What's the catch?
People keep landing on our pricing page looking for the trick. I get it. When someone offers you something for free, with no ads, no data harvesting, no upsell, the natural reaction is to squint at it. Where's the actual cost? What are you 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, perfect for files you rarely re-download. The timeline and map views never pull the full original. They serve mipmap variants and virtualised thumbnails, sized for the screen you're actually looking at. So when you open the app, you're loading something tiny that arrives instantly and costs us almost nothing. 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
Personal and Family plans run at roughly a 60% margin. That margin pays for everything storage doesn't: the domain, the build infrastructure, the email service that sends your invites, the database that holds your family trees, the error tracking, and eventually a salary so I can keep building this full-time.
The same margin also 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, the way a trip can play out across a globe, the lighting on the terrain at the right zoom level: that's all Mapbox. The fidelity is gorgeous, the features go deep, and the team have clearly poured years of taste into making 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, no investors waiting for the moment we start monetising your data. Stay free forever if that suits you. Upgrade when you need the space, and that's how you help us help everyone else.
That's it. That's the catch.
Mike