Having tested and used Audiobooks.com since 2019, I confirm it has an excellent selection of over 200,000 audiobooks and competitive pricing. Also, their highly-rated easy-to-use apps make it worthy of being your audiobook service of choice. There are two drawbacks; the book returns policy needs improving, and there is no smart speaker support.
With access to over 200,000 audiobook titles, and new releases arriving quickly, you will not notice any real difference between the Audible service and Audiobooks.com.
Importantly, like Audible, you own the book, which means that even if you terminate your subscription, you should have access to your audiobooks; for me, this is vital.
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Firstly, there is no easily discernible way to return a book you are unhappy with. In fact, looking into the user agreement, it says: “Audiobooks.com grants refunds at our sole discretion. We do not offer refunds on any subscription charges”.
Secondly, there is no support for smart speakers like Alexa, Apple, or Google Now.
Audiobooks.com a Great App With Good Recommendations.
Audiobooks.com, a Great App With Good Recommendations.
Audiobooks.com Pricing
Free Trial
Audiobooks.com offers a free 30-day trial during which you can access 3 free credits to exchange for 3 audiobooks, plus access to a VIP Book. This is an excellent free trial.
Monthly Membership
The monthly membership costs $14.95 per month, which gets you one credit for a book you own and access to an additional VIP book from a selection they have curated.
This means the average cost per book is $7.48.
The only issue I have with this is that you do not actually own the VIP book. It will always be in your library, but if you end your subscription, you will only have access to the books you purchased with a Credit.
This means all the VIP books will be removed as they were only loaned to you, not actually purchased by you.
This essentially means the real cost per book should you end your subscription is $14.95.
On the positive side, they are always running 2-for-1 deals, which means that if you buy books in the deal, you may bring your average cost per book back down to $7.50.
Audiobooks.com Book Club – New in 2021
Audiobooks have introduced a great new member benefit called book club. Instead of spending your book credit on a single book, you can spend it on 30 days of access to one of 8 book clubs. The book clubs are focused on the Romance, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Health, Business, and Religion genres.
This means when you join one of these book clubs, you get unlimited access to the featured books. I checked, and there are at least 200 books available in each book club. This is an innovative new offering. The only downside is that most of the books are over 2 years old, so do not expect the latest bestsellers to be included.
Finally, if you spend your credit on the book club, it means that you have not purchased a book that you keep forever; you have essentially rented access to unlimited books for 30 days.
Beachbody’s weight loss programs motivate and encourage you to follow through with your health and fitness goals. One of Beachbody’s benefits is the emphasis on its community, which provides participants with an active support system. Another highlight is the Beachbody app. Through the app, users have easy access to workouts, meal plans and fitness tracking tools.
How does Beachbody work?
Beachbody offers a variety of products and services, but all of them share the same goal: to make weight loss easier. Participants sign up with a Beachbody coach who guides them through their weight loss journey. These coaches help them choose a program and find products that give them the results they want.
The Beachbody diet program is one of the company’s more popular services. Although there is no specific scientific study backing the program, the company based this diet on common weight loss principles. For instance, the 21 Day Fix eliminates added sugar and refined carbohydrates, which are known to contribute to weight gain.
Beachbody programs
There are several Beachbody programs. Each one has different benefits, such as workout videos and Beachbody meal plans.
21 Day Fix: This weight loss program allows you to lose as many as 15 pounds in three weeks. The plan comes with workout DVDs and meal plan recipes that control your portions. The program typically costs around $70, but the price varies depending on the exact products you purchase.
Beachbody on Demand: Beachbody on Demand is a streaming service that gives you immediate access to the company’s meal and fitness programs along with support from a Beachbody coach. With this service, you can stream content anywhere with an internet connection. Subscribers also receive workout calendars and weight loss tracking tools. The service costs $99 a year, but there are short-term options available.
2B Mindset: Beachbody’s 2B Mindset program focuses on helping you lose weight by showing you what you can eat instead of what you can't. The program comes with a 30-day meal plan, video recipes, recipe books and coaching to help you accomplish your goal. The starting cost for the 2B Mindset is $119.
Ultimate Portion Fix: This program expands the 21 Day Fix into 30 days and recommends Beachbody’s Shakeology products, fruits and vegetables. Like the 21 Day Fix, this program has you use containers to measure out your portions. Costs start at $74, and buyers get access to cooking videos, resources and the Beachbody community.
The Monthly Fix: While the Ultimate Portion Fix comes with 30 days of meal plans and support, the Monthly Fix takes things one step further. After you purchase the Ultimate Portion Fix, you can pay $19.95 a month to get 24/7 access to The Monthly Fix. This gives you FIXATE recipes, meal plans, check-ins and ongoing support from the community. Billing is automatic every month until you cancel.
Beachbody Ultimate Reset: Beachbody Ultimate Reset is a 21-day cleanse that eliminates bad foods and toxins from your diet. The base kit costs $199.95, which includes supplements designed to cleanse your body, a three-part nutrition plan and fitness tips.
Freshdeskoffers aticketing systemfor businesses to help collect all of their customer conversations into a single place, automate repetitive tasks, and facilitate faster issue resolution by fostering greater collaboration between business units and teams.
