Portal - Escape Into Nature 4+

Truly found the perfect companion for my long study sessions and daily routines. I'm finally able to escape the mind numbingly fast-paced life of my busy city.

Also, the Portal team is truly quite open to making the Portal accessible to everyone. Just pure joy!

Updated: 👋 Hi MIGUELAMEV,

So so happy to hear that Portal is making such a positive impact in your daily life and introducing a bit of joy :) Indeed, you're not alone in yearning for an escape from our busy modern lives, in truth it's why Portal was created in the first place and we're just delighted it's working its magic and helping you get away from it all and reconnect, albeit digitally, with nature!

Many thanks for your support,

Stu, Andy, Nick & Tim - Team Portal


Prev: 👋 Hi MIGUELAMEV,

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your feedback with us and for following up with an email. We're so happy to hear that Portal's helping you with your studies and we're more than happy to offer you a student discount - so we hope that helps.

We do totally understand that Portal's a little more on the premium side of things at the minute (albeit not as expensive as other apps in the space). The main reason for this is we are a small indie team made up of 4 friends (including 2 brothers) building and self funding the app ourselves and in many respects punching above our weight in not only developing the app ourselves, doing all the filming and content production work ourselves, but also conducting our own R&D to integrate new immersive technologies into the experience. And the exciting news is there's lots more to come...especially now Apple Vision Pro has landed.

For us, Portal's all about making a positive difference in people's lives by bringing nature into our indoor lives, whenever we can't physically be out there ourselves. It's about recreating the essence of being in some of the world's most peaceful and beautiful corners of the world, so our focus is very much on the realism, immersion and overall quality of the experience. Indeed, we're hoping to pioneer a new approach to digital wellbeing by focusing on how our physical surroundings affect our health & wellbeing and in turn harnessing immersive technologies (smart lighting, cinematic motion visuals (shot in upto 12K), dynamic spatial audio & more to come) to virtually transform people's surroundings and provide instant escapes to real-world locations that induce calm, reduce stress and anxiety, improve mental fatigue & concentration, enhance cognitive performance and unlock creativity. Our big dream is by creating a relationship with the natural world through digital tools Portal can have a ripple effect that positively influences our mindset and relationship with nature. In the words of David Attenborough, “no one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced” and we’re passionate about Portal playing a part in ensuring we don’t lose touch with the magic nature can bring to our lives.

We do genuinely believe in the positive benefits immersive, virtual experiences of nature can bring in our lives, and whilst it might sound a little far-fetched, but this belief is backed up by a growing mountain of scientific evidence.

Unfortunately, the costs involved in creating these experiences are incredibly expensive (especially without external VC funding), as we do all the filming, content production, app development and R&D ourselves. What's more, we're staunchly independent and refuse to include ads in the app or sell on our customers' data to third party marketing companies, which further reduces our options for funding the app's development. So our current Premium Membership pricing is a way to allow us to keep pushing the app's development and continually invest in content production through the support of the Portal Community in a more predictable and sustainable way than we've been able to do so far. We hope it will allow us to continue to create a better app for our customers now and for the rest of our lifetimes, and hopefully beyond.

We do however understand that our current pricing is not for everyone and as a result may be a bit of a niche product at the moment but we hope that for those that are happy to support us as an indie team and use Portal regularly, they have the utmost confidence that we'll continually strive to improve and innovate to create an app that integrates the latest advances in technology, draws on inspiration from science and the most incredible locations in the world, and in turn delivers experiences that genuinely make a positive difference to their lives.

We do appreciate that not everyone will see the same value in Portal and please note so we are keeping an eye on other options that we may be able to offer to ensure the broadest access possible, while still allowing us to continue sustainably developing the app. Currently, we have made a Community Fund available for people that love Portal and would benefit from a Premium Membership but cannot afford it, including students. And we've also continued to maintain a free offering, which makes 3 of our portals available for free to anyone that downloads Portal, with no ads and no time or usage restrictions. Plus we do not require you to sign up for an account or anything silly like that as other businesses do to sell on your personal information to marketing companies - so you have peace of mind that there's no catches or commitment required when using our free Open Access portals. In fact, it's part of our mission of making great surroundings and the benefits they can bring people's lives as accessible as possible. However, we do currently limit them to 3 portals that we rotate regularly as the server costs for providing up to 8K motion visuals and multi-channel spatial audio to hundreds of thousands of people can get pretty expensive.

We really appreciate your feedback, so we hope the above helps explain the path we've taken so far. We do hope that you are able to take up our student discount. If you have any other questions or there's anything else we can help with, please don't hesitate to email us :)

Many thanks,

Stu, Andy, Nick & Tim - Team Portal.

Many apps of this type require payment, but this one does not. And it has many options for you to choose the music you like. This is really a great app! You can play this when you go to bed at night to help you sleep.

👋 Hi there,

Thank you so much for your kind words and feedback! Delighted to hear that you're enjoying our free offering - it is all part of our mission to make great surroundings and the benefits they can bring to people's lives as accessible as possible.

You will also be pleased to know that there's no ads and no time or usage restrictions when using our free offering. Nor do we require you to set up an account to use it...we are not big fans of companies that harvest their customers' personal information to sell onto third party marketing companies. So hopefully that peace of mind that there are no strings attached will help you sleep easy at night :)

Many thanks again for dropping us a review - that support and enthusiasm means a lot.

Stu, Andy, Nick & Tim - Team Portal.

The user interface is beautiful, and the experience is smooth. The visual quality, along with the sound, feels great.

👋 Hi LOCHIAWEI,

Thank you so much for taking the time to drop us a review - we're over the moon to hear that you're a Portal fan, and hope that it's making a positive difference to your day 😊

The exciting thing is we honestly feel as though we have just got started and the best is yet to come, so please watch this space!

In the meantime, thank you for all your support and enthusiasm for what we do - it means a lot to us!

Andy, Nick, Tim & Stu - Team Portal.