What is LiferList?

LiferList is a service for storing your birding life list, as well as associated media. Think of it like a Pokédex but for birds.

What does it do?

• Track birds by location, outing, and media type (photos, videos, sound clips)
• Upload photos in bulk, tag them by species/outing/location after bulk upload
• Compatible with eBird exports for quickly bringing in your life list, outings, etc. from eBird
• Share your profile (your list, photos, and outings) at your own address, like app.lifer-list.com/u/name, with family and friends, and follow other birders

Why did you make this? Why not just use eBird?

First and foremost, this app is not meant to be a replacement for eBird. I began my birding journey fairly recently as a means of getting away from screens/computers (I work in IT), and have also started working on my wildlife photography skills. eBird has been fantastic for both maintaining my life list, and for doing my civic duty in contributing to community science efforts. That said, where I found myself wanting was when I started taking pictures of my birds for confirmation. You can submit these to eBird as proof, but the social/sharing aspect felt very analytical, and not super friendly. In addition, I wanted somewhere to track birds that did not necessarily "count" towards my life list, but I still had media I wanted to share (e.g, birds at a zoo, aviary, or otherwise in captivity).

Because of this, I created LiferList. Software development and architectural design (specifically in AWS) is my day job, so I felt like this was a fairly simple project to take on. I tried storing my captures in places like Google Photos, but found the sorting lacking. I wanted to be able to pin captures to locations (e.g., my backyard), outings (e.g., trip to the nature reserve), or just species only. Since I couldn't find anything that did what I wanted, I decided to build my own.

Keep in mind, outings can still be exported in eBird format, so you can keep your life list synced and contribute to science.

Why are you charging? What are you charging for?

Raw pricing is below, but I'll break down what I'm charging for here. The short answer is I charge for anything that costs me a measurable amount of money (or liability) personally

• Storage - This is the highest cost to me. The storage backend is Amazon S3 for maximum durability. We also have backups, so storage is double-billed (though, less the second time due to archiving costs being lower) to me. The first 10GB is free, so storing small images or just your list itself is free forever.


• ID Assist - This increases compute cost for every image uploaded, as it needs to run it through a machine learning model to suggest potential matches. Since I'm committed to not training on user data, I'm reliant on heavier models for the widest range of compatibility.
• Auto watermarking of images, rendered into public image directly (compute cost) so the un-watermarked versions cannot be downloaded directly. Handy if you want to show off your pics, but don't want to give out the originals (e.g, if you're selling prints on external platforms)
• Sidecar file uploads to existing images. Upload your RAW/PSD/XMP/etc files at the same time as your jpegs, so you can grab the raw later if you decide you want to re-edit. Raw files store less efficiently, so this is a paid tier option only.

Sharing is free on every plan: your public profile, following other birders and the Birders screen cost nothing extra.

Plans and pricing

LiferList is free to start. Paid plans add storage and all paid tier benefits outlined above, billed monthly or yearly through Link, Stripe's checkout service:

• Free: $0, 10 GB of media storage
• Plus: $10/month or $100/year, 1 TB, paid tier benefits
• Pro: $25/month or $250/year, 2.5 TB, paid tier benefits
• Max: $50/month or $500/year, 5 TB, paid tier benefits

Identification assist uses machine learning to suggest which birds might be in your photos, recordings and videos. It's a starting point, not an identification: you always choose the bird, and nothing is tagged for you. It runs on LiferList's own servers, and your photos, videos and recordings are never used to train machine-learning models.

Prices above are in US dollars, plus sales tax where it applies. Outside the US, checkout shows your local price with VAT or GST included: Plus is €11/month in the euro area, £9 in the UK, A$16 in Australia, NZ$20 in New Zealand and ¥1,700 in Japan (in Canada it's CA$14 plus tax). Elsewhere, checkout converts the US price into your currency. Paid plans are sold through Link, Stripe's merchant-of-record service, in the 80-plus countries where it handles sales tax for us; the Free plan is open everywhere. Cancel anytime in the app (Plan & billing → Manage billing) or in your Link account. You keep your plan until the end of the period you've paid for. We don't refund partial periods, except where the law requires it. If a charge looks wrong, email support@lifer-list.com and we'll make it right. Full details are in the Terms.