Product Description
Option to upgrade from a BirdsEye sound package to MP3s.
Option to upgrade from a BirdsEye sound package to MP3s.
Once you have purchased a membership on the site, here is how to access it on your device:
BirdsEye is the product of many person-years of labor from hundreds of people. Money brought in from selling BirdsEye has never been enough to cover our costs even with the help of volunteers. We are able to balance our budget through generous contributions from users. One important way you can help is through a membership. If you like what we do and would like to help support future improvements, please consider becoming a member for about what it costs to buy a coffee and muffin to start a day of birding.
People have asked where our money goes and in an attempt to be transparent about what the membership fees pay for, here is a partial list:
App Stores: Apple and Google both take the first 30% of all revenue. But not if you buy a membership through this site, so thanks for considering this option!
Development: our largest cost by far is development: fixing bugs, adapting to new versions of operating system as they comeout, adding new features and supporting new platforms. BirdsEye requires a wide range of skills: wireframing, database, iOS client, Android client, website, web app, html, etc. Most of our developers are birders who help out at reduced rates because they like what we do, but still it costs money.
Managing photos, sounds and text: Making sure all the photos are identified correctly is mostly done in our spare time, but we are regularly adding new content, updating text and more.
Royalties: we pay a portion of the money we receive to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, VIREO, and other 3rd-party content providers. For content packages like The Bird Sounds of Peru, we pay a total of 79% to the content provider.
Marketing: we spend money on newsletters and advertisements.
Customer Support: As you might imagine, customer support can feel like a thankless task. We are lucky to have George helping out. He gets paid a lot less than he’s worth.
Server hosting: BirdsEye needs multiple fairly beefy servers to be able to provide fast response times to our many users in the field.
Taxes: even though we have never earned a profit we still need to pay various federal, state and local taxes.
The leaders of the project do it for fun, not for profit. No one makes a full-time salary from the BirdsEye apps and we regularly contribute personal money to keep it afloat. All this is to say, we need and appreciate your support to continue to develop the apps!
Once you have purchased a sound collection on the site, here is how to access it on your device:
Just contact the BirdsEye Help Desk if you have any questions or trouble getting set up. We are happy to help!
Purchasing sound collections also gives you access to eBird sightings, images and text for the species that are included in the sound package, for FREE! Simply download BirdsEye onto your phone for FREE and register with the same email address you used to make this purchase. Your purchased sound package will be at your fingertips. No additional purchase is necessary.
To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to Settings and then choose Download for Offline. Enjoy!