Hi everyone!

Ben here. Over the last couple of weeks, both Zach and I have been sick and/or traveling off-and-on. Even so, we’ve still gotten some good work done over the last couple of weeks. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Improvements to BridgeIt’s helpfulness

We’ve made some general improvements to BridgeIt’s operating instructions so that she’ll be a more faithful language learning partner. We invite you to engage her in conversation and see what you think!

Immersion Mode

In our new Preferences page or during sign up, you can now enable immersive mode. Immersive mode is a feature that will allow you to practice your language skills in a more immersive environment. This is a feature that we’re excited about and we hope you are too! We have just laid the groundwork for this feature, and more will be coming soon. Our first immersion feature will be daily greetings in the language you’re learning.

For now, we’re hoping to help users opt-in so that we can see how they engage with immersion mode as time progresses. If this sounds interesting to you, please enable it in preferences!

Subscriptions

Perhaps the biggest change: you can now subscribe to BridgeIt! This is a way to financially support us and help us continue to develop BridgeIt. Our letter on the subscription page explains more about why we’re asking for your support.

tl;dr You can financially support two nice independent software developers

Hello!

BridgeIt is a free service and will continue to have a free tier for the foreseeable future. However, we do offer a subscription plan for users who want to support our service and unlock premium features in the future.

For now, a subscription will help us cover the costs of running the service and allow us to continue improving it. This can be seen as “early access” as some other products offer. The subscription does not currently offer additional features.

Why pay? When you choose to pay for a subscription, you are voting that BridgeIt is interesting and worth continuing to develop. Your choice will help us to continue work on this independent software product. We are a small company, just a team of 2. We are working very hard to bring BridgeIt to life. The money you pay goes directly towards our improving our service and paying us individually for our time spent making BridgeIt a reality. This is our full time job and your support makes that possible.

Thank you for reading. We appreciate your support!

Ben and Zach

P.S. Have feedback? You can reach us at feedback@spacebarlabs.com

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to dig back in on features and more.