$3.99 and no asterisks

We do not have a free tier, and that tends to surprise people, so here is the reasoning behind it. When something online is free, the bill has not gone away. It has just moved somewhere you cannot see it, onto your data, or your attention, or your ability to walk away later. We would rather hand you the bill. It is $3.99 a month, with nothing printed underneath it in small type.

The reason we skip it is that a free tier is not free to run. It gets paid for by turning its users into leverage: ads, data, upsells, or the slow removal of features until you give in and pay. We did not want any of those, so there was no point in the tier that needs them.

Where the money goes

Split a subscription up and it lands in a few plain piles.

• Infrastructure. Hosting that is fast wherever your visitors are, images and video delivered quickly, backups that run when they are supposed to. A page that opens instantly on the far side of the world costs something to serve.
• The boring costs. Card networks take their cut before we ever touch the money, and running a company eats another slice.
• Making it better. The people writing the code, drawing the frames, and answering your email. This is why the product gets better over time instead of rotting.

There is one pile you will not find. Nothing here is spent on learning more about you so we can sell it. That was the cost we deleted, and the whole business is built around its absence.

Why not freemium

Freemium rewrites who a company works for. Free users become a crowd to convert, and every design decision quietly picks up a second job: nudge, gate, remind, upsell. Even a team that means well drifts in that current, because the incentive never takes a day off.

One small price keeps the compass steady. There is no cheaper tier to protect and no premium tier to dangle in front of you. Nobody has a reason to make the default a little worse so the paid version looks better next to it. There is the product, and either it earns its $3.99 from you or it does not.

The math of not selling you

Here is the trade in plain numbers. An ad funded competitor might squeeze a few dollars a year out of each user through attention and data, but only by running ads and trackers on the page you use to represent yourself. We would rather you hand us a few dollars directly and keep all of that off your page entirely.

You come out ahead in a way no pricing table can show. Your visitors are not tracked. Your audience is yours to take with you. And the company building your page has exactly one way to succeed: keep you around. Sign up at melodreams.com if that trade sounds like the right one. No trials, no asterisks, and you can cancel in two clicks.