For the past year, I tried to make it a habit of opening the Alpha Manga app every day, even on days when I wasn’t going to read anything. That’s because the app would give out one free ticket per day. While the first three and the latest three (sometimes four, very rarely five depending on the time) chapters of a series are free, everything else required 10 tickets to temporarily unlock. While most of my favorite series I had no problem keeping up with (Cavalier With the Truth, May I Ask for One Final Thing?), occasionally, time would slip by on some series, or if I approached the max limit of 12, I would use them up by trying out a new title and then the most recently paywalled chapter to catch up. That’s how I got into manga like The Ordeals of Regional Knight Hans, which didn’t intrigue me initially.
Tickets can be acquired in other ways, including trying out other apps or outright paying for them, but free is king, right!? Especially when getting one took about two seconds: open the app, ticket pops up, and then move on. These were called Bonus Tickets to separate them from the Purchased and Premium (free but earned) Tickets.
But a couple of weeks ago, I went to get my Bonus Ticket…and one didn’t pop up. I know I sometimes forget when the day resets, so no big deal. Then later I thought I had just missed the prompt, as I often start Alpha Manga in a haze in the morning or just simply forgot I had gotten my daily ticket. But when I started Alpha Manga a couple more days in a row and it was clear that it was not a matter of a glitch or a faulty memory, that’s when I took a little closer look at Alpha Manga again.
And with the assistance of the Internet, that’s when I discovered that Alpha Manga had retooled their freemium model for their first anniversary.
First of all, the first three chapters of a manga remain free, which is good. Now, though, there are two manga that have been serialized to completion: This Time I Will Find Happiness! and The Villainess with Special Circumstances. While ongoing manga have the last three or four not paywalled, these finished series instead have two. Still, at least a reader can read both the beginning and ending for free.
The ticket system remains. Paywalled content still requires 10 tickets to read, and you can free ones (some with limits per day) by watching videos and completing trial offers. Paying $.99 gives you enough tickets to read a chapter, and larger bundles save you more per ticket.
But can you find the difference between these two screenshots?
The pricing and bundles have all stayed the same, but you can see at the top the Bonus Ticket category has been removed in the second, newer screenshot.
Instead of giving readers one Bonus Ticket so that every 10 days they can unlock a backlog chapter, Alpha Manga now allows one free chapter per day. Well, technically, every 23 hours in this “Wait & read free!” option.
So ideally, you want to make sure you read your daily freebie about the same time each day. Otherwise, you are “wasting” recharge time if you open the app later than the day before since the clock won’t start running again until you used your charge. Before, the daily ticket reset at I believe 5 AM ET, so it didn’t matter if you checked in bright and early in the morning or in the wee hours of the night.
Still, though, 1 chapter per day instead of every 10 days? That’s a huge improvement!
…Not so fast.
Before, chapters were divided into 1 of 2 categories: free and paid. The earliest and latest were free; everything else was paid. Now, the latter has been divided further: into “Wait & read free!” and 10 tickets. I couldn’t figure out if this was the pattern, but from what I’ve gathered manga with 35 or few chapters had 7 chapters available for the free daily read; 40 or above had 12. The rest are tickets only.
Newer series with 15 or fewer chapters have all besides the first/last three as tickets only. So the Wait & read free! option is not yet available in these manga.
So in other words, it’s now almost impossible to read the backlog for free passively like before. The press release stated that Bonus Tickets were converted to Premium Tickets, but even if you had the maximum amount of Bonus Tickets, that’s only 12. So that’s one chapter with some leftover.
As I stated earlier, I started some manga a little later, and thanks to the daily free tickets, I managed to catch up on An E-Rank Apothecarist in full. I managed to read all but two of the middle chapters of The Ordeals of Regional Knight Hans. It is luck that they happen to be Chapters 14 and 15, so once the manga reaches Chapter 35-ish in a few weeks, those two should be part of the Wait & read free! program, but like Opening a Café in Another World, which also I missed out on part on? Well, I can use my current 12 Premium Tickets, but now I must either watch videos, sign up for websites, do surveys, etc. to read them. For video ads, for instance, you can earn up to 24 PP per day, and 10 PP = 1 ticket. So that’s about every four and half days to read a chapter.
Is this better than a fully paywalled experience? Of course.
Is Wait & read free! a downgrade from Bonus Tickets? I would say yes.
The new system is better if you only care about reading something, as 1 per day is better than 1 per 10 days. And for new users of Alpha Manga, they can read up to around 15 chapters in two different series for free in about a month versus only up to chapter six in a single title with Bonus Tickets.
However, if new titles on the service stagnate or the number of chapters included don’t increase, eventually, options are going to plateau. As of now, New Saga seems to be the longest title at 73 chapters, but even that one has only 12 available for Wait & read free! It is possible that the number could increase to, say, 15 when a series reaches triple digits, but that could just be wishful thinking on my part. Alpha Manga did announce new titles about the same time as the app was updated, but they don’t add new series as often as others do.
Meanwhile, for readers who may have been reading a lot on Alpha Manga for the past year, they may have already read most of those daily free chapters. And ones manga fans haven’t read are probably from series they aren’t interested in, so there may be very few options to spend their daily credit. Sure, readers could always unlock and reread an old chapter, but it’s not as good as having the option of reading anything — an old favorite, a missed chapter, or a series someone got into later.
I’ve been a big fan of Alpha Manga, and I still feel like either Alphapolis needs to publish full (physical please!) volumes of their series or someone needs to sublicense from them. I mean, sure, there are a lot of isekai titles, but how many isekai center around a resident of this other world dealing with a person from Japan — and in fact, multiple people from Japan! Or a villainess-type heroine grinning amidst blood spatter as onlookers call her the Mad Dog Princess?
But unlike Comikey, which had limited free reading initially but eventually made more widely available, Alpha Manga more or less disguises its new restrictions by proffering some older chapters. One chapter per 10 days sounds extremely slow, but considering most manga update either weekly or monthly, a reader could catch up on about three per month. Between new releases and the recent paywalled content, that usually covered a good portion of an arc if not a whole one. And if you wanted more, well, that’s what PP was for. Now, however, readers can only rely on PP to read those chapters. And it’s especially disappointing that for manga like Huh? I’m Just a Normal Girl! that they aren’t far along enough to even have Wait & read free! content.
But if the new titles coming out in September interest you, make sure you don’t miss their debut. Because once a few weeks or months have passed, if you want to start them, you are either going to have to wait quite a while or suffer through ads over a multi-day period instead of a simple daily check-in to eventually read them.