On subscription
What you pay for, and why.
Yumefumi runs on subscriptions instead of advertising. This page explains what each tier is for — read it as an argument, not a feature matrix.
Most trackers pay their bills by selling your attention: the homepage becomes a billboard, the feed gets rearranged to maximize time-on-site, your reading history leaves the building as a targeting segment. We took that option off the table early. There are no ads on Yumefumi. We do not sell your data. Two percent of revenue goes to visual-novel preservation work — the fan-translation archives and rescued-media projects that keep this medium alive past its original publishers. That is the arithmetic subscriptions pay for.
Because we fund the product this way, the free tier is tighter than Letterboxd’s. Letterboxd can afford a generous free tier because its hosting costs are low and its ad inventory is real. We host session timers, live feeds, import jobs, and review analytics; none of those are cheap, and we have no ad inventory. Tighter free means Free still works for the core use — tracking what you’ve read, finding what to read next — but the server-intensive parts live behind Pro. That’s an honest boundary, not a dark pattern.
Free.
Current tier$0
For readers who want to keep a record.
Free is the core tracker. You can mark visual novels as planned, reading, finished, paused, or dropped. You can rate on a half-star scale, write notes that only you can see, and browse curated routes without spoilers. You can follow other readers and see what they’ve marked finished. Discovery — the editorial homepage, series pages, tag browsing — is fully available. This tier costs us very little per reader, and it’s the version we’d like as many people as possible on.
What Free doesn’t include: session timers, the activity feed, reactions, velocity statistics, CSV imports, advanced search filters, or review drafting. Those live above.
Pro.
$5.99 / month · $59.99 / year
For readers whose hobby has weight.
Pro is the boundary at which Yumefumi starts costing real money per user. It covers the server-intensive features: session timers with per-day heatmaps, the live activity feed, reactions on reviews and notes, velocity analytics across your library, VNDB and CSV imports, advanced search with tag combinators, and review drafting with autosave. If you read at a steady pace — one or two visual novels a month, and you care about seeing your own patterns over time — Pro is the tier this product was built around.
The annual price is a quiet discount rather than a loud one: two months off, no promotional cycles, no “first year” trick pricing. Cancel at any time; access continues through the paid period.
Patron.
$12.99 / month · $129.99 / year
For writers, curators, and readers supporting the mission.
Patron is two things held together. It’s the working tier for serious reviewers and curators — scheduled publishing for reviews, long-form analytics on your audience, a verified badge, a custom profile URL, an embeddable “now reading” widget, read access to the public API, bulk operations on your library, and custom exports. It’s also the tier readers choose when they want to fund the thing beyond what they personally use — the preservation grants, the editorial independence, the refusal to monetize attention.
Patron implies Pro. Everything above is additive; nothing gets taken away.
Where the money goes.
The simple version: servers and the people who run them. The less simple version: of each dollar you subscribe, roughly two cents leaves the company as preservation grants. We publish who received those grants in an annual note, without ceremony. We’d rather the math be boring and visible than grand and vague.
We do not accept publisher money for placement, review slots, or recommendation surfaces. The editorial side of Yumefumi is quarantined from any revenue that would compromise it. That separation is a founding constraint, not a policy we could change later.
Billing is not yet live.
Yumefumi is in MVP. The subscription infrastructure — Stripe, invoices, the founding-rate window — lands in Phase 2. Until then, the paid tiers are granted manually to validation readers and early supporters. If you want to be on the list when billing opens, send a short note to hello@yumefumi.com. Include which tier you’re interested in and we’ll reply when it’s ready.