Charging $1 for the first month should give us more time to improve the product and retain patrons, and we believe this approach is much better from the user's perspective as well.

Enjoyer / Enthusiast ($8/$16)

Our top tiers represent a time of peaceful coexistence, where people who wanted to support our project opted for a higher contribution.

This approach allowed us to cover our costs, and it worked well.

These tiers utilize a much better IP geolocation service, which is already integrated into the new extension. However, it currently lacks the necessary UI elements, and our legacy UI currently does not recognize whether you are a patron, so there is no enhanced confidence zone on the map.

As a result, we have chosen to temporarily hide these tiers from the list of available options until we are satisfied with the implementation.

In the future, we plan to enhance these tiers with more features, but right now, we need to address critical issues, as we are still bleeding users every single day.

We have paused billing for one month to give us time to resolve these issues. However, if you are subscribed not to support us but to access those perks, you should probably temporarily switch to our base tier.

Free for content creators

We are exploring programmatic options to provide all YouTube and TikTok creators with free access to the Browser Mode feature.

Our browser extension offers numerous use cases for content creators, such as OBS integration. We prefer not to charge them, as even one paying user brought in by each content creator would be worthwhile for us.

Due to limited resources, we cannot manually review applications. Therefore, we will automatically grant creator access to those who log in using their YouTube or TikTok accounts and meet our subscription requirements.

Currently, we are considering thresholds of 1,000 YouTube subscribers and 50,000 TikTok followers. Please note that these numbers may change, and our team will periodically review accounts, manually disabling any that appear suspicious.

Creator access will have a limit on geolocation requests per minute to ensure that such accounts are not shared.

There will be no technical support available; if you encounter any issues, you will need to resolve them independently, as we can only allocate time to assist paying users.

We initially considered linking YouTube accounts to Patreon for verification, but this approach is complex. Instead, we will likely proceed with direct authentication using YouTube or TikTok, allowing our server to check if you meet the subscription requirements.

This will not give us access to your account; it will function like a social login to confirm your eligibility.

At this time, Twitch is not included in this program, as streaming random chats there is prohibited. However, if you are an active content creator on another platform besides YouTube or TikTok, please email us at videochat-extension@proton.me, and we will explore the possibility of automatic verification on that platform.

📈 Looking Ahead

We're committed to continuously improving Videochat Extension. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and as always, thank you for your incredible support!

If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to reach out!