Treefort Blog

How to create content and not go broke

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

All content costs money to create - even if you’re just paying tokens for AI to clank out your next blog post 😉. From infrastructure costs and editing software, to microphones and those little circle-lights, to the actual time you put into the creation, the costs add up. How do you charge for it?

Treefort was built to help you get your content to your audience with the tools you need to monetize. Here is an overview of how monetizing can work on Treefort and how our users take advantage of these integrations.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are by far the most common way to monetize with Treefort. Dependable, recurring revenue is great for business growth and you don’t need 100k subscribers to make it work financially. Our Stripe integration makes it super easy to set up monthly or yearly subscriptions. Apart from Stripe, our team will help you get set up with Apple and Android too. The essential element of a successful subscription service (nice alliteration!) is new and engaging content. The businesses that manage this well thrive. Our built-in analytics will help you understand what your audience is or isn’t engaging with so that you can give them more of the hits and less of the duds.

Freemium

The “Freemium” model is a variation of a subscription service where you offer both free and paid content. Free content is a great way to attract your audience to your platform and introduce them to your paid offerings.

Individual Purchases

For some content, your audience will expect to purchase it once and have access to it forever. Treefort gives you the option to set up individual purchases - we call these “offerings”. An individual purchase is connected to a user’s account so, as long as the account is active, the content will be available.

Donations

A handful of our customers offer all of their content for free. Ok, it’s not free, they paid to create it, but it’s technically free to their audience. Most of these organizations have 501©(3) status and they use donations to fund the content production and distribution. With Treefort you can link to your site’s giving page or embed the giving page directly in your app.

Mix and Match

Treefort is intentionally flexible. If you’re uncertain about how to charge, why not mix and match? Offer your podcast and articles for free, charge a subscription fee for a series of video courses, and sell your ebooks as individual purchases.

Whichever model you choose, we’ll keep making great software so you can stick to making great content. It’s like a match made in …Moscow, ID.

Articles

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

I’ll keep this short - we’re all about to head home for eggnog with our families. But we haven’t forgotten about you, our dear customer. In fact, we have a Christmas gift for you!

Pop open the “Add content” button in your dashboard and you’ll find a new option: “Article”. You can now add rich text articles to your apps, replete with images, links, and your very best writing.

You’ll also notice a new “Blog” section in your sidebar. Click over there to group multiple articles together into, you guessed it, a blog.

We plan to continue expanding on these features, so feel free to send us your requests and ideas - although maybe after the holidays ;)

Have a Merry Christmas!

Analytics dashboard

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce the launch of a brand new Treefort analytics dashboard replete with helpful charts, graphs, and stats. This feature is designed to help you better understand your audience and ultimately make more informed decisions about how to serve them.

The dashboard includes a mix of metrics that were already available (but were quite difficult to gather) as well as brand new, never-before-seen stats. A few examples:

Subscribers: Take a look at this chart for historical subscription and cancellation numbers. See how you’re trending without tallying up numbers across Stripe, App Store Connect, and the Play Console.
Shares: See which content is being shared the most by your users.
Searches: See what users are searching for in your app - and if they’re finding it. Search misses can be particularly interesting. Sometimes these will just be severe misspellings, but often they will highlight content that you don’t have but that your audience would like from you.
Engagement: See at a glance your most engaging content. Click the little expando button above each mini table to open the data in the full filterable/sortable analytics table that you’re already familiar with.

Audio playback timer

Wed, 21 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Surprise! It’s been so long since our last post that I bet you thought we forgot we had a blog. But just like springtime in the North, we’re back when you least expect it! We’ve been doing a lot of quiet behind-the-scenes work since our last blog post, but today we’ve got an exciting new feature to announce: the oft-requested audio playback timer!

14 minutes left until audio pauses automatically!

The latest version of our app now has an audio timer option in the player, both in the native mobile app and on the web. When you tap the timer icon, you can select your desired timer duration from a number of presets or you can enter a custom number of minutes. “But Matt!” I hear you cry. “I want to fall asleep to my current audiobook chapter, and I don’t know how much time is left in the chapter!” Fear not, my friend, for we have given thought even to this exotic use case. The “End of chapter” timer option is built specially for you! Instead of pausing after a set number of minutes, this timer will pause playback when the player reaches the end of the currently-playing chapter. (And what’s more, it also works for podcast episodes and album tracks!) Simply set the timer to “End of chapter” and then relax in the peace of mind that accompanies the knowledge that by falling asleep you won’t miss more than the entire remainder of your current chapter. (The rest of that chapter probably won’t be on the final exam anyway.)

