WeDispatch 1.4.0: three tiers, one axis
Audio quality now sits on a single axis with three tiers, reserved features are announced the same way everywhere, and a new card tells you where your listens come from.
This release is less about what the product can do than about how it says it. A client area reads quickly when each word stands for exactly one thing, and that work comes round regularly, because a product's vocabulary ages faster than its features.
Audio quality sits on a single axis
The Voice and playback screen used to draw a distinction between two neighbouring settings: the voice, which followed from your plan, and text preparation, which you chose. Two close ideas, two places, and the word "premium" used on both sides for two different things.
There is now a single axis, and three tiers. Standard, the voice included in every plan. Premium, the most natural voice in the catalogue, with the pick of every voice. Sovereign, the commitment of processing that never leaves Europe. Your tier follows from your plan and governs the whole chain, from text preparation through to the reading. One setting, one promise, nothing left to reconcile.
One point we would rather put in writing: the sovereign tier currently guarantees text preparation in Europe; the reading itself still uses the premium engine. A fully European voice layer is our work in progress, and we won't present it as settled before it is.
The sign-up wall, properly reserved
The sign-up wall lets you offer the first few seconds of an article, then ask for an email address for the rest. It is a Premium feature, and it is now reserved the same way everywhere: in the interface as on the API, putting a wall up follows your plan's entitlements strictly.
Taking one down remains allowed in all circumstances, and that is a principle we hold to: nobody gets trapped behind a setting they can no longer remove. An account that already had a wall in place keeps it, we don't unplug anything retroactively.
The podcast feed, the embeddable pages and the daily briefing stay free on every plan, as advertised.
One vocabulary for what's reserved
The dashboard marks what's reserved with a small grey rectangular label, next to titles and in the sidebar. Locked settings carried something else entirely: a rounded lime pill with a padlock emoji. Two ways of saying one idea, sometimes an inch apart.
The lock now takes the shape of the label (same border, same typeface) and adds only a drawn padlock and the word "unlock", because unlike the label, it can be clicked. It sizes itself cleanly whatever setting it sits on, including a plain toggle. And where the title already carries the label, the setting is simply greyed out with nothing on top: saying "premium" twice in the same sentence teaches nobody anything.
One last detail, and not the smallest: the lock now leads straight to the "Change plan" section of your subscription rather than to the public pricing page. You're logged in and already a customer, pushing you out of your account to re-read a sales pitch made no sense.
Where your listens come from
The new thing in this release fits in a single card, on the Listens screen: how your listens split across three surfaces, your article pages, the daily briefing, your audio page.
That origin is written by the server that builds the player. It isn't inferred from an IP address, a referrer or a listener identifier, and we store none of those. The breakdown only appears above fifty located listens: below that threshold, a share would point at one listen and one only, and we'd rather show nothing than a figure capable of singling someone out.
The podcast feed isn't in there, and that's deliberate. Its episodes go out as direct files to the listening app, never passing through our counters. Routing them through a redirect would let us measure them, but would change every episode's address, and podcast apps treat that address as the episode's identity. Your subscribers would see your whole series duplicate itself. The missing count bothers us less than that prospect.
What's next
We're carrying on putting the dashboard screens through the same filter: does what's displayed say exactly what the product does, in the words you'd use yourself? It's quiet work, and it's what makes a tool pleasant to open every morning.
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