Guo nian hao everyone,

I'm wondering if there is any idea right now about the price once out of Beta? Will it be based off an income of someone living inside of China or say... The states? Just want to see if this thing is going to be affordable.

Also, I want to say that this is a fantastic idea and it goes perfect with my new Wacom! Thanks guys!

Sorry Kaer; we're gonna have to stay vague on the pricing still, as unsatisfying as that may be -- we haven't finalized pricing yet, and we need the freedom to do that as we see what usage looks like.

If I may ask, what range were you thinking "affordable" is?

I will say, though, that we're not going to make it too expensive for anyone. Even if you're flat broke, we'll work something out, where you can just help us make Skritter better if you can't pay.

Glad you like it!

Wonderful, that sounds affordable already. As a student in China I probably wouldn't spend more than 50元 (7 USD) a month. Depending on the features (adding vocab lists) and other possible language learning tools you may add later on.

One thing I've noticed while using Skitter is, its working! I possibly have the worst retention rate in all of history, my nv pengyou had to tell me the word for dumpling (jiao ze) about eight times last week. Maybe once this thing is running smoothly you guys can look into making a way for us to be able to write out simple sentences with the words we've already mastered with some sort of correction function like the one you have in place now, I also think writing out a complete sentence would help memorization of not only the character but its use.

I don't mean to ramble but, because this is a flashcard type system have you guys considered adding little pictures below the English words? This would be a huge bonus for those Visual learners like my self.

We have some ideas for doing whole-sentence practice, which is going to rock so hard I'll probably self-ignite. We'll start working on that in the summer.

We haven't considered adding pictures, but we will! Other users: are pictures a good idea? How useful would it be? We would probably only be able to do some of the simpler words, unless we crowd-sourced it.

Pictures are great, but can easily become silly. There are definitely words that lend themselves to pictures (concrete nouns like 'rice'), others where pictures simply can't work unless one already knows what the word means (e.g. 以为). I'm not opposed to pictures, but they need to be good ones (i.e. truly and clearly showing what you want them to show) and finding them can be a tremendous time drain. I'd say don't make it a high priority.

Pictures would help me (but I also haven't practiced in weeks).



You could hire me to draw pictures. They would be the best everrrr.

Skritter is definitly a service I could pay for. To give an idee of my personal "feeling" about princing, I would say that I could easily pay 100 Eur a year for it.

Yeah, pictures would probably be nice...I guess it would be ideal for certain lists (like clothing list, or description of people, etc...), and about useless/impossible for others (而且, 然后, ...)

I don't think that pic would be very useful (to me), I think examples are more relevant (in what kind of sentence the word is used, useful for words such as 著).

About the price I also don't have much idea but I think that even if Skritter is tremendous tool, 100€ (130$) a year would be quite a few for a lot of people.

Do I ever recognize that ideas come flowing like crazy with such an inspirational tool like this, but please guys:

"Focus, focus, focus!"

:-)

I think the price of a tall latte per month would be an ok price.

/johan

Thanks for the discussion of price points, all; we very much appreciate the information.

Johan, we're pretty good at prioritizing ideas and doing important things first. I've got a queue of ideas stretching years by this point. I wouldn't worry about us adding pictures, or anything so optional as that, before things like Japanese or sentence-level practice get done, which of course will be after Skritter is a fiery, precision-tuned beast of Chinese character/word learning power. :)

We do add stuff that isn't strictly necessary to those more basic goals, but usually it's because the work is easily parallelizable or because we need to take a break from grunt labor to implement a cool cam or two:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Cool-Cam.aspx

I just wanted to second Nick and say thanks for all the feedback on pricing. Our strategy thus far has just been to focus on building Skritter and making it awesome, and we have intentionally treated pricing as an issue that can and will get resolved at a later date. As such, it's excellent to hear what everyone thinks its worth!

I think the price of a small llama per month would be an okay price.

European llama or African llama?

I'd like to see something similar to what other Web 2.0 companies are doing-- have the basic functionality free to users and then "Pro" accounts for people who need/want more features (not exactly sure what the cutoffs would be-- a certain number of characters? Certain lists?)

Of course, I'll probably be spearheading the attempt to get the U of Iowa to license it for all Chinese students, so...

www.llamanation.com

Trina, you are a crazy thing. That link is pretty awesome by the way. I found my own llama. She's a real sweetie too.

Eleraama, we're playing with a lot of pricing ideas, one of which is a freemium model. It would be totally sweet if U of Iowa licensed Skritter for its students. Awesome.

