Also as a nitpick, in changing the flag you may want to provide common options at the top. For example, the default for English is the GB flag, but it probably makes sense to put US, Australia, etc. as top options of the dropdown of other flags since they are most relevant. A similar thing would benefit Spanish and maybe others as well.
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Oh sorry my mistake - I thought you had. Hmm, will investigate again then 
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@seanblue I think you should be muted .. at least Discourse says you are. Thank you for the note. The discourse muting process failed (Discourse can be flaky for these bulk operations).. so i’ve rejiggered. Hopefully next time it works.
Everyone else without English as a subscription should be muted too.
As for the flags, that’s a good idea.. i’ll add that.
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I added „English“ and it appeared below „All languages“ on the left side of the forum. At first I didn’t even find it.
I‘d have thought that it appeared between „French“ and „All languages“, the latter always at the end.
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Ah right, good call! I’ve reordered the English category above all languages 
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Total: 2 Books, Children: 1 Book.
One Young Adult book is missing in the French quick stats.
Same in the English quick stats; there are two missing young adult books.
German quick stats: 11 missing young adult books.
Japanese quick stats: number of light novels is correct.
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Product Update
Lots of stuff still cooking! I’ve been pumping out a lot of little product requests this week and bug fixes, including:
- adding ‘Featured in Lists’ section to item pages
- lots of QoL improvements around lists - sorting on list pages, list edit & creation updates
- lots a little fixes around the English UI (blurbs / subtitles)
- backfilling blurb autogenerated translations that have not been edited by humans and retranslating with claude. Should be done in the next few days
To keep track of product requests that are completed, reminder to check our lovely Product Requests Board created by @Megumin!
Ok, now onto the major updates.
New Dashboard
https://learnnatively.com/spa/
@mathew and @nikoru have made huge improvements over the past few weeks based on all of your lovely feedback! If you haven’t checked it out recently, please give it another go.. it should be launching soon. I already can’t use the old dashboard anymore, so much better 
Upcoming ‘Supporter only’ features
Now that we’ve gotten our data and code infrastructure into a much better place, we’re ready to start building more user-facing features.
But, to keep development sustainable, some of these new features will be available only to paying supporters. We won’t move current features behind a supporter paywall, but upcoming features—such as recommendations and advanced statistics—will be supporter-only. Users donating $5 or more through patreon will be designated as supporters.
In general, our philosophy is that features involving significant site-generated analysis or algorithmic processing will be reserved for supporters. Features that encourage sharing, collaboration, and community participation will remain available to everyone.
There will inevitably be some gray areas, but that’s the framework we’re using as we make these decisions.
Next Up
- Dashboard launch
- Supporter badges
- Advanced statistics
- Overhaul of ‘support us’ page
As always, let us know your thoughts!
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Is this recurring or one-time?
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Recurring monthly. I should say too that we are trying to add a better payment processor like Paddle (Patreon takes 13%) if anyone wants to wait. But Patreon is fine too~
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Also @mic thanks for the report! Will take care of that next week~
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I’d consider having yearly or multi-month plans, usually avoids the small processing fee aside from the %, and you can pass a discount to the user for signing up for 6 months or 12 months from the beginning.
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I’ll be happy to switch over, once the new one is in place.
Looking forward to seeing the new features
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Agree - now that things are moving… would be nice to have a one and done payment for a year instead of micro transactions. (or possibly both options for some so people could do monthly and then a discount for a year in advance say 5/mo or 50/year as an example).
Could also have an extra donation (special bucket) of some kind. A way of giving back something to users that wish to support the platform beyond the basics. If you did this it should be separate from the regular thing. Not sure what kind of rewards you could offer but say someone wanted to donate say $25/mo, maybe quarterly they get back from Natively a giftcard from the seller of their choice BW or Amazon for up to a certain dollar amount. Depending on what Natively grows into potentially some options for people that might want to support Natively while giving a little something back to those users that go beyond any monthly subs.
Also highly recommend having a short trial period, 2 (maybe 4 weeks). That will let new users try everything and see if it’s for them. If someone ends up not using natively and comes back to it a year or two later, let those people reactivate a trial (maybe via email req). You don’t want people abusing it, but if it’s not something that someone needs at a time but then given significant time passing, maybe it’s worth trying again. I bought a sub to another site because they did this for me when I went back to it a couple of years later and had forgotten all about it. Flipped a switch and was able to try it for a couple of weeks and worked great for my needs at that point in time. If they hadn’t done that, would have gone some other route.
