Manga UP‪!‬ 17+

tldr; a great app to read official translations and support the staff. Think of it as renting manga to read for about half the price of outright buying the manga. Supporting minor titles and older publications.

Manga Up is a great way to read some titles that may have never made it to the big book stores in America. Honestly the pricing scheme is very fair considering the work authors and translators put in. You get ~7 “chapters” free a day with each new series have 1-2 free ones to see if you like it. Now a chapter in this app is broken into sections so a real chapter in a physical book would be split up into ~4 sections. Sometimes it feels short but if you compare the price of buying coins to read it all it would come out to about half the price it takes to buy a physical copy.

i only lasted 35 minutes on the app before deleting for two reasons. first and most noteworthy thing to mention is that the chapters cost 40-90 coins per chapter and those coins can be obtained with money thru the app. normally thats fine, most manga apps have a monthly subscription or the volumes can be purchased as a whole and read that way.. but this app doesn’t allow you to keep the chapters you’ve purchased. they’re merely available to you for up to 3 days. second thing to mention (biggest reason i deleted) is that these chapters that you pay for and are only available to you for 3 days are broken up. i got so confused when i went to read and one single chapter was broken up into 8 segments. EIGHT. 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 etc. each segment costing 80 coins. that’s 640 coins for a SINGLE chapter. i went to the shop to see what the coin prices were and they’re about on par with other apps. 650 coins for $4. which sounds okay but remember, because they split it up, you’re paying $4 for a single chapter. if the manga you’re reading has 100+ chapters and each chapter is broken into 5-10 segments priced at 80 coins a segment.. you’re spending way more money than it’s worth. imo this isn’t the app for me. truly surprised others even use it, there are far better, cheaper options that allow you to retain what you’ve purchased than this - i suggest one of those.

As much as I want to show support towards this app since it has a few titles that I really like finally getting an official translation, I threw money towards the 0.99 newbie pack. I read a few chapters, understanding that the XP and the UP that you use made the chapters temporary to read (you only get to keep the chapter for 3 days!). HOWEVER, the moment I spent PAID coins on a chapter, I went to double check whether the chapter purchased was temporary and IT WAS, telling me that the chapter is only available for 3 days. I find that disappointing that spending a chapter (or a part of the actual chapter) with paid currency didn’t mean that it would be permanent for you to read. Rather, this app seems to make it that if you want to re-read a chapter that you’ve previously purchased with PAID currency, you’ll have to purchase it again which is disappointing. I would like to support the author, but with this kind of system I think I’d rather have a subscription instead like another reviewer had mentioned, or change how when you spend your paid currency on (part of) a chapter, you get to keep it permanently as opposed to it only being able to temporarily read it for 3 days.