Today, I'm announcing a plan to transition GameSearch to a paid application. The quality of the app's ability to find game is stable and extremely impressive. Infrastructure that has been built to support the app has been going well. User feedback has been great and we are aquiring new people daily. Overall, I'm really confident in the app's ability to keep delivering to users and I feel good about continuing the project in a way that is more sustainable for me as a developer.

The road to the drop of the paid version will take a couple weeks to go down. I plan to implement a Stripe integration so that the app can accept payments. I also have a few infrastructure updates that I would like to make so that the app continues to run smoothly, with potentially quite a few more users.

As a user of apps, I'm really tired of monthly fees. I never know how much I'm going to use an app and I really don't like when the company is asking for a consistent amount every month, regardless of how much I use the service! Because of this, the plan is for GameSearch-AI to utilize credits-based system. Credits will be spent when you use different features in the app.

Currently, the only plan for credits spending is when you generate hunting spots. Completing one generation, you'll spend one credit. My plan for credits pricing is that there will be a 10-pack of credits and a 100-pack. The 10-pack will be priced $3.99 and will give you 10 credits, while the 100-pack will br priced $29.99 and will give you 100 credits. I think that these two options give you a really low commitment way to use the app in the 10-pack, while giving a more economical package in the 100-pack.

Users currently are getting 10 free credits when they create a new account. 10 credits is a pretty solid amount of app use. You might be able to get your whole hunting season done with 10 credits. I want to allow a free trial system, while not incurring too much cost to support that. The free credits will drop to 4 per new account. Any credits you currently have you'll keep!

Free credits will still be available to users! The referral system is currently active which allows you to invite your friends to use the app. Referrals currently give you 10 credits for free. This will be reduced to 5 credits per referral.

Besides the desire to financially support myself, the app is quite expensive to run. The app uses LLMs like Google's Gemini to produce results. Each request to the AI provider incurs cost and there is cost in running the servers. I don't even have any employees, but this cost won't be neglible with a lot of people.

On a personal note, I am a solo developer who just left a job a few months ago to build GameSearch. I currently have a wife and daughter and I am expecting another child! GameSearch is hopefully in a place where I can support the development even if I need to get a job, but in the meantime it needs all the attention I can give it. Paying for the app supports my development efforts and will keep new features coming!