Push to Kindle 2.5 is now live for users of Push to Kindle 2. The main change in this release is the introduction of monthly credits on the free and lower tier sustainer memberships.
Credits for sending and downloading
To try and encourage some of our more active free users to support us here on Patreon, we've introduced sending credits. Here's how that looks:
Free tier (no Patreon membership): 30 credits/month
Sustainer Lite: 60 credits/month
Sustainer Standard: 100 credits/month
Sustainer Plus: no limit
Each credit can be used to send and/or download an article.
The vast majority of our users do not send 30 articles a month, so we think this is a fair limit for the free tier. We do however have some very active users, and we hope these limits will incentivise people in that group to contribute to the maintenance and development of the service.
Our sustainer memberships remain primarily a way to support the service. We're extremely grateful to all of you who do support us here. We'd love to hear any feedback on these new limits, especially if they impact you in any way, or if you experience any trouble using this new version.
Exceptions
We don't want to try very hard to enforce these limits. The free tier, like before, does not require anyone to be logged in to use Push to Kindle. So if you use a different browser, you'll get 30 credits/month on that browser, and if you clear site data, your credits will be reset (although you might have to re-enter your Kindle address again in the settings panel).
When we release this for everyone, users of our Safari browser extension bought via the Mac App store won't have monthly credits. We currently charge for the extension on the Mac App store, so until we change that, credits won't be used to limit sending for those users.
Privacy
The credits remaining are stored in your browser. We do not store them on the server and they do not even get sent to the server.
Although you can now login via Patreon when using Push to Kindle, we do not link your Patreon account to the Push to Kindle email addresses you enter. Your browser records whether you are logged in or not, not our server. And in terms of what's sent to our server when you send or download an article, it's the same as before (we do not send any Patreon information).
We use Patreon's OAuth service if you login with Patreon. We request the minimum information we can using their API - your public profile. It does not contain your email address. We only use the data returned by Patreon to tell us which tier you're on, which determines the number of credits you get assigned when using the app.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy, feel free to message us or comment here.
What's next?
We plan to start rolling out version 2 to all users of Push to Kindle in the next few weeks. This will happen in stages.
First, users of the old pre-2.0 extension will see the new interface but will not have access to the browser-submitted content feature which requires the new v2 extension. At some point after that we'll update the old extension to v2. At that point, the two extensions will work and look the same. We'll continue to keep the patron-only extension for those of you who want to keep up with and give feedback on improvements and feature development.
That's all for now. As always, all feedback welcome.