Portal - Rewild Your Mind 4+

Everything costs money!

At least make one or two free or make us watch an ad or someting, this is rediculous!!!!

Developer Response ,

UPDATE: 👋 Hi iwshsjosnh ba, I just wanted to get back in touch to let you know that following your feedback we're pushed really hard to make providing a free offering a possibility...and the exciting news is we've recently launched our "Open Access" programme where we've made a selection of portals accessible to anyone to use for free. No ads, no usage restrictions.

This way people like yourself can try Portal without committing to a free 7-day trial (although this is still an option if you'd like to try our full Premium offering), but importantly it's also a step towards our mission of making great surroundings accessible to all - and so people that can't otherwise afford a Premium Membership can still use Portal and the benefits we hope it brings to people's lives.

We hope you give our "Open Access" portals a try and thoroughly enjoy giving Portal a whirl!

Thanks again for your feedback,

Andy, Nick, Tim & Stu - Team Portal.

PREVIOUS: 👋 Hi iwshsjosnh ba,
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So sorry we don't have a free offering available, in truth, we'd absolutely love to offer this but unfortunately at the moment we've just been unable to on our Mac app (we do provide a free tier on our iPhone & iPad apps). Instead, please note that we do have a FREE 7-day trial available, and there's absolutely no obligation whatsoever to continue onto a Premium Membership.

All you have to do is cancel the trial at least 24 hours before the end of the trial period and it won't roll into a paid Membership. You can even cancel the trial immediately after you start the trial and still enjoy full access for the full 7-day trial period - that's certainly what I would recommend doing.

You might be wondering why we don't have a free tier on our Mac app and we want to be completely transparent about this. It's absolutely not because we want to be hard nosed and force people onto a free trial - that's just not us - it's why against all convention we offer a free tier on our iPhone/iPad app without any time limits or restricted functionality.
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The tricky thing with our Mac app is we not only deliver multi-channel spatial audio but also up to 8K cinematic motion visuals to provide an even more immersive, true-to-life multi-sensory experience that makes the most of the larger and higher resolution displays with Mac.

As a consequence, the download route that we adopted for content delivery on our iOS/iPadOS apps just wasn't possible on Mac, as the audio-visual files were just far too large. And so, we've had to completely re-engineer our approach to content delivery on our Mac app to support streaming instead, which means our server costs can ratchet up really very quickly - especially if we offered a purely free offering.

By way of context, the number of individuals that actively use Portal free on our iOS and iPadOS apps is in the hundreds of thousands. And so even if we had a fraction of that number of people on Mac using a free tier the server costs alone could very feasibly put us out of business. Especially as we're an independent bootstrapped business, and so don't have external investment money to provide us a cushion if costs quickly outstrip revenue nor are we Goliaths like YouTube (Google) that can absorb this cost, plus we're not the type of app to use ads so we have to play these things a little more cautiously than some.

However, that's not to say that offering a free tier on Mac is completely off the table forever. We're very keen at looking at options that would make that a sustainable possibility, but for the time being we're just not in a position to do so right now - sorry about that.

In the meantime, as mentioned, we'd love for you to give the trial a whirl. I know I'm massively biased, but it really is an incredible experience if you want to focus and think clearly in today's busy and distraction-filled world.

If you have any other questions or there's anything else I might be able to help with, please don't hesitate to drop us a line at hello@portal.app.

Many thanks,

Andy, Nick, Tim & Stu - Team Portal.