Interesting business model. I was just speaking about app mascotification the other day with someone. It's a potential branch of the future. I wonder what the appetite is for curated avatars like this right now.
Regarding the tech... I really need to start offloading all of the tech I've built out in the last few years. I keep seeing business being erected on a fraction of the features I've developed in recent memory. Realtime lipsync, 3D avatars with generalized animation systems and basic autorigging, cost-effective/local TTS, STT, speaker diarization and embedding, memory models, agentic frameworks, there's just so much sitting on my drive in a handful of monorepos that needs proper treatment as either a standalone open source project or startup. I could take all this tech, grab a few artists I know and clone Mascotbot's business model in a week...
Not to detract from the great work they did here on coming up with and executing an idea. Subscription-based model work on its own is a really interesting market segment and I am very much rooting for Mascotbot's success.
Hey all, just noticed someone featured us here! I'm Seraphim, the founder. Our mascot should have most info so feel free to chat on the website, but I'm happy to answer questions here as well
What happens to the art work if someone stops paying the membership? Is it their property or is it only available on your page?
Basically, who owns the likeness of the avatar and the artwork around it?
It's their property, and it can be integrated and use in their app after downgrading from design/animation-oriented plans. I see it as a normal situation when we worked on appearance and animations for several months, and then they just use it on our lower plans just using the API. The API will soon have more features supporting non-verbal speech-based animation/gestures, etc., so it will be even more valuable.
What exactly is the use case here? I have yet to see a website replace their text chat with an avatar
I can see one use already; Streamer avatar, but hosted instead of running it locally. All you would need to do is include the HTML in the OBS overlay and it can now be "your face" on stream.
Looks really well executed. However I have my doubts about the business model.