In this Freshdesk review, we’ll discuss whether your business could benefit from using it, as we dive into its pricing, features, support, and ease of use.
Freshdesk is a helpdesk SAAS solution for improving customer service (Image credit: Freshdesk)
Plans and pricing
Freshdesk’s helpdesk offerings come in five different plans with cute names that range in price from free up to $99/month per agent if billed annually (if billed monthly, the price would be $125). At $15/agent/month, Freshdesk’s entry-level paid plan is similar to what many other providers offer, but its high-end plans are quite a bit more expensive.
Each step up in plan adds extra features to those already included in the previous version. The free version comes with a limited feature set, while the high-end plan boasts more than 30 features including an email bot for automatic replies, a sandbox for testing new features, and skill-based routing.
Freshdesk has plans for both home and business use (Image credit: Freshdesk)
There are also Omnichannel solutions that combine Freshdesk with Freshchat and Freshcaller, with prices starting at $79/agent/month and going up to $139/agent/month. All plans come with a 21-day free trial.
Features
The aim of Freshdesk is to help businesses exceed their customers’ expectations, and it comes packed with features for that purpose.
The main one is the ticketing system, which can collect support tickets from multiple channels into a single inbox. Communications that come in via email, phone, chat, social media, WhatsApp, and websites can all be turned into tickets.
These can then be categorized, prioritized, and assigned. This process can happen automatically with the ticket field suggester. You can create custom statuses so you know what stage a ticket is at, and agent collision detection ensures multiple people don’t end up working on the same ticket.
Freshdesk’s ticketing system is the core of the service (Image credit: Freshdesk )
Collaboration features mean you can share tickets with other teams and link tickets together. Complex issues can be broken up into smaller child tickets. Automation features increase productivity by automatically assigning tickets based on keywords, or by the current workload or skill level of available agents. Tickets can have actions taken on them that are triggered by certain events or the passing of a certain amount of time.
Freshdesk also includes a number of tools that enable your customers to help themselves, like a chatbot, help widgets, a community forum, and a knowledge base that support agents can add to by converting tickets.
And businesses will be able to improve helpdesk performance and identify problems with reports, dashboards, and customer satisfaction ratings.
Interface and in use
When you create a Freshdesk account, you’ll be given your own subdomain, e.g. your-business.freshdesk.com, and when you sign in you’ll be presented with a dashboard which gives you an overview of all your tickets, to-dos, customer satisfaction rating, and forum comments.
The main sections of the dashboard are reached from the menu icons in the left column and there are separate sections for tickets, contacts and companies, your own knowledge base (which will be empty when you first start), bots, reports, analytics, and settings.
The Freshdesk dashboard is your control center for all support requests (Image credit: Freshdesk)
We found the dashboard to be very user-friendly with lots of fine-grained control over all the different types of data on offer. When you first log in, a useful getting started wizard helps you with the most important initial set-up tasks, and then as you visit different sections of the dashboard for the first time and start interacting with it, there are more wizards offering tips and guides on how to use the app.
Support
Freshdesk is all about providing support to customers, so it’s unsurprising that some of the features available to its customers are in use on its own website. There is a knowledge base that includes a library of videos and a community forum and a help widget with suggested articles and a search form. There are also phone numbers to call in the U.S., U.K., India, and Australia, or you can email the support email address.
Freshdesk offers many of the same methods of support as its own products (Image credit: Freshdesk)
We had to make use of support immediately after verifying our email because our account URL wasn’t working, and we weren’t that impressed that the first question we were asked was for the account URL, which we’d already entered when creating the ticket. Having said that, the ticket was resolved quickly.
Freshdesk promises robust data security and privacy (Image credit: Freshdesk)
Security
Freshdesk promises enterprise-grade security and carries out regular audits of its systems and networks. All Freshdesk accounts come with custom SSL certificates, and businesses have the ability to whitelist IP ranges and restrict login access outside the workplace. If agents need to log in from elsewhere, whitelisted IPs can be linked to VPNs. Single sign-on (SSO) scripts can also be used to authenticate the credentials of users and agents.
The competition
Freshdesk is not only the player in the helpdesk SAAS space, and there are several viable alternatives.
Zoho Desk also has an extensive array of features and comes in four plans ranging in price from free for three agents up to $35/agent/month for unlimited agents. All paid plans come with a 15-day free trial.
LiveAgent also offers four plans and a 14-day free trial. LiveAgent’s free plan has no limit on agents, while paid plans go from $15/agent/month up to $39/agent/month. As with Zoho Desk and Freshdesk, each successive plan level includes all the features from previous levels plus ones specific to that level.
Final verdict
Freshdesk is a very easy-to-use online helpdesk software package with lots of fine-grained control over all aspects of the app. The free plan is great for small businesses to be able to get a good feel for how the app can help them without taking the plunge for a paid plan immediately. But some key features like chatbots and social signals are only available on high-end plans which are more expensive than what a lot of competitors offer.
Freshdesk is also aimed primarily at small- to medium-sized businesses that serve external customers and is not ideally suited to enterprise-level businesses with their own IT departments dealing with internal issues.
