Helping both our users and our company get to the next level
Buddhify was one of the first meditation apps available when it was first released in 2011. Seven years later, there are several things that we are particularly proud of.
Firstly, we are proud to have bucked the trend of having a subscription-based product, to keep access to buddhify simple and affordable. Secondly, we are so proud of our users, who just keep coming back for more. One in five people who have bought the app still regularly use buddhify, and by that, I mean several times a month. I don’t know about you, but that means it is about as useful as my toaster! We are also very proud of the variety of people who use and recommend buddhify. It is individuals who use buddhify, but we regularly have family doctors, psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists get in touch to say they often recommend buddhify to their clients and patients.
We are a small, family-run business run based in Glasgow, Scotland. We’ve never accepted investment because we’ve wanted to remain independent, and continue to be led by our values and creativity rather than by being the biggest app or having the biggest bank account. Saying that, cash flow is still important. And over the years as more meditation apps have become available in the app stores, that competition has affected our bottom line and threatened the sustainability of the business.
So the reality is that to continue to operate and innovate in a world where all other major meditation apps are paid for by subscriptions and have significant private investment, we realised that we needed to do something different. We’ve decided that the core buddhify experience and offer should stay the same — affordable and flexible (and beautiful!). However, we wanted to offer something additional and unique to buddhify users. We wanted to enable them to practice and develop in new ways, based on our ideas and aspirations for what the next generation of meditation apps could do for people. We’ve constantly reinvested in buddhify and our products over the years, but buddhify membership has definitely been our biggest reinvestments, as we hope it will be for our users.
We’ve been fortunate that we’ve been able to work on and develop buddhify over seven years. Every day is a pleasure as we hear messages from our buddhify users, dotted across the world. When buddhify was released, it was genuinely a novel idea that Rohan had been thinking about — meditation on-the-go that focused on meditation based on what you are doing rather than finding a quiet 20 minutes a day. Since that start, we’ve learnt from buddhify users what really works when it comes to presenting modern mindfulness in an inclusive, fresh, and authentic way. So we’d love to be able to keep doing this work, to continue to provide even more experiences for our community and to grow. But the truth is that to do that, on our own terms, we need a more sustainable base.
Since the very early days, getting buddhify has only ever cost around $5. But we know that many of you have got so much more value out of it than that. If everyone who used buddhify on a regular basis became a member, the future of our small family business would be secured so we do hope you join us.
