Our statement on the future direction of ClientEye
It's with a heavy heart that we must announce that ClientEye can no longer remain in its current free format from the 17th of May 2022.
OUR JOURNEY (2018-2022)
We started our apps to increase the safety of a local group of workers we were part of, in the 4 years since then, we have grown to become the biggest reporting database of its kind in Europe with over 250,000 reports, we regularly receive 400-500 reports a day, and deliver 13,000+ reports & over 500,000 notifications every month.
We have personally taken on 2nd jobs in order to fund ClientEye and have worked 12+ hours a day, 365 days a year for almost 4 years to keep our apps operating, unfortunately, month after month our costs have exceeded the revenue or donations we have received.
In '20-'21 our losses totaled £5800, in '21-'22 our losses totaled £3800, and we can unfortunately no longer fund ClientEye in its current format.
We have come to the realization that funding a free app, via supporters & donations alone, whilst costing us £1000's per year is not viable in the long term, and if our apps are to continue, we have to find a new funding direction to sustain our continued growth and further app updates.
VARIOUS OPTIONS WE LOOKED AT
We conducted a 12mth trial of an ad-based system for android users, unfortunately, the revenues from these changes have been minimal at best, and very much annoying to the user experience.
We looked into the pros and cons of obtaining charitable status and funding solely via fundraising/applying for grants, but we felt this would be a greater burden on us having to administer a charity as well as all the tasks currently involved in operating our apps.
Close down ClientEye, we simply cannot allow this to happen, ClientEye has proven itself to be the premier safety app within the UK for 1000’s of daily users who rely on the safety our apps bring them.
Pass our databases and apps onto another group who could maybe continue our work. Although we could pass on the apps we could not pass on the databases (for legal reasons) and without the databases, our apps would not work.
A subscription model. This is an option we have been trying to avoid for over 18mths as we understood this would be a shock to all users. Unfortunately, a transition to a subscription model is our only viable option.
OUR CHANGES - from 17th May 2022
Today 17th April 2022, we have recorded the current "report count" of each user and stored the results in a separate field in our databases, we have also reset all users' "search counts” to 0.
(Users who wish to check their current report & search counts, can select the shield icon that appears in the top menu of our apps when viewing our report results pages.)
Users who have already made 100+ reports, will not see any changes until March 2023.
Users who have already made 31-99 reports, will not see any changes until September 2022.
New & existing users with a report count <30, will start to see changes from the 17th May 2022.
Users will be able to complete 100 unique searches before being limited in the report description details they can see, at that time or after any time extension, users will be given information on how to remove the additional restrictions.
All users, regardless of their restriction status, will continue to see if any, number/username/e-mail has been reported and the report type, users will also continue to receive all auto-notifications and see any linked details, if their app version supports these features and users will continue to see their own reports regardless of any restriction status.
Working closely with our key partner Vivastreet, we've developed a web-based version of our app exclusively available to active Vivastreet Escort & Massage advertisers, free of charge. This will launch on Vivastreet from 17th May 2022.
Our current ad-free supporters will automatically be transferred to our new system and will not see any changes for as long as their supporter status remains unchanged.
OUR APOLOGIES
We understand that no one will be happy with the changes we are having to make and apologize for them, we also understand some users may miss out on any time extension due to reinstalling, however, we have to set the changes at some level & we hope our users will understand, that if ClientEye is to continue, with a much bigger platform than we could ever have imagined, financial changes have to be made.
We have tried to find a balance that ensures we lessen the impact of our changes on our low volume/occasional users as they will still be able to perform searches without a subscription for as long as possible, and thank our higher volume users, who have contributed the most reports, as they will be able to use our apps without a subscription for an extended length of time.
Our hope is that any much-needed revenue generated from subscriptions will start to cover our ever-increasing monthly & yearly costs and that this will allow us to better plan, fund, and develop future app updates. Thank You …… Emma & Richard ( ClientEye )