Imagine the most common moment in modern app pricing. You hear about a PDF-to-speech app. You install it. You tap “Start free trial.” The flow asks for your card, “for verification only — we won’t charge you.” Three days later you have forgotten the trial exists. On day four, the charge clears: $99.

You open the app and try to cancel. The button isn’t in Settings. It is in the account screen, two taps into a side menu, behind a “manage subscription” link that sends you to the App Store, where the actual cancel button lives. You find it eventually. You email support. Three weeks later you get a partial refund and a coupon for the product you just refunded.

That is the trial-trap funnel. It is not a glitch. It is the design.

Audris has a 3-day trial too — the same three days our competitors offer. What we did not copy is the wiring underneath it. This post is about that difference, because “we have a trial” and “we have that trial” are not the same sentence.

What a trial is actually for

There are two honest reasons a subscription app offers a free trial.

The first is product risk. Some products are genuinely hard to evaluate without living in them for a few days. Audris is one of them. You cannot tell from a screenshot whether an app reads a 40-page report in a way you can follow for an hour. You have to put it in your ears on a commute.

The second is conversion math. Most people who start a trial forget about it. Conversion for a no-card trial runs about 5–10%. Conversion for a card-on-file trial is often 40–60% — almost entirely because people don’t cancel in time. The product doesn’t have to convince you. The clock does.

For most consumer subscription apps, the second reason is the bigger one. That is the part we refused, and refusing it has a price we actually pay.

How ours is wired

Four commitments, all of them in the terms so they are not just blog-post talk:

The number is on the screen before you start. Not the monthly equivalent of an annual plan, not a strikethrough anchor — the amount that will be charged and the date it will be charged.
We tell you before it converts. Audris shows you a notice inside the app while there is still time to cancel. Yes, that costs us conversions. That is the point; a subscription you were reminded about and kept is worth more to us than one you didn’t notice.
Cancelling is one tap plus the platform’s confirmation. No retention interstitial, no “are you sure?” discount panic, no survey.
You never need the trial to evaluate Audris. The free tier does not expire and never asks for a card. Three pages a week, at full HD voice quality. The trial exists for people who want the meter gone for a few days before deciding — not as the only door into the product.

That last one is what makes the rest possible. When your free tier is real, the trial doesn’t have to do the selling.

The part that is structurally different

Here is the thing our competitors cannot copy, and it is not a promise — it is arithmetic.

Their good voices run in a data center. Every minute you listen costs them an inference bill. So their free tier gets the cheap voices, and the good ones sit behind the paywall, metered by characters or minutes per day. They are not being stingy. They are passing through a real cost.

Audris runs the neural model on your phone. A minute of listening costs us exactly nothing. So the free tier ships the same HD voices the paid tier uses, and the meter counts pages, not quality. An app whose voices live on a server can match our price. It cannot match that.

What we gave up

If you skip trial-driven inertia, doesn’t the business break?

Run the math. A typical app in this category charges around $99 a year behind a card-on-file trial. Of 100 people who start one, maybe 30 actually use the app for three days. Of those 30, maybe 10 wanted to subscribe. The other 20 forgot, and paid anyway. The ratio of “wanted to pay” to “ended up paying” is, generously, one to two.

We give up that second twenty. In exchange:

Lower support cost. The biggest support category for trial-funnel apps is billing complaints from people who forgot. We don’t have that ticket type.
Higher renewal. People who chose to subscribe renew. People rolled in by inertia churn the moment they notice.
Word of mouth that compounds. “I subscribed because the app is good” is a better story than “I subscribed because they charged me.” The first customer recommends you. The second writes a one-star review.

This is not a charity move. It is a counter-position, and it is hard to imitate for a boring reason: a venture-backed competitor’s investors will not let them give up the inertia revenue. Any of them can copy a feature list in a quarter. Almost none of them can copy this.

What is free, and what is not

To be specific, the free tier of Audris includes:

Three pages of listening a week — about 900 words — with no expiry and no card
The full set of on-device HD voices, not a downgraded subset
Structure-aware reading on every supported format
The full player: lock-screen and Bluetooth controls, speed, skip-by-section, resume
Dark mode and the OpenDyslexic font option

Premium — $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year — removes the weekly meter and adds OCR for scanned documents and custom pronunciations. Saving a document as an audio file is included three times a month on every plan, free tier included; extra exports are $0.99.

The yearly discount is permanent, not a countdown. We want you on the plan that fits your usage, not the one a timer pushed you into.

The promises

No auto-billing surprises. If a charge is coming, you will have been told, inside the app, in time to stop it.
Cancel anytime, library stays. Your documents are on your device. Cancelling does not delete them.
60 days’ notice on any price change, and we honor old prices for the longest period the stores allow.
No lifetime plan. We considered one and decided we would rather not sell it than sell it and quietly retire it later, which is what happens to almost every lifetime tier in this industry.

These are easier promises to make when there is no quarterly board meeting where someone proposes a conversion test that lifts revenue 18% at the cost of trust. Audris is built by one person. There is just the product and the people who use it.

Built by one person, for people who actually read

If you want a slick funnel, we are the wrong app. If you want three days to find out whether an app reads your documents in a way you can actually follow for an hour — with the price on the screen and a reminder before it charges — that is exactly what the trial is for.

And if you never start it, the free tier is still there next month. That is the whole idea.

Download links are on the download page.