Auphonic Freemium at Last

This translation was generated automatically.

Auphonic, the jack-of-all-trades Pezibär of audio levelling software from Georg Holzmann and co., announced its pricing model today. Until now, the web service was free and the desktop client cost a one-time licence fee of €69 or €299.

Nothing changes for the desktop client, but the free web service is now limited to two hours of input per month. Anyone who needs more pays between €1.80 and €0.69 net per input hour.

Finally!

Let me explain why this matters.

One argument making the rounds today, and in other contexts too, is that the fees are needed to pay for servers. That’s surely only a small part of the cost. Servers that can be scaled up and down in the cloud according to demand are extremely cheap to provide. I don’t know how much material Auphonic processes in parallel, but especially for traffic, standard packages—particularly on physical hardware—should cheaply cover most needs. The processing time, which you can observe in the desktop client, is not negligible, but modern hardware can do it in a fraction of real time. The processing runs in a single thread, so one machine with several CPU cores can handle many productions in parallel. Or they can wait in a queue.

More importantly, without having any inside information, I assume Auphonic is Georg’s full-time job. His audio-processing expertise is certainly a unique selling point. But expertise alone would be just a nice academic idea without the implementation. If you want to install similar hardware in your rack, Orban has an Optimod for about $5,000.

There’s also a reliable web app and API covering a crucial, incredibly tedious and error-prone part of podcast production: encoding, embedding metadata, and deployment. Auphonic is alone in the service landscape with this combination of post-production and file handling. The service keeps improving; most recently, there’s been a multitrack beta.

“Sustainability” says it better than the awkward German word Nachhaltigkeit: the ability to keep something going.

That’s the difference from a venture-capital-funded startup where the only question is how much pretend money is left to burn before the founders and investors cash out in an acquisition or the company is shut down.

If we want lots of podcasts to sound good, and for this service to stay available, it has to support itself. The alternative is that it eventually closes because it can’t cover its costs—or gets sold to someone like SoundCloud and joins the land of pretend money.

So who should pay? The people using the service: podcasters. Finished media files are distributed to listeners millions of times. And in the end, good audio can make the difference between a happy, loyal subscriber and a lost listener who can’t understand anything on a noisy plane.

With real startups, you have to ask whether the idea and implementation are good enough, and whether the founder cares enough to keep developing it over the long term and make it their full-time job. That means the web service needs ongoing funding, and because the target market is so small, the desktop client needs to cost a normal professional-software price.

So: finally. Auphonic’s future now looks sustainable to me, and that makes me happy.

The exact number next to the euro sign isn’t much of a discussion point either. I think the prices are perfectly reasonable. Auphonic has surely thought through how many users are likely to become customers, the cost of a full-time salary, external expenses, and running the service, then arrived at this price. There’s always room to raise it later.

A side note on pricing: I find the model a little awkward, because it’s relatively complicated—or at least presented in a complicated way. In general, such a model should be simple. On the other hand, someone producing audio by the hour should be able to understand the table. Other models would have been possible too, from pay-what-you-want to crowdfunding to a flat rate, but that’s the provider’s decision.

Disclosure: I received the desktop client for free after the beta, but I’m now going to buy a subscription to the web service. Shut up and take my money.