SoapBox in May — Audio Plans, Onboarding, and a New Tier

It's been about seven weeks since the 1.2.0 launch post. Most of that time has been spent on three things: shipping a lot more content, making the first 24 hours in the app feel less empty for new users, and quietly rebuilding parts of the subscription structure so the app can sustain what we're building.

None of those is a single dramatic launch. Together they're a real step forward. Here's everything that landed in May.

🎧 New: 18 Audio Plans across 5 sections

The biggest content drop since the Audio Bible itself. We seeded 18 new audio plans — roughly 315 days of guided narration — organized into five sections so they're discoverable by mood, not just by Bible book.

Listen to the Bible

Picks up where the Audio Bible left off, with plans like the 10-Minute Morning Listen, Bedtime Gospels, Psalms for Commutes, and the Full New Testament Listen-Through.

Prayer & Stillness

Five plans built around contemplative traditions: Lectio Divina, the Examen, Breath Prayers, the Daily Office, and Sabbath Stillness. Each one is a real practice from church history rendered as a short audio guide you can do anywhere — a walk, a commute, a five-minute pause between meetings.

Healing & Hope

Four plans for grief, anxiety, depression, and chronic illness. These are the ones I've been quietest about in public because they matter most to me. They were written for moments when you can't open a Bible app and read — but you can put in your earbuds.

Deeper Walk

Three plans for users who want theology, not just devotion: a Christology study, a survey of the Holy Spirit, and an introduction to the Apostles' Creed.

Soundscapes

Six ambient tracks. Rain on a chapel roof. A forest at dawn. A monastery bell. Not "audio plans" exactly — more like backgrounds for the moments when you want to be still without being talked at.

Every plan ships with a two-voice ladder for free users and the full six-voice cinematic library for paid tiers. The Audio Plans browser is now organized into these five sections, so finding the right plan for the right moment takes about three taps.

👋 New: Welcome Checklists for new users

If you signed up for SoapBox before this month, the first time you opened the app you probably landed on a half-empty Profile screen with a streak counter at zero and not much else to do. That was bad design and I knew it. We fixed it.

There are now two checklists that appear on the Home tab for the first week:

For believers — four small tasks: Join a community, Start a reading plan, Submit a prayer, Write a journal entry. Each tap takes you to the screen where you actually do the thing. The card disappears once you finish all four or once you dismiss it.

For explorers (users who told us during signup that they're not sure where they are with faith), four different tasks. Three of them are pre-answered ORA questions — "What is Christianity really about?", "Who is Jesus?", "What does it mean to follow Jesus?" — that open a guided answer instead of forcing the user to write a question into an empty chat box. The fourth opens our beginner-friendly Bible reading plans.

The design assumes nothing. No talking down. No "Welcome to your faith journey!" energy. Just four concrete things to do, one of which most people pick.

💰 New: Witness tier + a few honest pricing changes

This is the part I want to walk through plainly, because it includes one change that's a regression for current Disciple subscribers, and I'd rather you hear it from me than discover it in a release note.

We added a fourth individual tier — Witness, at $25 per month — to fill the gap between Disciple and the church plans. It's the new top of the individual ladder: 100 ORA AI conversations per month, every advanced reading plan, early access to new features, and the full premium voice library. The name comes from Acts 1:8 — "you will be my witnesses" — outward-facing maturity past the Disciple stage.

We also made two changes to the existing tiers:

• Annual prices now show with a tilde — "~$4/mo, billed annually" instead of "$4/mo". $50 divided by 12 is $4.17, not $4, and I'd rather the math match what shows up on the receipt.
• Disciple's ORA quota is now 50 conversations per month, not unlimited. This is the regression. When we set Disciple to unlimited, ORA was new and our usage was low; we could afford it. As ORA has become the most-used feature in the app, "unlimited" started to mean "subsidized by every Disciple who doesn't use it much." 50 is enough for most people, and Witness covers heavier usage. If you're a current Disciple subscriber and 50 isn't enough, email me and I'll figure out a fair landing.

Reading plans got rebalanced to match the new tier ladder. Seeker gets the starter plans and the explorer onboarding plans. Believer adds the rest of the beginner plans. Disciple unlocks intermediate. Witness opens the advanced theological year-long plans. Cumulative, so Witness sees everything.

🎨 Other things that landed

• Tier-colored avatar rings in the app. Pastors get a purple ring. Witness gold. Disciple green. Believer blue. Seeker no ring. Small touch, but it makes the community surfaces feel less anonymous and gives paid tiers visible recognition.
• Smart Journal Search now actually opens the journal entry when you tap a result. Sounds like it should have always done that. It didn't.
• The "Give" tab for users who aren't part of a church now has an actionable "Find a church" button instead of just a wall of empty-state text.
• A bunch of small copy changes: "Circles" → "Communities" everywhere. The word "Circles" was confusing people; "Communities" matches both the iOS and Android pastor tools.

A note on what's next

The next month is about church-side features. The donations rail is now fully passthrough — money goes directly to the church's Stripe or MoMo account, never to us — and the pastor tools need to catch up to that architecture. Beyond that, the roadmap has small-group features, a real sermon clip generator, and — eventually — a video upload path for sermon transcripts that don't come from a direct file upload. I'll write about each of those when they ship.

If you're already on SoapBox, thank you for being on it. If you're not — the free Seeker tier is genuinely useful (10 ORA conversations per month, the Audio Bible, the new Soundscapes section, and the starter reading plans), and you can grab it on iOS or Android.

— Alan