When will these new features be paywalled? I donate but my monthly donation is not at the $5 mark. So before bumping it up… are we getting a new payment provider and/or will features be available initially during development? Tend to feel that leaving these open for comments from everyone during development might be better than putting them behind a paywall outright as you can get feedback from a larger audience.
Something to consider for many users who have been using the site for free, please don’t go crazy with the paywall stuff. It sounds like you are going to go the renshuu type route which is nice, but if it ends up being nickel and diming and what not, in the long term it will likely drive users away. Currently Natively is in a unique space and there really isn’t anything else like it anywhere.
So maybe not ALL new features are paywalled but new “extra” things are that are not necessarily required for functionality - you mentioned advanced stats (not sure what that means vs stats now), but w/o trying to sound rude, please don’t let the greed override the basic op costs/needs. Not everything needs to become a subscription model, there is enough enshitification everywhere else 
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Based on the philosophies Brandon stated, I’m not very worried about Natively getting enshittified, but I’m glad you’re bringing up Renshuu’s revenue strategy, bc Renshuu has probably the healthiest financial relationship with its users that I’ve ever seen from an online service.
- All the core advertised features are free and unlimited; you can use it forever with a good user experience without ever paying a cent
- “Pro” features are largely cosmetic, QOL, or aimed at power-users; things that add value to the service, but don’t ruin the core experience to go without
- Dev is constantly working on it and releasing features, bugfixing, etc.; makes paying users trust that the service won’t disappear and their contributions aren’t wasted
- Dev actively cultivates a community that is helpful and engaged; naturally attracts users who are willing to provide monetary support, whether they feel the need for “Pro” features or not
- Lifetime membership option; allows paid participation by users who are allergic to subscription models
There is little-to-no overt focus on making money and no attempt to trick or force users into paying, which makes users who have the means actually more willing to pay out of respect for the business model – to the point that the dev had to add a supporter club for users who bought the lifetime membership and wanted to keep paying for the service on top of that! The dev makes enough from paying users to run the service, support his family, hire voice actors & teachers to provide content offered for free, and even donate to charitable causes with the surplus. It’s kind of insane what can be accomplished with good will and a good community.
Natively I think ticks most of the same boxes, as long as the site in its current form stays free and unlimited, and the paid features are along the lines of resource-heavy analysis (which makes sense to restrict) and cosmetic things. There’s a great community to start with here (which probably has a higher proportion of adults with money than Renshuu’s!), and the the dev team is visible and has been on fire with upgrades and fixes for the past 6 months, so as long as that pattern continues, nothing underhanded should be necessary for Natively to be financial viable.
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Yup! I bought a lifetime of Renshuu a long time ago and have been very pleased.
The thing to maybe try to avoid driving people away is to consider those users who will never pay, not the cheapskates necessarily but consider those that are income limited, students, kids, etc… People that might pay if they could afford it but really cannot.
If you can do right by them, then they should tell others and drive more traffic and some people will end up signing up.
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On the other hand, I’d like to continue using Patreon because I already have an account there and use it for other things as well.
Also @brandon, I checked and there seems to be a minimum monthly revenue required before you can offer annual options on Patreon. Unless I misunderstood something.
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Thank you so much for all those kind words and feedback everyone! The supporter-only features will have a slow rollout and there will be lots of opportunity to work through how this all works - paying annually & trial periods, these are definitely good callouts.
@shuly @gillianfaith i agree, nickel and diming, encountering paywalls everywhere, that destroys a free experience. For a community site that would be death. Our goal is that the paywalled features should feel sensible - a simple ‘plus’ to the free experience that feels nice & useful. Good to hear about Renshuu, we’ll have to take a look at them.
I know this can be a worrying transition. But, as we noted in the update, nothing on the current site will change A huge proportion of our new features will still be free and many of our supporter only features will have many free portions or versions. Where and how we draw these boundaries will be a long and continuing conversation, which we hope you all will participate in!
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Is there already a product request for series rating/review options? I thought there would be, but I couldn’t find one when I searched. If not I’ll write one up. I think now that we’re getting some more features on the series page (like the lists section) it would be good to expand it in other ways.
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You’d think searching for “series review” would find that… my suggestion is slightly different. Do you want me to make a new post or respond to that one?
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