We have been maintining the Letterpad Platform for almost 2 years. And Letterpad was open sourced from the very begining (2017). The early phase of Letterpad was more like a community project. After covid, a lot of contributors reduced contributing and since then Letterpad is maintained by a small group of people.
When we thought about releasing it as a platform and make it easy for all users to onboard the platform will be an excellent way to know the needs of users. That was our way to make Letterpad better which is more user-centric. And we never thought of business-centric. But with recent changes to infrastructure policies, we only need a little bit support for further development.
So far we have been able to keep it running at a low cost. We host Letterpad at vercel, we recently moved from Plantscale to Supabase to save cost because Planetscale decided to remove the free tier. With that we had to migrate from MySql to Postgres. Our quota on these servers are filling up and soon we will have to pay.
So it has become necessary to find out a revenue stream for us and users. Earning through ads was an option we never wanted to opt. We always liked the experience of distraction free reading and we will not deviate from that. So we decided to wrap domain mapping, analytics, creatives, etc into a pro plan as they are going to be expensive to us.
The pro plan not only unlocks these features, but it also gives you 2x earnings. Check out the pricing table (https://letterpad.app/pricing) for more information.
We have more interesting features in the pipeline for pro members.
What about existing users who have mapped their domain?
If you have mapped your domain already, we will continue to support it. However, if you disconnect, you cannot reconnect to the same domain.
