Why CastReader is introducing Pro
We're a tiny team of indie developers. For the past year, CastReader read everything aloud for everyone, free, no limits. This month that changes a little — and we'd rather explain the math ourselves than have you discover a limit and wonder what happened.
The honest math
Every minute CastReader reads to you runs a neural text-to-speech model on a GPU, and every Explain run calls a large language model. These aren't metaphors for "costs us almost nothing" — they're real bills that scale with every minute played.
Light use — an article or two a day — costs us very little, and we're happy to keep subsidizing it. Heavy use is different: listening through entire Kindle books, hours of long PDFs every day. We looked at our own (anonymous) usage data: about two-thirds of all heavy listening time comes from whole-book reading. That's exactly the usage we love to see. It's also exactly the usage we can't keep paying for out of pocket forever.
So instead of ads, data selling, or quietly degrading quality — three things we will never do — we're introducing CastReader Pro.
What stays free
- 20 minutes of listening every day — enough for an article or two, every single day
- 3 AI Explains every day
- Every platform: Kindle, WeChat Read, PDFs, ChatGPT, Google Docs, your own uploaded files
- Full quality: the synced highlight, auto-scroll, and voices in the free tier are the same as Pro. We don't cripple the free experience to push upgrades.
And some details we sweated over: if your free time runs out mid-article, CastReader finishes the article before showing you anything — we won't cut you off mid-sentence. Short text selections never count against your quota. Your daily time resets at your midnight, not some server's.
What Pro unlocks
- Unlimited listening time — whole books, long PDFs, all day
- Unlimited AI Explain
- 100+ premium voices and up to 3× speed
$4.99/month or $35.99/year (~$3/month), with a 3-day free trial. Cancel anytime in two clicks. In China, you can also buy a one-year pass with Alipay — one payment, no auto-renewal.
If you've been here a while
You installed CastReader when it was fully free, and we don't take that lightly:
- Nothing changes for 30 days after you update — your listening stays unlimited while you decide.
- Founding price, locked forever: $2.99/month (about 40% off), exclusively for early users. You'll find it in the one-time notice inside the extension.
Questions you might have
"You said free forever." We did, and we were wrong to promise something that depended on costs we don't control. What we can promise honestly: light use stays free, quality never gets degraded to upsell you, and there will never be ads or data selling. Pro exists so those promises can survive.
Will the free tier shrink over time? No. 20 minutes + 3 Explains per day is the floor, not a starting point for cuts.
How do I cancel? Pricing page → "Manage subscription & billing" → cancel. Trial cancels are never charged. Alipay passes never auto-renew.
Where does the money go? GPU time for TTS, LLM calls for Explain, and keeping two developers able to work on this full-time instead of nights-and-weekends.
Thanks for reading along — literally. If you have feedback about any of this, email us at support@castreader.ai. We read everything.