Supporter, Premium, Free: Where New Features Go First
I am working on more features for Elephant. Everyone without admin permissions might ask: Who gets them, and when? Here's my plant for rolling features out.
Over time, Elephant will gain more features - I am already working on a few of them and have a backlog of even more. Ideally, Elephant will support any kind of exercise we need during language learning (some ambition is good).
However, which plan will get which features? What is the timeline of feature introduction? Here is a very confusing graphic depicting my idea of how this should, and for the foreseeable future will, work.
Every new feature will first be available to the “Supporter” tier only. These are the people supporting Elephant the most - through money or other contributions, volunteering as testers and more. They get to see what’s coming first.
The barrier for Premium subscribers is time and testing completion: After some time, when I am happy with the feature, it will be available to all Premium users. There will never be a learning-focused feature available only to Supporters.
This is not the same for Free Tier users. My goal is to make any feature available to the free tier that is:
- Beneficial to all users.
- Cheap to run.
Examples for these categories: Corpus access, like searching for a sentence, looking things up in the dictionary, is very cheap to run. Analysis is not cheap; it needs to create audio, translations, check correctness and more. However, analysis grows the corpus of Elephant, enabling everyone to learn more.
The next blog post will be about the actual new features I am working on: Numbers, word scramble, listening, and sentence writing.
And later, some outlook on long-term plans (long-form text support and more).
- David