What the free tier covers
Shellf’s free tier is genuinely usable forever. No credit card, no time-limited trial, no “your first 30 days are free” ramp. You sign up and you’re in. The free tier covers the parts of the app most readers actually want:
- •Unlimited book tracking. No library size cap. Track ten books or ten thousand.
- •Full library organisation. Custom shelves with optional tag rules, half-star ratings, DNF tracking with reasons, private notes (with voice dictation), barcode scanner, full Goodreads / StoryGraph / CSV import.
- •Reading stats. Books and pages read this year. Your average ratings. Types of books and genres — that sort of thing.
- •Per-trait rating tags. Mark plot, prose, atmosphere, pacing, and other traits as loved or didn’t work, so the recommendation engine has more signal than a star rating alone. No paywall on this.
- •100 AI recommendation credits. One credit = one recommended book. Enough to ask the engine for, say, ten 10-book batches before you hit the wall. For most readers, 100 credits comfortably covers months of discovery.
- •Full data export. Your library is yours. Download it as CSV any time from shellf.app/export-my-library. No fees, no support tickets.
What Shellf Plus adds
Plus is $18/year. It exists for one main reason: AI recommendation generation has real per-request cost (embeddings, LLM calls), and Plus credits are how Shellf covers that cost without metering the free tier any harder than it already is.
- 2,000 AI recommendation credits per year
- Twenty times the free tier’s allowance. Enough for daily use without thinking about it.
- Advanced reader insights
- Taste evolution over time, archetype-style summaries of what your library says about you, theme analysis. The kind of reflection that’s hard to get from a basic stats screen.
- Priority access to new features
- Plus subscribers get new features (e.g. content warnings, reading challenges, web app) earlier in the rollout. Not a dramatic perk; mostly just “you get the new thing first.”
Why there’s a paid tier at all
Long-term, my hope is to make everything free, funded entirely by affiliate book purchases through Bookshop.org and Amazon. The economics: if a reader buys, say, three books a year through Shellf’s Buy links, the affiliate cut more than covers the inference cost of their recommendations.
Plus exists today as a safeguard while that model matures. Open-ended free AI generation can get expensive fast if a small number of users generate thousands of recommendations a month. Plus puts a soft cap on that and gives me a runway to make the economics work without eating the cost personally. If affiliate revenue ever covers the bill comfortably, Plus becomes free.
Ready to try it? Install Shellf on Android. iOS launches mid-2026.
Related questions
- →How do I import my library from Goodreads?
- →How much does Shellf cost?
- →Does Shellf work on iPhone?
- →Does Shellf work on Android?
- →How do Shellf's AI recommendations work?