Honest ads, why a paid position is labelled

Noctiso has a free tier, and the free tier shows ads. There is nothing unusual about that. What is slightly unusual is how we handle it. When a frame appears in your feed because someone paid for it to be there, we say so, in plain words, on the frame itself. This piece is about why we made that choice, because it sits at the centre of how the whole app is meant to feel.

The sentence we keep coming back to

Here is the honest version of an ad, stripped of the usual softening: you did not pay for this position, someone else did. Every feed that contains advertising is built on that sentence, whether or not it admits it. Most apps work hard to blur the line, dressing a paid placement to look exactly like an organic one so you cannot tell which is which. We do the opposite. A sponsored frame is marked SPONSORED, in the same plain style the Tuner uses to explain its own choices.

Why disclosure fits the rest of the app

The feed is ordered by mood, and the Tuner tries to be legible: when it moves an image up, the reason is a readable thing, a mood you have been leaning toward. An ad that pretended to be an organic pick would quietly break that contract. You would think the feed was speaking your taste back to you, when actually part of it was speaking someone's budget. Labelling the ad keeps the rest of the feed trustworthy. You can believe the unmarked frames precisely because the marked ones are marked.

It costs us something to do this. A disclosed ad is a little easier to skip than a hidden one. We think that trade is worth it, because an app about atmosphere cannot afford to make you suspicious of your own feed.

The version with no ads at all

If you would rather not see them, that option exists and it is clean. Premium removes ads entirely, and it also unlocks the things that genuinely cost more to deliver: full-resolution and portrait downloads, sync across your devices, and custom Tuner presets. You can read the details on the pricing page. There is no degraded free experience designed to nag you into upgrading. The free feed, ads and all, is meant to be genuinely good. Premium is for people who want the quiet version and the full quality, not for people trying to escape a product made deliberately worse.

Either way, the principle holds. You should always be able to tell why a frame is in front of you. If you want to understand the rest of how the feed thinks, the about page is the place to start.