Supporter, Premium, Free: Where New Features Go First
I am working on more features for Elephant. Learners may reasonably ask who gets them and when. Here's my plan for rolling features out.
Over time, Elephant will gain more features. I am already working on a few 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 graphic showing how I plan to roll out new features.
Every new feature will first be available to the “Supporter” tier only. These are the people supporting Elephant the most through subscriptions, testing, or other contributions. They get to see what’s coming first.
Once a preview is stable and tested, 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 Elephant’s shared corpus, so it remains Free and enables everyone to learn more.
The v0.16.0 release post introduces Numbers, Word Scramble, Listening, and Guided Writing.
And later, some outlook on long-term plans (long-form text support and more).
David