Waverate will be moving to a $2 a month subscription. All current Lifetime Premium holders are officially grandfathered into the program—your access remains forever. This change is necessary due to massive feature growth driving up cloud infrastructure costs. Free users will still enjoy an unintrusive experience, while the subscription empowers our power users.
Waverate V3 is almost finished with development! We are in the final stages of polishing the new dashboard aesthetics and optimizing cross-platform stability. This is our biggest update yet, bringing unparalleled speed and a completely refined social music experience.
The next step of our development journey is the finalization of the Waverate API. This core infrastructure is the bridge required before we release Penny Sphere V1. We are building an ecosystem where your data connects seamlessly across all Avlory platforms.
Waverate may move to a subscription at $2 a month, for V3 or V4 anyone who gets premium now will be grandfathered in this is due to high Firebase costs, we are sorry for not calculating the scope of our ambition, free users will still get a great experience unlimited ratings, 15 friends, and 8 custom catalogues (10 total), achieving a 30 day streak will get you 10 more friends the subscription is for unlimited friends, catalogues, and no ads.
The blueprints for Waverate V3 are officially on the desk. We're focusing on "Vinyl" dashboard aesthetics, deeper gamification, and the much-requested streaming integration. It's about making the app feel less like a tool and more like a companion to your music life.
V2 shipped on April 19th with three major additions: custom music catalogs so you can organize your library your way, theme color sync that lets you personalize the entire app's look, and a full avatar creator. This was a ground-up rebuild of the profile and catalog systems.
How we're rethinking data ownership — apps that view your data instead of owning it. The idea is simple: your information lives in your account, and our apps are just windows into it. If you leave, your data stays intact. We're building the architecture so that no single product has a lock on what's yours.
Why we built a 0.25-step rating scale in Waverate — because the difference between good and great matters. A 5-star system is too blunt. A 10-point system feels academic. 0.25 increments on a 10-point scale give you 40 steps of precision, which is enough to meaningfully distinguish between songs without overthinking it.
Avlory.com is stable with live filtering, real-time user metrics pulled from Firestore, and a fully responsive layout across all screen sizes. The site runs on vanilla JS — no frameworks, no build step, no unnecessary weight.
How we optimized Firestore queries to load dashboards in under 100 milliseconds. The key was composite indexing and restructuring our document schema so that the most common reads — your ratings feed, your friend comparisons — resolve in a single query instead of chaining multiple lookups.
Early architecture work on Penny Sphere — designing isolated storage for financial data. The challenge is connecting to real bank data through Plaid while keeping it segregated from the rest of the ecosystem. Your spending data and your music data live in separate containers, linked only when you want them to be.
Avlory is rooted in San Diego. The music scene here, the people, the pace — it shapes how we think about software. We're building for real communities, not abstract "users." That local perspective keeps us grounded and focused on tools people actually want.
Why we chose Flutter for mobile and vanilla JavaScript for the website. Flutter gives us a single codebase for iOS and Android with native performance — no compromises on scroll physics or animations. The website runs on vanilla JS because we didn't need a framework's overhead for what's essentially a well-structured static site.
We serve ads in Waverate to keep it free. That's the trade-off, and we're upfront about it. What we don't do is sell your data or build shadow profiles. Personalized ads are opt-in — you can turn them off in your profile settings. If you want zero ads entirely, Waverate Premium removes them for a one-time purchase. No subscriptions, no tricks.
Our build pipeline runs through Codemagic for iOS deployment. Environment variables are injected at build time via dart-define — no secrets in the repo, no config files shipped in the bundle. It costs money per build, so we test locally first and only push to CI when we're confident it's clean.
One of the features we're most proud of in Waverate is taste comparison. Add a friend, and you can see exactly where your ratings overlap and where they diverge. It turns "I think this album is good" into a real conversation backed by data. It's the feature that made us realize this app had legs beyond just personal tracking.