I just wrote a catchy title (which can be a bit misleading, but not dramatically, as all the audiobooks I'm mentioning are really accessible to people; I developed all the infrastructure needed for that), and tried to clarify everything in the post itself.
There are 70,000 audiobooks in the catalog, and people can listen to them. If audio is generated on-demand in the background, it does not make them "not-audiobooks", and it does not make my post a lie. "If it looks like a duck..."
It's just a technical implementation detail. And I'm not hiding it; I'm describing it in the post
1. There are 70,000 audiobooks in the catalog, and people can listen to them.
If audio is generated on-demand in the background, it does not make them "not-audiobooks", and it does not make my post a lie.
It's just a technical implementation detail. And I'm not hiding it; I'm describing it in the post.
I cannot describe the implementation detail in the short title.
It's just that you decided to believe that it's a lie, saying it very confidently, and taking down the post that was received generally very positively.
2. It's not a subscription, it's one-time purchase of hours.
I explained what I did in detail.
I'm open in the comment section and explained my reasoning regarding the pricing.
I've made practically no money off of this project so far.
There is an option to cache, but there is also an option to crowd-source, which makes the price for the first person smaller.
Moreover, if you try to buy an 'hour plan' for $15 and listen to any PG book, you will not be billed for the converted chunk, so the caching works as you'd expect.
They're using a previous generation of TTS models, which most of the reader apps are using. They're reasonable, cheap, but sound noticeably worse than OpenAI's or 11Labs. I don't like them.
On the one hand, I want to make money.
On the other hand, I understand that making everything available for free would be much more aligned with the Project Gutenberg philosophy.
I left my job, living on the savings, and in the last year listenly made only $400 ~= $35 MRR.
Although I was not doing much marketing.
I'm dreaming of it making $1k, $3k, $5k MRR.
Right now, I set the price to be 50% of the API cost, so I would make a profit starting from the 3rd same book purchase.
But maybe I should make it fully social project, get some donations, and treat it as "lead magnet" to monetize something else.
I'm open to your suggestions!
I really thought that 1.5x playback speed would be the same as 1.5x generation speed. Wow. Looks like I was wrong.
Regarding the subscription — I thought that no subscription was actually a competitive advantage, but now so many people are telling me to do it, that I'm really not sure anymore.
I just wrote a catchy title (which can be a bit misleading, but not dramatically, as all the audiobooks I'm mentioning are really accessible to people; I developed all the infrastructure needed for that), and tried to clarify everything in the post itself.