Membership

As part of the Shelfworthy Beta we gave all of our testers a 3-month membership to Shelfworthy to try out and give us feedback. A good portion of these complimentary memberships are ending in the next month or two. Because of this, and for potential new members, we’d like to take a minute and go over how memberships work on Shelfworthy.

Membership Plans

The first point we would like to make is that we will always offer a free plan on Shelfworthy. This plan currently lets you make as many recommendations, take as many notes and write as may reviews as you would like. The one limit is that you can only add 50 items to your personal library. If you are a beta user and currently have more than 50 items, don’t worry, we will never remove items from a users library once they are there. So while you may not be able to add more, we won’t cut back your library.

The next plan is called a membership. We’re starting this plan at $25 a year–which is only about $2 a month. A membership lets you have as many library items as you want, will never show you ads, and will have more and more exclusive features as time goes on (including syncing with other services like Netflix).

For a limited time, we currently have a lifetime membership plan. This plan is $99, but you’ll never pay again! It has all the features of the normal gold membership, plus you’ll get some exclusive benefits like a a Shelfworthy t-shirt.

You can view all our plans, or check on your current plan, on our subscription page.

Shelfworthy is what you would call a bootstrapped startup. What this means is that while we have gotten small amounts of money from friends and family to support development, the vast majority of investment into the project has been our free time. The more support we get, the more time we can spend improving the site!

How you can help support Shelfworthy!

• Shop with Shelfworthy! If you’re a regular Amazon.com shopper, you can use Shelfworthy to find an item: go to its item page on our site, and click “Buy on Amazon” to complete your purchase. You can also use this special referral link (bookmark it!) to browse and shop on Amazon itself:http://www.amazon.com/?tag=shelfworthy-20. All these kinds of Amazon purchases helps out Shelfworthy!
• Spread the word to your friends and family! Help promote and expand the Shelfworthy community; it’s what we believe to be the heart and soul of the site. With more people joining, Shelfworthy can become an incredibly helpful tool in choosing your media. You’ll be able to learn all kinds of things about books, movies, and games you might normally miss out on. You can find and meet people with similar interests. Read reviews and comments on items you’re undecided on. Or simply use our site to just be your virtual library; helping you organize your media as well as showing it off to the rest of the world!
• Give us feedback! There are links in the footer of every page. We take all comments, concerns, and suggestions very seriously. It’s what helps us most in improving the site and creating a more memorable interactive experience. We love working on the the site and watching it evolve, and an integral part to that is the feedback we get from all our users and visitors!

What’s in store for Shelfworthy…

We are hard at work “completing” the site, with a fistful of fun features (and surprises!) that will be appearing on the site very soon!
Be on the lookout for:

• Facebook app and integration
• A Mobile Site optimized for the iPhone, iPad, Palm webOS, and Android
• More media site aggregation (Netflix, Xbox Live, other cataloging sites)
• Much, much more!