Fair questions.

Why do you charge for this if all your data is public?

Great question, and it deserves a real answer rather than a shrug.

I'm a solo developer and this is my only job. You're right that the raw facts cost me nothing. Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and the rest are free, and I'd defend that they should stay free. What isn't free is the machinery that turns a pile of public records into something you can listen to while walking: matching and deduplicating them, writing each place up, turning that into natural speech, storing it, and serving it to your phone at the moment you walk past.

The unit economics, as they actually stand

So a three-day pass is about the price of fifty places nobody has ever asked about before. Most people don't spend it that way. They walk where other people have walked, and those narrations already exist. That's the whole trick: the catalog is a shared asset that gets cheaper per listener the more it gets used, which is why I can charge once for a weekend instead of metering you by the landmark.

What the price is set to

Passes run about $2.88 for 8 hours, $6.88 for three days and $9.88 for a week; a subscription is about $8.88 a month or $88 a year. (A few cents differ on the App Store, because Apple only allows certain price points. Your store always shows the real number.)

Those aren't numbers I reverse-engineered from what the market will bear. They're the lowest point at which I can pay the bills above, take a salary, and have enough left to seed the next city. If this ever gets big enough that the per-person cost drops, the honest thing is to drop the price, and I'd like to be held to that.

No ads, ever. No selling your location or your listening history. The only thing I'm monetising is the guide.

I only see tours in San Francisco.

You do, and that's real. Seeding a city properly is work, and San Francisco is where it started. More cities are coming, but a solo shop expanding one city at a time is slow, so the plan isn't only me.

The goal is user-submitted tours. Build a route in My Tours. Drop the stops, order them, write your own notes, then send it my way. I read every one, and the good ones get published so everyone walking that city can take them.

And I'll pay you in the only currency I have. Ten tours I can publish gets you a month of free access. If that's not the right trade, make me an offer. I'm open to most things, with the honest caveat that right now I don't have money, so what I can offer is access, credit and a say in what gets built.

Know a city well? Email me before you start and I'll tell you what makes a tour publishable, so you don't spend a Saturday on something I have to send back.

What's next?

Tour sharing with tipping, contributor rewards for photos, and user-written content are the three I keep circling. They're written up properly on the What's next page, along with every enhancement request people have sent in.

Anyone can read that list. Adding a request of your own, or upvoting one that's already there, happens in the app once you sign in. Nothing goes on the list until I've read it, so yours won't appear the instant you send it, and that's the review rather than a bug.