Webcomic App Review - Tapas
I've tried six of them. Here's what I think.
So if you’ve been following this little series of mine, this if the 5th of 6 apps I’m doing a review of. I’ll talk about how it feels to use the app and how much it costs to read the comics, etc. I’ll end the discussion of each app with Pros and Cons from my experience trying them out.
What is Tapas?
This is a site that offers manhwa in webcomic form as well as web novels. Unlike the other apps I’ve reviewed in this series, this website and app was actually created in the US. It’s a California-based media company founded in 2012. It was recently purchased by Kakao Entertainment in 2021. This company licenses Korean content and also gives people the ability to publish original content. In this sense it’s similar to Webtoons (which is the final app of this series!) and Lezhin.
Like I’ve said previously, you can access Mature/adult/spicy content. However it has to done via the website before you can access it on your phone app.
Cost
The first chapters of all the manhwa are free. It’s typically the first three chapters. Sometimes you’ll get more if there’s a special promotion happening. Another fascinating thing is that you’ll have random events happening where you can earn bonus “ink” if you do certain tasks. For example, unlock 3 chapters and you’ll earn an extra 500 ink. What is ink? You guessed it, it’s their internal currency!
Chapters (both comics and web novels) vary in cost. The general range of I’ve seen is 300-450 ink/chapter. If you access chapter by chapter you exchange that 300-450 ink. If you trigger the “1-tap” function, you save 10% with the auto-locking option. Not too shabby. However you should know you save even more ink if you purchase the chapters in bundles. Unlock 10 chapters at once, you save 20%. If you bundle 20 chapters, you save 25%. You also save 25% if you bundle all chapters available. The exception is that if there are less than 20 available chapters, then you only save 20%.
Naturally you can purchase ink. There are 6 possible bundles. The cheapest is 1,600 ink for USD$1.99. This means a rate of 800 ink/USD $1. The most expensive bundle is 80,000 ink + 50,000 bonus ink for USD$99.99. That means you’re getting 1,300 ink/$1. Every once in a while there’s a special sale happening where you get double ink bonus. In other words the most expensive bundle instead of just 50,000 ink bonus you’re getting 80,000. Which would then mean you’re getting 1,600 ink/$1! You’d in essence be getting the equivalent of 50% off of the cheapest bundle.
For a comparison to the other apps in this series, let’s say you spend USD$5. By coincidence you can buy 4,000 ink + 1,000 bonus ink for $4.99. That means depending on which story you’re reading you can read 11-16 chapters via chapter-by-chapter reading (or 12-18 chapters if you use the auto-unlock). If you take advantage of bulk unlocking you could afford 13-20 chapters via 10 chapter purchase or 14-22 chapters via 20 chapter purchase.
My personal thoughts
I feel like in many respects this app has a lot of similarities to Tappytoon. In terms of content and even the cost of currency to access content, they’re pretty similar to each other. I still bound between the two apps as they do have stories the other doesn’t have. I can’t honestly say which of the two is really better than the other from that perspective. The upfront is pricy, but I think in terms of value, this is really good along with Tappytoon.
The next review is going to be on Webtoons. That one will be a relatively short review and along with the “personal thoughts” section, I’ll do a comparison chart and final conclusions of all 6 apps in the series to help you readers see how each app stack up.
Have you tried Tapas? What did you think of it? If you haven’t tried it, would you? Leave a comment!