What's the catch?
People keep landing on our pricing page looking for the trick. I get it. When something is free, with no ads, no data harvesting and no upsell, the natural reaction is to squint at it. What are you really paying with?
Fair question. So here's the answer.
What a free account actually costs us
A free Lovd account comes with 500 MB of storage. Hosting it costs us less than €0.10 a month. Cents, basically.
We keep original photos in cold storage: cheap, slow, and fine for files you rarely download again. The timeline and map never load the full original. They load smaller copies sized for the screen you're looking at, so opening the app pulls in something tiny that arrives instantly and costs us almost nothing. And there are more optimisations I haven't shipped yet.
Even with thousands of free users, the bill barely registers.
Where the paid plans come in
The Curator and Archivist plans run at roughly a 60% margin. That margin pays for everything that isn't storage: the domain, the build servers, the email service that sends your invites, the database that holds your family trees, error tracking, and eventually a salary so I can keep building this full-time.
The same margin subsidises the free accounts; one paid subscriber covers a lot of free users. People who can afford it pay a fair price, and that pays for the people who can't, aren't sure yet, or just want to drop a handful of photos into their grandkid's album.
The one bit that might change
I love Mapbox. The smooth pans across a holiday, a trip playing out across a globe, the light on the terrain at just the right zoom: that's all Mapbox. The team have clearly poured years of taste into maps that feel like maps.
Their pricing scales with usage, though. If Lovd grows the way I hope, that line on the bill could start to bite. If that day comes, free accounts might fall back to an open-source map provider for some views, while paid plans keep the full Mapbox experience. I'd rather flag that now than spring it on anyone later.
The honest version
A solo founder in Amsterdam can keep Lovd running for thousands of free users on less than the cost of an avocado on toast and a coffee a month. Take that, boomers.
We can run like this for years. The free plan isn't bait: there's no Series A pressure to turn the screws and no investors waiting for us to start monetising your data. Stay free forever if that suits you. Upgrade when you need the space, and you'll be helping us look after everyone else.
That's it. That's the catch.
Mike
