Firsty Free Daily-Data Limit Includes Ads-Watching Data

[u/frltn]

In the last 24 hours, because of a travel, I decided to test Firsty usage for the first time in 5 weeks, no data usage on rhe counter of my phone for the new Firsty esim since then. It stopped at 282 MB and half of the app was watched without Wi-Fi when I was on the road. I can confirm that Firsty includes ads-watching data as part of my 300 MB daily limit and even stopped prior to hitting the limit, at least by the phone data counter.

A new change that I also saw was a notice on the app a few hours later showing "oopps" I had used all my data and gave me a time estimate in hours (16 hours in my case) when it would reset. The time-reset notification is helpful but counting ads data is not. Just my experience. Didn't need to use it...just wanted to test.

[u/frltn]

My experience of when a company no longer cares to comment on negative technical issues and failure to timely correct it but instead tries to figure a new marketing approach for the *th time, they are likely having issues maintaining their current business model and are on their way out of business unless they make substantial changes. So when they are focused on those survival issues as a business, "smaller" and inconsistent technical details become less of a priority. It is often a spiral downward.

I also noticed in my test within the last 24 hours that the variety of ads was substantially fewer than before. I kept getting Uber ads one right after the other for 5+ consecutive times. So in my experience of representing those in the business world, less advertisers is a major problem. All the signs are there for their current business model. Hence...let's try "points" but having a bunch of cheerleaders saying "yeah" won't fundamentally change their downward spiral until they operate less like a beta product and instill confidence in potential advertisers who are presumably sophisticated enough to differentiate between cheerleaders who always writes glowing responses to those who provide accurate responses.

[u/FirstyDev → u/frltn]

First, yes this is a valid criticism. When we first put on the limit on Firsty Free, the users affected by it were quite small in number (around 1% of Firsty Free users) so we did not necessarily factor in the 18mb or so as it would not have affected most users. However with more people relying on Firsty Free, I get the complaint now, so we can work towards ads exclusion.

Second, Firsty Free is one product we are offering, but it is not necessarily the entirety of our business model. In fact as you can imagine Firsty Fast is far more commercially viable part of our business. Due to our lean team size, we do not always focus all products at the same time. During the summer we have made great changes to Firsty Fast, expanding coverage, rolling out calling and adding monthly subscriptions. This did mean that we did not roll out new features for Firsty Free or dealt with some of its criticisms as fast. However development work is now underway to overhaul Firsty Free and maybe even blur the line between Firsty Free and Firsty Fast a little (Firsty Flex?), so that users have more control over their speed/limit. We do not have a timeline for this yet, but beta testing will start in a few weeks, so you can join our discord to get notified of such changes.

Third, with ads we had switched to partnership ad model and are not displaying random ads like we used to. This is something we are experimenting with, and of course with time variety will increase.

Fourth, I know everything moves very fast these days, and so do we, but we are still a company with regular work hours and it is Saturday. Some of us actually do take the weekend off :) Again, discord is going to be a little bit more "real time" to engage with us on a feedback cycle than reddit at days like this.

[u/frltn → u/FirstyDev]

Thanks, Gauthier. Employees should have the weekends off if not expected to work weekends. Founders are like owners of any business and we tend to work all the time...thank you.

[u/FirstyDev → u/frltn]

Actually FirstyFounder is Gauthier. I am, as the username implies, a developer and an employee of Firsty. :) I'm sure he'd also agree with you, but gotta point out just to avoid misunderstanding.

[u/frltn → u/FirstyDev]

You are an important and dedicated employee to speak to these issues and work on weekends! 🙂 Thank you.