Fair questions.

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

BeeMyGuide is early, it is small, and it has to pay for itself. You're right that the raw facts cost us nothing. Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and the rest are free, and we'd defend that they should stay free.

What costs money is everything between those records and your headphones: collecting them, working out which five entries are the same place, writing each one up, turning it into speech, storing it, and serving it to your phone the moment you walk past. That happens once per place.

Wikipedia runs on donations and that works, because Wikipedia is a household name. Nobody has heard of BeeMyGuide yet. We'd rather give this away than charge for it, and if it ever gets big enough to live on donations we'll take that trade. Until then, the price is set as low as this thing can survive on.

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 we reverse-engineered from what the market will bear. They're the lowest point at which the catalog keeps growing, the bills get paid, and there's enough left to seed the next city.

No selling your location or your listening history. That one is permanent.

What pays for it can change. Today it's the guide itself. In the future we may pursue partnerships with hotels and short-term rentals. Some of that may look like promotion, and when it does it will be labelled as such.

The goal is to reduce the per-user cost, and ultimately reduce the price of the app.

What else is it good for?

Language immersion. BeeMyGuide speaks twelve languages, so a student can walk a real street and hear it described in the language they're learning, rather than off a worksheet.

If that fits a class, a semester abroad or a whole department, bulk licensing is open: val@beemyguide.travel.

I only see tours in San Francisco.

Tours are available in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee in the US; Madrid, Barcelona and Málaga in Spain; and Mar del Plata in Argentina. After go-live we add a new city every week, and the ones coming next are listed on the About page.

If you're an active subscriber going on vacation to a city that isn't on the list, email us the city and your dates at val@beemyguide.travel. We'll see if we can make it happen.

I want to write tours for BeeMyGuide. How does that work?

We're looking for partners and contributors. Both get paid.

Email val@beemyguide.travel before you start. The details are still taking shape, and we'll go over what makes a tour publishable and how the incentives work, so you don't spend time on something we can't use.

From there, build your tour or write up your story at app.beemyguide.travel. We review every one: that it's yours to share, and that it's not something we already have. If we publish it, you get paid every time someone takes that tour.