I’ve always been an avid reader, and I particularly enjoy romance novels. I even enjoy corny novels that I can laugh at, and playfully poke fun of. However, the novels on this app aren’t just corny, or funny bad. These are just bad. They’re poorly written, fanfic style “novels”. Most are written from 1st person present tense, a personal pet peeve of mine, have trigger warnings, POV indicators and lots of things that make me think I could read a similar story on creative writing forum in some unknown part of the internet. This leads me into the other great annoyance that I’ve come to realize about this app. That is the way they monetize it. In theory, this is a free app with free novels, but if you don’t want to be bombarded by ads you can pay $13 a week for a subscription with no more ads. I grew up reading $1 Harlequin Romance novels, even a “premium” romance novel didn’t cost more than $7-$8. You would have to be going through at least 2 whole novels a week to make it worth it IMO. If you don’t pay, then it uses “minutes”, a micro currency that you must watch ads to receive more of. The ads are annoying and often hard to close out of, even if you watch the entire thing. There is a free spin that will give you minutes, but it often times isn’t enough to read more than 1 chapter per day. I can see that this was designed by following the template that gacha games are designed by, with micro transactions and addiction being the primary mechanism used to bring in money from consumers.
Hello Sarah, and thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed review! We appreciate your thoughts on our monetization model. Our team aims to balance keeping FreeFM accessible for free with improving the app and finding more stories to share with our users. Ad revenue helps achieve that, while we're also offering ad-free subscriptions for readers who prefer completely uninterrupted access. Since we're continuously publishing new stories, we strive to meet the interests and preferences of all users and hope to see you back one day.