Brush Ninja #17: Memberships

Happy (slightly late) Halloween!

Last week was half term here in the UK, so I went on holiday with my wife and son - we had a great time going to museums and the beach and playing in the arcades.

The week before that I launched Brush Ninja Memberships.

It’s interesting to me that when I started Brush Ninja I didn’t know how I would make it earn money so I can work on it full time. I didn’t want to sell peoples data, I wanted to treat the people who use my website in the way I would like to be treated. Too many websites take peoples information and sell it to the highest bidder, generally through behavioural advertising - I really dislike that.

I also wanted to make something that anyone could use, which is why I resisted adding paid accounts for so long, but now they are here and I am really pleased with how they work.

The core features of Brush Ninja are still free, and I still don’t sell your information. If you want the power features then you can join Brush Ninja for a relatively small amount (and there’s a coupon code at the bottom of this email to save even more).

The biggest new premium feature is the addition of the images tool. This has long been requested and I’ve resisted adding it in, purely because I couldn’t work out how to make it function, but I’ve finally worked it out. So that you can test it I have added some demo images that you can use for free, and these will change periodically (paid members can download an archive with all the images in - currently small but this will grow).

In addition, if a paid member gives a free member a .brushninja file containing images, then the free member can edit the file using the images, even if they can’t add images of their own.

I think this is a great feature for teachers since you only need the teacher to have a premium account and they can share prepared files with the class.

Other premium features include downloadable animations, lots more stickers, access to priority email contact, and the project roadmap. There’s going to be more premium features in the future - but I won’t leave fre users behind. There will al and there will also be more free ones.

Gallery

Now that schools are going back there’s been a lot of activity from schools on Twitter about how they are using Brush Ninja. There’s loads of updates in the gallery, and there’s a few that stood out below.

This following tweet shows students using the default images from the new images tool:

Some seasonal drawings here:

And learning about the planets!

What’s next?

I’m planning to spend the next few weeks tidying everything up. There’s changes I want to make on the stickers screen, and other areas related to images that could do with some tweaking. After that, it’s on to some new features.

Let me know if there’s anything in particular you would like to see in the future. You can always reply to these emails if you have any feedback!

Till next month, Ben