everysong is free now.
The short version: I launched everysong in May at $5 one-time, lifetime, no subscription. I thought that was the fairest deal on the internet. In two months it sold exactly zero copies. So as of today the paywall is gone: upload a track, get the full 13-trait readout and all 20 Creative-Commons matches, free, no account. This post is the honest maths behind that decision, because "no fake numbers" is the whole brand and that has to include my own.
The honest numbers
- ~3,400 unique visitors in the last 30 days: real people (and, fine, a healthy share of crawlers: they're welcome here).
- Zero purchases. Not "disappointing": zero. The only account in the database was me, testing.
- One company asked for an API evaluation key. It was never used once: which taught me a different lesson, below.
A hundred people a day walked up to the door, read the sign, and left. For two months I assumed the price was the incentive. It turns out the price was the door.
Why the paywall came down
$5 was protecting nothing. The costs here are almost comically small: the analysis engine runs on one small cloud machine that literally goes to sleep when nobody's around. The paywall wasn't covering costs: it was preventing the only thing that could make this project matter, which is people actually running their songs through it and sharing what came out.
The shareable readout is the whole growth engine. Every analysis produces a permalink. Permalinks only spread if people can make them. Nobody makes them behind a $5 gate with no trial.
And honestly: the try-before-you-buy flow was sitting in the codebase, finished, never switched on. I built a free demo endpoint, wrote its rate limits, wrote its upgrade copy: and never wired the button. Indie development in one sentence.
What's free (everything)
- Upload your own track: MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, up to 30MB
- The full 13-trait readout: BPM, key, LUFS, energy, mood, the lot
- All 20 Creative-Commons matches: play them, download the MP3s, click through to the source
- A shareable permalink for every readout
- No account. No email. 5 readouts a day per connection.
This is not a trial. There is no feature behind the curtain waiting for your card. The free tier is the product.
What $5 buys now
The $5 one-time payment still exists as a supporter tier: saved history, CSV export of everything you've analysed, a 50-a-day cap instead of 5, and the warm glow of keeping an independent tool alive. It's a thank-you with perks. If everysong never earns your five dollars, use it free forever with my blessing.
The API went free too
That unused evaluation key taught me the real lesson: any process with a human in the loop is where evaluations go to die. So the API now has an instant free tier: one POST with your email mints a key on the spot, 25 calls a day, forever, no payment, no waitlist. If you're building something that needs "find me a safe track that sounds like this": go get a key, it takes ten seconds.
What doesn't change
- Never a subscription. Still true, now trivially so.
- Never CC BY-NC in the catalogue. Every match stays commercial-safe.
- 48-hour artist removals at [email protected].
- If it ever shuts down, the analysis code goes open-source. That promise outlives any pricing model.