V4 Public Release Idea - Free Tier Versus Paid Tier

Free Tier

  • Access to featured soundfonts and featured instruments
  • Can save 1 song to the cloud

Paid Tier

  • Access to all soundfonts and all instruments and uploading instruments
  • Can save 100 songs to the cloud
  • Access to real-time collaboration

Both tiers have access to the full functionality and sound capabilities of the composer.

Free tier is still very capable with paid tier unlocking nice but not essential features.
The V2, V3, V4, and SMP soundfonts gives access to plenty of instruments. These instruments were good enough for OG users, they will be good enough for free tier users.

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That’s pretty spot on with what I had in mind! Glad you came to this conclusion, would love to hear what others thinks!

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Revised December 2023

After some rethinking I’ve decided to change some things and add new ideas.
One big change I made is to remove the restriction on instruments/soundfonts use by free tier users. Being an accessible music composing tool is an important aspect to Notessimo, so I don’t think reducing the timbral variety for free tier meshes well with that idea.
Free tier could also have access to uploading instruments/soundfonts, perhaps with a limitation of 250 MB total space, equivalent to the upload limit for soundfonts.
Video export is locked for free tier. If people want to create video content of Notessimo on social media such as YouTube, TikTok, etc., they should have the Paid tier, especially considering you can disable the watermark.
A new idea for paid tier is player visual customization. You know how in V3 you could add a background to the player for the song? Or, how in V4 you can take it further in the video export customization? Give paid tier customization for the song in the player, allowing users to adjust the background color, radial intensity, and staff color, and allow adding a background image and overlay image and adjusting their opacities. People love to pay for cosmetics in games/apps, so this would be a good idea.

Free Tier

  • Access to all soundfonts and all instruments
  • Access to uploading instruments/soundfonts (250 MB limit for total space of uploaded instruments)
  • Can save 1 song to the cloud
  • Access to audio export

Paid Tier

  • Access to all soundfonts and all instrument
  • Access to uploading instruments/soundfonts
  • Can save 100 songs to the cloud
  • Access to real-time collaboration
  • Access to audio and video export
  • Access to song player customization
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Thanks for the suggestions! It does makes a lot of sense I think and cosmetics is a great non-obtrusive way to monetize, maybe some part of it will be in the free-tier.

I was thinking about the backgrounds the other day and I loved the variety of it and how it made each song more unique. One of the issue is that the player can be of different sizes on multiple different screens and having a background image fit well and looks good in those different scenarios is hard.

So I was thinking of having the option to use custom shaders as well. Think something like this one or that one but that could also react to the music being played and there could be a section for users to share them and browse them. Some notes could act as trigger to change the background for a different shader (or change some variables like colors) as well or even temporarily display some PNGs on top like video games sprites, etc.

Of course I’ll focus on at least getting to V3 parity first before coding that but visual customization could be a big hit that set notessimo apart.

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Yep, anything cosmetic related or non essential tools would great perks for paid-tier. Anything essential for sound editing/composing should be available for both tiers, though. Being able to introduce more non essential perks is a great way to distinguish the paid-tier from the free-tier without restricting essential sound capabilities which I think goes against the spirit of Notessimo so I revised it.

The backgrounds back in the V3 days definitely added that extra bit of fun to the platform and added that extra bit of liveliness to songs while listening and watching them in the player. About the issue, you’re right, since the V4 player doesn’t use use a fixed aspect ratio like the V3 player or V4 exported videos, it doesn’t translate as well. We’ll do some more thinking and experimentation and come up with a solution.

The shaders would look great as well and having them respond in real-time would add another layer of creativity and presentation for songs.

Definitely finish V3 parity first. That is the main thing holding V4 back right now. V3 parity + V4 instrument variety would actually make it better than V3. All these visual customizations would do a lot to make Notessimo stand out, you said it best “…merging sound with visuals.”

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