About

Some tweetstorms are good, but reading them on Twitter can be a pain in the ass. Thread Reader reformats a tweetstorm into a readable essay

Thread Reader can take your barely readable Twitter rant of choice and transform it into normal text served up on a sparse, normal looking page.

About Thread Reader

What is Thread Reader App?

Thread Reader App is a service that allows anyone to unroll long Twitter thread and display them on an easy to read page.

Our problem was that it is a pain to read Twitter threads (or Tweetstorm) on the official twitter website/app and we think that all the Tweets put one after another in a medium.com alike page could be better.

So we asked ourselves: "What about a service that helps you unroll a full Twitter thread on a dedicated beautifully designed page to allow an easy read of the whole story?"

What else does Thread Reader App do?

Thread Reader has other interesting features, like getting a PDF Archive of a given thread, having a personalized account with a list of all of your unrolls. Notifications from your favorite authors so you don't miss anything. Learn more about our basic and Premium features.

Team

@Cal

Actual developer

@Amy

Actual Designer

Values

Is this some big company making this site?

No this site is just two indie developers on a laptop coding everything. From the bot, to the trending section. It's all hand-coded, designed, deployed and marketed by us.
This service is not related to Twitter.com

Pricing

Why isn't Thread Reader App free?

It is free! Thread Reader main service is and always will be free.

So why Thread Reader has Premium features?

You must know that Thread Reader is not a startup. It’s just two indie developers working very hard to make it happen. Everyday we are working on this project, doing marketing, support and development. We don't have any external funding on purpose.

Even if we're passionate about what we're doing, in the end if we don’t get any money to live, we’ll have to get back to a more classic desk job.

We also want to stay as independent as possible.

Thread Reader is already bound to Twitter through their Terms of Service – and somehow through some of their obscure developer rules – but we don't want to depend on any other entity/person that could decide who and what can be published on the website.

You may think that it doesn't cost much to run a site like this? But you’re mistaken.

Let’s run the numbers: a good full stack developer is paid $150,000/y+, a normal Startup probably has 4 engineers: that's $600,000/y. Add some support and marketing people and you’re close to $800,000/y in labor costs. On the technical side we'd like to keep it simple but still: sending emails (like subscriptions alerts) costs $1,000/y, hosting and bandwidth is cheap but still adds up $5,000/y. Even Twitter API is going to be paying at some point. Plus you need a bunch of other services like security audit, backups, software licences, etc. probably another $10,000/y.

That means we'd be close to $1,000,000/y to make this profitable not even talking about taxes. We can assure you, We don't even make close to that!

Our goal is to avoid the usual Startup story. You know when someone build a cool service and get some users, attracts some big company (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) and get bought. Then somehow the service gets closed or fades away.

Instead, if every user is paying a little bit for the service, then you’re less likely to see it disappear overnight. When you pay for Premium you get all those advanced features but foremost you’re supporting us and the service so it can stay online and independent.

This is inspired from Maciej, Pinboard and Levelsio, Nomad List who think quite the same as we do.

How do you make money?

Thread Reader mostly makes money from Premium membership and ads.

I would like to advertise on Thread Reader

Please contact us by email at hello@threadreaderapp.com

Others

What is the tech stack?

It's HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Rails and Node.js. It's hosted on Nginx.

Credits

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Support Thread Reader

Pay for the service!

The best way to support Thread Reader App is to pay for it
(Even if you don't need all the Premium features)

Talk about it

To support Thread Reader App all we need is that you talk about it to your friends, but if you want to be even more helpful, start a Premium membership.