Pause playback at the end of the chapter…or podcast episode…or video…or album track!

Other creative uses for the playback timer include:

Timed reading: want the kids to listen to 15 minutes of the Bible or some other content? Playback timer’s got you covered.
Chores timer: when my kids were young, we’d have a brief cleanup time each day and play a song to signal it was time to tidy up. Using playback timer, you can signal the kids to do a cleanup routine as long as the music (or audiobook) is playing!
Pomodoro timer: Set a custom playback timer for your 25-minute Pomodoro interval, get to work listening to your favorite audio content, and then take a break when the audio stops.

We hope you enjoy this new feature! As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you’re looking to distribute your content on a streaming platform that provides you with your own custom apps and has a nifty built-in audio playback timer, reach out and book a demo today!

Music streaming

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 GMT

Our effort to be the best way to publish all of your digital media continues: we now support streaming music! Whether you just want to add a few albums to your app or you’re aiming to launch your own music service, we’ve got you covered.

Publishing an album for your audience to enjoy is as easy as dragging a list of mp3s into your Treefort dashboard. Take a look:

Publishing an album in 60 seconds

Some fun features we snuck into this launch:

When a user is listening to music we replace the audio player’s speed control with a loop button (assuming they would rather listen to that latest hit on repeat than at 3x speed). When the user switches back to an audiobook or podcast, we swap the controls back.
We increased the quality of our audio streams from 64kbps to 128kbps for music. A lower bitrate is fine for the spoken word but the higher bitrate makes a big difference for music.
Users can search for albums or individual songs in your catalog using the in-app universal search.
We built a new backend to track artists that will also improve the way we handle authors, publishers, podcast hosts, etc. For now you’ll notice a fancy new autocomplete when entering these folks into your Treefort dashboard. Keep an eye out for future updates in this area.
While working on music we discovered a performance limitation with our audio player. We addressed the problem and the player can now handle albums or audiobooks in excess of 100 hours and 1,000 tracks! We’re pretty confident it could even handle a Pink Floyd album.

That’s all folks! If you’re looking for a way to publish or monetize your digital content - whether you’ve got music, videos, audiobooks, ebooks, or podcasts - we would love to chat. If you’re already on Treefort - happy streaming!

Build revenue with offerings

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 12:00:00 GMT

At Treefort one of our goals is to help you build revenue with your digital content. You can’t keep producing videos, publishing books, and hosting podcasts as great as all that for free. We get it. So our platform includes a slew of features to help you monetize your content: subscription plans, coupon codes, free trials, group memberships, you name it. At the heart of these features is our “offerings” system.

In a nutshell offerings allow you to decide who gets what in your Treefort apps. The two key components of every offering are:

What is being offered: either content or features in your app
Who it’s being offered to: based on subscription plan or region

You can use offerings to answer questions like “When a user signs up for my $10/mo plan via their iPhone in Canada, what should they get access to?”

This system allows you to accomplish some pretty neat things with Treefort:

Paid content: This is the core use-case for offerings. You can setup a subscribers-only offering to lock content behind a paywall. Only paying subscribers will get access to the content. Freeloaders can browse what’s available, but will be asked to subscribe before they can access anything in your offering.
Subscription tiers: You can create subscription tiers by setting up multiple offerings. For example, you might create a “Basic” offering for your $5/mo subs that includes a sampling of your content and a “Premium” offering for your $15/mo subs that includes the kitchen sink. Users can sign up for a plan or switch between plans right in your app.
Family plans: Many of our customers create a “Family” offering that unlocks the family profiles feature and then sell that at a higher price point. This is a great upsell opportunity if you have a lot of family-friendly content.
Regional licensing: You can limit access to an offering based on region. This is helpful as many content licenses are geographically limited. For example, maybe you can get a sweet deal on the entire Harry Potter franchise if you just limit your streaming rights to the Territory of Christmas Island. You can make that happen with offerings.

We recently made some significant improvements to the offerings system (the regional licensing feature in particular) and we have even bigger plans for offerings in the future, so keep an eye out for updates.

That’s all folks. Happy streaming!

P.S. I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw in a sales pitch: if you’re not already on Treefort, schedule a demo and hop on board. You won’t regret it.

eBook highlights and notes

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT

That’s right, we now support highlighting and note taking in eBooks! To try it out just open a book that you’ve added to your app and select some text. You’ll see a handy new popup with five color choices for highlighting and an option to add your own notes. Tap the icon in the bottom left of the reader to browse all of your highlights for the book.