Well, I said earlier, that I would be spreading the world and I did. One of the teachers at our uni seemed to be pretty enthusiastic about the idea of integrating Skritter into the educational process, which is now made all the more possible, since our Asian languages department got a new shiny computer classroom with tablets and an interactive blackboard, which is basically a big touchscreen (a touchscreen device seems to be the best thing for running Skritter... a pity that my UMPC is a bit lacking in the processing power department to run it smoothly). Probably won't be this semester (no custom wordlists as of yet), but that just give us more room to experiment and think of the best way of integrating it...

Which gets me to my question... are you planning some special pricing options for unis? Like an academic multi-licence or something? Just a thought, I also don't know how this could work in reality, since Skritter is SRS based and therefore dependend on how each individual student use it (the only thing that comes to mind now is, that it would be practical if there were some student/teacher type accounts at some point in the future...)

Hey Sarevok, first, thanks for spreading the word, it's always warms the heart to hear that people like it enough to suggest it to others!

Also, although we did design the input to work with mice and everything else, I kind of agree with you about touch input being the best. As the price of touch sensitive screens come down in price hopefully more universities will buy them, but they're still a luxury. The iPhone's already got the touch sensitivity down, so we are looking to exploit that as soon as possible.

Finally, we are definitely going to be offering reduced cost site licenses and teacher management accounts are on our list of things to do. Ideally a teacher could just make a list once, seed it to her students, track the time they spend studying, and save time in class.

We attended a trade conference two months ago and found by asking numerous professors that teachers really don't have a lot of cash to spend, but it's really important for us to make Skritter cheap and easy for students to use. So our current thinking is just to adjust our pricing to the point that its appealing for teachers. Since we don't have a sure idea what we want to charge otherwise we don't know how much of a discount it will be, but I do know it will be significant. We want to make enough money to keep going, but its not about the cash, its about increasing student retention and learning speed as much as possible!

I know this may sound like a crazy idea, but how about keeping the site free and support it by collecting ad revenue? Or keeping certain features of the site free, and offering other "premium" features for paying subscribers?

Sorry for the redundancy. I just looked back over the posts again and eleraama basically said the same thing.

I'd say have three levels, free, cheap and pro.

Free should be a fixed list of say 100 characters so that anyone can get a feel for how awesome it is, but limited enough that serious students would want to move on to a subscriber account.

Cheap should have basic functionality, at least 2000 characters, but fixed lists. Maybe HSK plus the common text book lists.

Pro should allow one to design on-line or upload custom character and sentence lists, more extensive selection of standard lists, maybe even be able to share lists with other pro users, and use some more advanced features you design in the future, etc.

Free: $0
Cheap: $5/month
Pro: $15/month

Discounts for 3/6/12 month subscriptions.

i have been thinking about how much i would pay to use this site. One problem is the human natural tendency to save money opposed to my feeling about the value of this site for my learning.

It also is a problem that I live in China and make Chinese money, although I have to add that i am not a poor man, but my income is very unstable and i have to pay huge bills regularly which bring me in debt even.

So how much would I think to be cheap enough to sign up? Jlick's prices seem reasonable, maybe even too cheap for the cheap option (if you are a newbie and want to go to 2000 why should you pay less than an advanced student who wants to go from 2500 to 3000?) and i would have no problem at all paying the pro price, living in my mothercountry, they could be higher and I would still have no doubt.

Living in China it could be a close calll depending on the number of features that skritter ends up with. But if one year subscriptions would be discounted i think i wouldn't have to think twice to sign up.

Anyway there has to be an option to have longterm subscription as I　can easily see myself to have loads of money one month and not enough to extend subscription the next one.

How many users are there now anyway? Because the makers live in Canada (right?), so if it is 15 x 100 i don't see them make a living.

Thanks for the input gaolaoshi, jlick, sonorier.

jlick: I think a full-feature trial period would be better than having 100 characters for free, because then people who aren't beginners can still learn while they're trying it out.

Sonorier: Skritter probably isn't going to "end up" with any set of features. We'll keep adding tons of features after we release, and we're not going to stop working on it any time soon.

We live in Oberlin, Ohio; not vastly different from Canada, I guess. We're aiming to have far more than 100 paying users, though.

100 was just an example. But seeing the small number of users on the forum i didn't think that right now there are too many users.

ha i don't know how i came under the impression you are canadians.