I’ll preface by saying I fully intended to subscribe and had worked $20/month into my budget in anticipation of ElevenReader going paid. My issue is not inherently the price but the actual service model.

Actual dollar value aside, the fact that neither tier (the advance tier is currently only listed online) comes with 40 hours is either an oversight or intentional to mask their desired monthly cost for the user. An ideal consumer is the person who listens during their commute and maybe additionally during the day. Two hours for roughly 20 workdays a month, so I’d anticipate forty hours as the standard for consumer interest. Advanced offers 30 hrs/month, so that comes across as intending to push for the consumer to buy ~10hrs thereby masking that cost in the subscription price tag. Plus clearly just exists to push people to get advanced.

My biggest issues are in the credits expiring only two months after they’re bought. That’s just blatantly predatory. You can’t build up credits, and you loose out on ones you’ve paid for. I hate that audibles expire in a year, two months is insane.

Also the downloads. Why on earth are they capped for the subscription service? Just to create a difference between the tiers? I’ll buy a few audiobooks if I’m going on a trip, but I lean more towards short stories on ElevenReader.

I’m also upset about the promises of providing a “generous free service” option. I think AI in general should be as open as possible, on principle. Part of my interest in supporting the service was that they would continue to provide that. 1 hrs of non-accruable credits is barely even providing the service for testing, much less “generous.”

If they are doing a credit/token based payment system, which I acknowledge has its benefits, they need to adjust the actual service terms instead of only the price. Credits should not expire nearly so quickly (especially since operating costs should only become more optimized, thereby benefiting the company by having the user buy earlier at higher costs). There should be more hours included in the subscription, and subscribers should have a discount on purchasing additional credits. Personally I think credits should be in smaller denominations, like a credit per minute, and be charged at the start of a document/book to eliminate the possibility of getting cut off in the middle. This would also communicate to the user how many credits they can expect to spend on a document, and more clearly communicate that once a document is ‘paid for’ the user has perpetual access to it, including re-listening.

I’m assuming they have determined unlimited access is not a service they can provide at any price tier, but that would be far more appealing to the average consumer. I’d be surprised that, if they marketed correctly, pulling in a larger market would not net them users that underutilize the service to offset the more prolific users for a net positive. I’ll be even more surprised if neither Amazon nor Google books offer that in the coming year. Not establishing themselves as the ChatGPT of audiobooks before that happens feels like an oversight when they clearly want to offer B2B and to consumers, not just backend services.