This feature is supported on every platform - iOS, Android, and the web. Each user’s highlights and notes will automatically sync across all of their devices. As an aside, syncing user data is a more difficult problem than it might seem and we put in quite a lot of work to make this happen. We’re very pleased with the results and plan to build more on this foundation in the future (custom playlists, anyone?).

We started slowly rolling this feature out about three weeks ago. It is now fully available to everyone. We really think readers will enjoy it - they’ve already marked over 18,000 highlights!

That’s all for now. Just keep uploading excellent content and we’ll take care of the rest! And as always, if you don’t have an app yet and are interested please ask us anything or book a demo.

Next episode autoplay

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT

One of our primary goals at Treefort is to help you engage and retain subscribers. We’re constantly making updates and improvements to the platform towards that end. This is why we’ve added a feature that makes it much easier for your subscribers to play the next episode in a video series.

Previously when a subscriber finished a video they would be left staring at the video’s thumbnail, possibly in an existential crisis of what to watch next. Our personalized recommendations can help, but if the video is in a series we know what the subscriber probably wants to watch: the next episode.

To solve this problem we’ve updated the app to automatically suggest the next episode in a series. When a subscriber finishes an episode a screen pops up asking them if they’d like to watch the next one. If they don’t respond within a few seconds we go ahead and start the episode automatically. This is a similar experience to many other streaming platforms out there, except without all the algorithmic shenanigans and censorship.

We’re planning to add autoplay to other parts of the app, but if you have particular requests or suggestions don’t hesitate to let us know!

What we’re about

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT

Hi there, I’m Elliot the CEO of Treefort. Today I’d like to take a brief intermission from our product updates to explain what we’re really up to here at Treefort. Not as in “hey, we’re actually Feds” but as in “what’s the reason that we do what we do”.

At a practical level we are a technology company building a media streaming platform. We can help you launch your own branded streaming apps without the development headache. We spend most of our time wrangling code and keeping the servers running so that you don’t have to. But all of this technology is ultimately a means to an end. Our true mission is this: to help you own your audience and build sustainable revenue.

The concept of a “media streaming platform” is far from original. There are a million services out there that will help you stream your digital content: YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, X-formerly-Twitter, you name it. You can even use these tools to build revenue with ads, royalties, subscription fees, and more.

But here’s the problem. If you’re connecting with your audience through a channel that you don’t own then they’re not really your audience. You’re borrowing an audience from someone else. This becomes painfully obvious in areas like communication, monetization, and censorship. Spotify won’t let you build an email list from your listeners. YouTube can de-monetize your videos at their whim. Twitter (I mean X) is an increasingly lonely exception to the rule of platforms censoring on behalf of governments. No fun.

That’s where Treefort comes in. We help you retain ownership of your most valuable asset - your audience - and we help you build reliable subscription revenue on that foundation. This is why you get the email address of every audience member that signs up. This is why we make it easy for your subscribers to pay you directly. This is why your Treefort app is a fully customized experience designed to meet your specific needs. With Treefort you rent your technology but you own your audience. Way more fun.

If this sounds compelling, we’d love to have you along for the journey. You can learn more from our website or sign up for an in-person demo today.

Web content

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:00:00 GMT

We’re thrilled to share that you can now embed web content right in your Treefort apps! This complements our existing support for videos, audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts, allowing you to publish just about anything. It’s an important step towards our goal of helping you create a single home for all of your digital content. Here are a few ways you can use this new feature:

Livestreaming: Easily incorporate any livestream player into your app to engage your audience in real time.
Social: Integrate a group chat or forum to add a social element to your app. Pair this with our Single-Sign On support for a smooth user experience.
Magazines: Embed online flipbooks or magazines for content that doesn’t quite fit the traditional ebook format.
Blogs: Everyone loves blogs. Include yours in your app.

If you’re already a Treefort user, check out our help documentation to start embedding web content today. If you’re new to Treefort and find this feature interesting, we’d love to have a chat or give you a demo.

Happy streaming!

Family profiles

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 12:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce our latest feature: family profiles.

Similar to the “Who’s watching?” experience from many popular streaming services, this feature allows up to 5 family members to share a single subscription to your service while each maintaining their own personalized experience. Gone are the days of losing your spouse’s place in an audiobook or sifting through junior’s ebooks to find your latest read - each profile has its own progress tracking, library, and recommendations.

Head on over to the app settings page in your admin dashboard to enable this feature today. You can limit the number of profiles allowed per account, upload profile images for your subscribers to choose from, and even limit access to profiles based on subscription tier. And of course we’ll upsell users right in your app if they need to pay to access the feature. Take a look at the help guide to learn more.

