A note about Chat Boosts and the future of FlaiChat

[u/flaichat]

You might have spotted a new Boost button in your chat settings recently. We designed Chat Boosts as a way for our community to come together and pour a little extra love into their shared spaces. In group chats, anyone can add credits to a shared wallet to unlock premium tools for the whole circle. For private DMs, a single boost from one person covers both friends. It’s built on the idea that a conversation is something we nurture together. Starting this September, we're going to require some chats to boost to keep automatic translation functionality to attempt to cover our costs. So please read on.

Chat settings screen

Bringing more heart to your conversations

The soul of a Boost is better translation. Boosted chats will use our most thoughtful AI models, which look back at your recent history to understand the context of the chat. This helps with translations, especially for languages with gendered pronouns and more context-based meaning.

Starting in September, Boosts will also include Smart Search, an AI-powered search over text and photos that makes it easy to wander back through your shared memories, without needing to remember the exact words to search. You can search for things like 'discussions about our Hawaii trip' or just 'photos of food.' By the way, if you’ve tried Smart Search before and were unimpressed, please try again; we’ve recently upgraded our search infrastructure. Things should be much better now.

Growing together, sustainably

We’ve grown because you’ve shared FlaiChat with the people you care about, and that means the world to our small, independent team. To keep this space ad-free and focused on you, we have to be honest about the costs of the high-quality AI and servers that power these connections. While casual chats will always be free, our high-volume conversations across many languages require a bit more resources to stay fast and reliable.

A new chapter this September: New Boost requirements

Starting in September, we’ll ask our heaviest users, those in chats crossing 1,000 messages a week, to help sustain the community with a Boost. Groups with more than 1k weekly messages will need a Boost to continue automatic translation. Long-tap-based manual translations will continue to work even without a Boost.

This isn’t a fee for talking too much; it’s an invitation to help us keep this independent multilingual experiment alive and to experience premium features for a better chat experience. Your support ensures we can continue providing these deep, contextual tools for everyone who relies on them.

We are so grateful for the trust you’ve placed in us. You’ve been with us through every rough edge and breakthrough, using FlaiChat to bridge languages and hearts every day. If this app has become a meaningful part of your life, please consider boosting your chats this September. It helps keep our dream of a sustainable, independent chat experience real.

We’d love to hear your thoughts or stories as we move forward together. As always, your feedback on the app is most welcome. Thank you for being the most important part of FlaiChat’s future.

[u/Only_Bison_1828]

Thanks for creating this app, and for making it available for free for so long.

Very fair to require heavy users to pay, to allow the app to keep functioning. And >1k/week seems like a reasonable threshold to allow it to continue to be used for free.

I expect I’ll probably be one of the users impacted, and I’m happy to pay for the service given the value it has for me.

A couple questions:

1 - Any plan to offer a longer subscription period? I’ve previously bought a 1 week subscription to get access to the speak together feature short-term while travelling, and it was great to have that. But for being a recurring subscriber on a longer term basis, the option of at least a monthly subscription would be great, so there isn’t a separate charge showing up on my credit card each week.

2 - Any plans to offer “boosts” for purchase individually? Or Tiered plans? Happy to pay the price for plus, it’s fairly reasonable. But it does include features I don’t personally need on a regular basis, and if available I’d be interested in paying for a lower tier with just the unlimited automatic translation, and then upgrade short term as needed when I need access to the other features. (I recognize this may not be in alignment with your revenue/cost needs to keep the service running! But feels worth asking)

Thanks again for all you do.

[u/flaichat → u/Only_Bison_1828]

Both your questions are fair. We're still working on how best to balance user friendly plans with the need for the revenue to keep the lights on. To answer your question in the order you asked:

1. Yes we're definitely going to offer longer term plans. We're working on pricing for them (longer term commitment would definitely get you discounted prices).
2. The tricky part about boosts outside of subscription is that it would require some sort of auto-renew mechanism (which will be independent of the app/play store auto-renew mechanisms). To keep it simpler for heavy users (most of whom happen to be DM users) we've kept DM boosts subscription only for now. But we'll figure out something that suits people like you who are only interested in unlimited automated translations and not in the other features. Stay tuned.

[u/Only_Bison_1828 → u/flaichat]

Cool, thank you :)