Hi guys

I just noticed that little sentence on the login screen. I hadn't realised that skritter was going to cost money sometime.
Does anyone know when and how and why? (although the why part I can probably guess for myself :)

Cheers

David

Relevant to my interests as well! I know literally nothing about the internet economy. I'm curious as to why a subscription model seems to preferred over ad-generated revenue. I don't mean curious in a "that was a bad decision" way, I mean legitimately curious!

We're not going to start charging until we've implemented the main features we want, tuned and tweaked and polished things up, and attracted enough users for it to make sense. In development terms, there's no way we'll be out of beta earlier than end of February, and as we work, our eyes get bigger, so it may well be longer than that.

In short, we're not sure, but we'll certainly give advance notice (as well as the free trial period). And no one will be locked in -- you'll be at the very least able to export your words to another SRS or your own data format, if you choose not to continue with Skritter.

Why we're not planning on relying on advertising revenues: we think Skritter is going to be valuable enough to warrant it, basically. If you can learn in 10 hours a month what would have taken you 20 (or perhaps more like 40), the time savings are vast compared to the subscription fee. Plus, who clicks on ads when they're practicing? Skritter will be a better tool this way.

Even though it'd be awesome to simply give Skritter away and get even more users, even more people learning Chinese really well, we can't. We don't have much cash to go on, no VC funding or anything, so we have to become profitable or Skritter dies (and our student loans crush us). It's something we wrestle with, because everyone knows free (and open source) software is the Good Way, right? But this is much more work than we could afford to put in if it wasn't our livelihood, and so we must charge.

I don't think anyone here will be disappointed by the cost, when we decide what it will be.

I can definitely understand the need for demanding fees. It might actually help some people study (now that I have paid for it I should use it..although now that I write it, I remember a lecture where they said that it doesn't work with fitness studios....the self commitment device is not strong enough:)

I do hope that Skritter will survive (on the one hand it would be fair to you guys who have invested so much time and work and on the other hand....I really like practicing characters like this:)...

Maybe some sort of partnership can be struck up with some other Chinese teaching sites (chinesepod.com does quickly come to mind because their focus is on oral comprehension..they really have anything like this at all).

Yeah. I'll be sad--because free stuff is my favorite--but it is true, you value and make better use of what you pay for. Some kind of flaw in human logic, no doubt. But I really do love this tool. It's much more suited to my temperament than flashcards: stacks of the messy things everywhere, scrambled all over my desk with grimy eraser rubbings sandwiched between each sheet. . .ugh. Thank you, Skritter!

I'll probably subscribe— it's been way too helpful to stop now, with two years of hanzi under my belt.

Have you considered institutional accounts? I'm pretty sure I could convince my university (U of Iowa) to cough up a few thousand dollars to licence this indispensable resource to students on a yearly basis. God knows compared to what they spend on EBSCO, etc. it'd be paltry...

Yes, we'll be marketing to institutions. We may get in touch with some of our users at various colleges and universities when it comes time to sell Skritter to them, perhaps get a chance to meet some of you!

I understand the need to charge a reasonable price. The issue for me is that a reasonable price in one country can be overwhelmingly expensive when you live and work in China, making RMB.