Let us know if you have any questions, and happy streaming!

Recommendations

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 12:00:00 GMT

We hope you’ve been enjoying your summer - and your state-of-the-art streaming applications from Treefort 😉. Read on for the latest updates to our product.

Recommendations

We’re excited about this one. If you have a large catalog of content it can be tricky for users to find the next thing to watch, read, or listen to. To solve this we’ve integrated with a slick service called Recombee. You can sign up for a Recombee account and plug it into Treefort to show automated recommendations right in your app! This includes the ability to:

Show personalized content recommendations based on an audience member’s individual taste.
Show similar content recommendations based on a particular video, video series, audiobook, ebook, or podcast.
Show trending or popular content recommendations based on what your audience has been enjoying as a whole.

You can even use Recombee to generate recommendations for use outside of your apps - say on your website. Read the integration guide to get started.

Honorable mentions

Link management — You’ll see a new “App Links” card when you open a piece of content or a collection in your admin dashboard. The goal of this card is to help you keep your app organized and avoid broken links. The card lists all of the places in your app that link to the item. We’ll prevent you from accidentally archiving the item before removing these links from your app.

Media formats — We’ve added support for uploading flac audio files and mvl video files.

Stability — We spent a good part of June shoring up loose ends in the platform to keep your apps fast and stable regardless of the size of your audience, the size of your catalog, or if you decide to switch podcast hosting providers. That last one was complicated - but we’re happy to think of these details so you don’t have to.

That’s all folks! As always, book a demo if you want a tour of the product, have questions, or just want to chat.

Subscription tiers

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMT

We’ve got some pretty exciting developments to share with you this month — read on to learn more!

Subscription tiers

Our most requested feature is finally here: subscription tiers! Up until now you could only offer one subscription plan in your Treefort apps. Now you can create multiple plans with different prices and benefits. You can choose which content is available under each plan, and your subscribers can upgrade their plan when they want to access more content.

New checkout page

To complement subscription tiers we’ve redesigned our checkout page from the ground up. The page includes a switch to view monthly or annual pricing (if you offer that), a full list of benefits for each plan (customizable by you), and a beautiful new layout.

Honorable mentions

We’re always fixing bugs and making minor improvements behind the scenes. Here are some of the changes from this month:

Revenue in Google Analytics — We’ve updated our integration with Google Analytics to include your subscription revenue. This helps you analyze revenue and conversions across all platforms.
App header icons — You can now customize the icons in your app’s header to match your branding. You can update the search, menu, back, and close icons.
Quicktime file support — We’ve added support for Quicktime .mov files when uploading video content.

Interested in Treefort?

We’d love to chat. Sign up here and we’ll give you a tour of the product and answer any questions you have.

eBooks

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMT

This past month was a productive one for us. Maybe the cold weather kept us indoors and programming more than usual. We pushed out quite a few bug fixes and minor improvements, but we also finished a major feature that has been in the works for some time: eBooks!

eBooks

Now, in addition to videos, podcasts, and audiobooks, you can publish eBooks in your app. You’ll find a new “eBook” option under the “Add Content” menu - click that to get started. A few highlights:

You can bulk upload up to 10 ePub files at once and we’ll automatically extract the artwork, table of contents, and other metadata for a streamlined admin experience.
Your apps have been updated with a responsive eBook reader that works at any screen size, on every platform, and in both light and dark mode.
Your users can pick up where they left off across all their devices and download eBooks for offline reading on iOS and Android.
Our Google Analytics integration tracks the number of times each book has been opened and logs when a reader reaches key progress milestones (10%, 25%, and so on).

We’ll continue working on this feature and have more updates in the pipe!

Honorable mentions

We’re pretty excited about eBooks, but there were a few other features launched in February that deserve a mention:

Podcast episode page: We’ve added a new page in the app for individual podcast episodes. The page shows the episode’s artwork (if your podcast feed includes that) as well as the episode’s full show notes.
Payment plan switching: Users can now easily switch payment plans right in the app. Previously it was a bit of a hassle to do something like switch from a monthly plan to an annual plan.
Updating videos: You can now update a video’s media file even after it has been published. The original metadata, settings, and analytics are all retained.
Uploading from Dropbox: We’ve integrated with Dropbox to allow you to import videos and eBooks directly from your Dropbox account. Files are transferred in the cloud which makes this a great option if you don’t have the best local network connection.

Stay in touch

We’ll be back next month with more - sign up below so you don’t miss out. And as always, if you’re new here and want to know more about Treefort please schedule a demo.