Book Dragon is Free Forever

Book Dragon Archive is intended to remain free for its core purpose: keeping track of your books. There is no limit on the number of books you can add, no rate limit on how often you can use the app, and no subscription required to make the library large enough to become useful. We are not building toward a point where you have entered hundreds or thousands of books, spent time organizing everything, and then discover that continuing requires an upgrade. That decision was made early, and it shaped the architecture of Book Dragon from the beginning.

A lot of apps begin with a simple, useful function and then place enough restrictions around the free version that the application becomes difficult to use without paying. Sometimes there is a reasonable explanation for that. Software costs money to develop, infrastructure costs money to operate, outside services charge for usage, and companies have to pay for the systems their customers depend on. The problem is that subscriptions have spread far beyond the places where those ongoing costs justify them, and users are increasingly asked to pay every month for applications whose basic function creates very little continuing expense for the developer. We wanted to avoid building Book Dragon around that kind of pressure, so the design question became less about how to charge for growth and more about how to make growth inexpensive enough that we would not need to.

Designed Without a Per-User Server Bill

One of the easiest ways to make an application expensive to operate is to make every user dependent on infrastructure the developer has to maintain. If every account, library, synchronization request, shared collection, and piece of stored data has to pass through our servers, then every new user creates another continuing expense, and eventually that expense has to be recovered somewhere. Book Dragon was deliberately designed around a different model. Your library information remains with you, on your devices and within the Apple services you already use, rather than living inside an Archive Nine account system that we have to host indefinitely. Apple technologies handle the iCloud functionality used to keep information available across your devices and support features such as sharing, which means Archive Nine does not need to maintain a separate copy of every user's library on its own servers.

That approach made the application more difficult to design and build because it removed some of the shortcuts available when everything is routed through one central service. It also means that growth should not create the same kind of direct infrastructure cost that eventually pushes many applications toward subscriptions, usage limits, or complicated paid tiers. If adding another user does not also create another meaningful hosting bill, there is much less pressure to turn that user into another monthly payment.

Your Library Is Yours

A personal library can represent years of collecting, organizing, correcting information, and deciding how books relate to one another. We do not think that work should become trapped inside Book Dragon simply because you chose to use Book Dragon, which is why the app includes the ability to export your data. If you decide to leave, if another application becomes better for your needs, or if Archive Nine disappears someday, you should still have access to the information you spent time building.

The same principle affects how Book Dragon handles book information. The app currently checks multiple public and open data sources when identifying books and collecting metadata, while Archive Nine is developing its own book information API to improve areas where those existing sources are weak, particularly editions, series, and fictional universes. Our API should make Book Dragon better, but it should not become the only thing keeping the application functional. The existing public data sources will remain part of the system even as our own database grows, so if the Archive Nine service becomes overloaded, temporarily goes offline, or someday stops operating entirely, Book Dragon should still be capable of performing its basic job. The experience may lose some of the additional information our service provides, but your library should not suddenly stop working because one server we control is unavailable.

Future Features

Our current intention is to keep future Book Dragon functionality free as well. We are not looking for ways to divide the application into a deliberately limited free version and the version people would really want to use, because once that becomes the business model, product decisions begin to change with it. Features that should make the app better can become opportunities to create another tier, another limit, or another reason to ask for a recurring payment, and eventually the application is being designed around the upgrade path instead of around the person using it.

There may someday be a feature that depends on an outside service with a real per-user cost, and it would be irresponsible to promise that every service we could ever add will be free under every possible circumstance. What we can commit to is the principle behind Book Dragon. Adding books, maintaining your collection, organizing it, scanning books, sharing where the platform allows it, and using the library you have built should remain part of the application rather than becoming leverage for a subscription later.

How Book Dragon Can Make Money

Book Dragon is still intended to become a sustainable product. We would rather make money by creating additional value than by taking useful parts of the application away and selling them back through a subscription. As Book Dragon becomes better at understanding your library, it should also become better at helping you decide what comes next, whether that is the next book in a series, another book by an author you already enjoy, a missing volume in a collection, or something new that fits the way you read. Once the app can do that well enough to be genuinely useful, we plan to support affiliate purchasing links.

If you choose to buy a book through one of those links, Archive Nine may receive a commission from the retailer. The goal is for that relationship to be straightforward: your library remains free, the core application remains useful without payment, and Archive Nine earns money when Book Dragon has helped you find something you wanted to purchase anyway. That gives us a reason to make the application more useful over time instead of making the free version less useful until you agree to subscribe.