# Run the free tier on the user's hardware and sell the GPU as the upgrade

- Category: business
- Author: Andrei Statescu (https://indie.md/people/andrei-statescu/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/andrei-naramine/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/free-tier-on-their-hardware/

Naramine's Basic tier is the same open source engine as Premium, Kokoro, but executed as Kokoro JS in the listener's own browser, so every free user brings their own compute and Andrei's marginal cost for the entire free tier is zero. The limits of local execution, roughly 1.3x listening speed on a good laptop but stuttering below realtime on weak hardware, and English only, are exactly the pitch for Premium, which runs bigger models on Modal GPUs with two to three second cold starts, better voices, and more languages, at under a dollar per 50 chapters. The elegance is that the free tier demos the paid tier by being honest about its own ceiling: the user who feels the stutter understands precisely what the upgrade buys. If your workload can run client-side at acceptable quality, that is a free tier that cannot bankrupt you, with an upsell built out of physics instead of feature gates.