Pricing

Yes. The free plan includes unlimited book tracking, full library organisation, reading stats, per-trait rating tags, and 100 AI recommendation credits. No credit card is required for the free plan.

Plus is $18/year and adds 2,000 AI recommendation credits per year, AI-generated reader insights (your archetype, your taste fingerprint, evolution over time), priority access to new features, and direct support from me. Everything else — tracking, shelves, stats, imports — is identical to the free plan.

StoryGraph Plus is $49.99/year, so Shellf Plus is about 64% cheaper. Fable Premium is $69.99/year — Shellf Plus is about 74% cheaper than that. The category benchmarks are good products charging fair prices for what they do; I just have lower costs and a different long-term plan. I’ve written longer breakdowns in Shellf vs StoryGraph and Shellf vs Fable if you want the full feature-by-feature view.

My long-term plan is to make every feature free, funded by affiliate revenue from book purchases through Bookshop.org and Amazon. Plus exists mainly as a safeguard against AI recommendation credit over-consumption while that business model matures. As affiliate revenue grows, Plus features will move down to the free tier rather than the other way around.

There isn't a separate trial, because the free tier already includes 100 AI recommendation credits. That's enough to test how Shellf's recommendations work on your own library before deciding whether the full 2,000 credits are worth $18/year. If you genuinely use up 100 credits and want to keep going, that's the signal that Plus is right for you. If a one-off top-up suits you better than an annual plan, $5 credit packs (500 credits each) are available on either Free or Plus.

Yes. Plus is billed annually through Google Play. You can cancel from your Google Play subscriptions at any time, and you'll keep Plus features until the end of the period you've already paid for.

Not really, but I take each case on its merit. I've made the price as low as possible — $18 a year — so that people can buy it and not regret it. But if you genuinely buy the Plus plan, find you don't like it immediately, and haven't used it, I'll consider it. Similarly, if you buy the Plus plan and I see you've used loads of recommendation credits, then no, I won't provide a refund. You can always contact me at hello@shellf.app to say why you weren't happy and I'll consider it.

Yes. When iOS launches mid-2026, Plus will be $18/year on both platforms. App Store and Play Store take roughly the same revenue share at the annual price point, so there's no reason to charge iOS users more.

Tracking, shelves, stats, ratings and imports keep working exactly as before — none of the core book-tracking features depend on AI credits. Recommendations and the taste-fingerprint refresh pause until your credits reset (free tier) or you upgrade to Plus. You don't lose any data or get locked out of your library. If you'd rather not move to a subscription, $5 credit packs (500 credits each) are available on either Free or Plus.

One credit covers one full recommendation run — Shellf builds a taste profile from your library and ratings, runs multiple retrieval strategies, and returns a batch of picks with a written reason for each. 100 credits is enough to explore Shellf's recommendation engine across different parts of your library; 2,000 is enough to use it as your default discovery tool.

No ads, no tracking pixels, no email upsell sequences. The free tier is a real product, not a teaser. The only paid surface in Shellf is Plus itself, and the only mention of it inside the app is one screen that appears when you've used most of your free credits.

Not today. The annual subscription matches how the AI provider costs accrue, which is what Plus is mainly funding. If the long-term plan works and Plus retires into the free tier, the lifetime question becomes moot anyway.