The Family Nexus Adds Premium Features

The Family Nexus is an interactive app for iPhones that automatically plots life events from your family tree on an interactive Google map. This makes any road trip into a family history discovery. As you plot your course on a Google map, The Family Nexus adds events around your location that occurred in your ancestors lives as recorded on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The basic program is free, but now the company has added some premium features based on an annual subscription.

Quoting from a press release:

Premium Features provide powerful tools to access even more data, customize the map experience, and connect with ancestors in new ways. Subscribers can download an additional 4 generations of ancestors beyond the 6 generations in the free version. They also can see more context around those individuals. For example, in addition to basic birth, marriage, and death information for an individual, users can also see immediate family members of an ancestor. Furthermore, subscribers see a beautiful gallery view of photos and stories directly from FamilySearch Memories. 

The free version lets users visualize life events of their ancestors in a map, which is a fun and engaging way to see family history. Premium Features allow subscribers to customize the map experience in new ways. Filter controls allow users to show or hide certain types of events, filter by date range, or isolate a family line by showing only ancestors of a particular person. What is more, subscribers can turn on locations of key places such as cemeteries, churches, and courthouses which can be very helpful when visiting an area. 

“These new features are a significant step forward in our journey to make family history more mobile and more social. The positive response of our fans and users encourages us to continue developing innovative new features.”

Although the price of the premium features is designated as a "subscription" the real issue is that upgrades are included so these "subscriptions" simply become a substitute for the older method of charging for upgrades. Meanwhile, the customer gets the benefit of the free program and can decide whether or not to "upgrade."  From my perspective, the use of "subscriptions" to replace an upgrade cost is more in line with the reality of software development and sale than charging an upgrade fee that is more than purchasing the original program.