This is a long blog post! For those who prefer getting their information graphically, we have made a comic to give you the jist.
We’re very excited to announce that soon you will be able to study ChinesePod vocabulary with Skritter! We have been working with ChinesePod for several months, the first result of which is that ChinesePod users will be able to grab vocabulary from user created labels as well as the lessons emanating from the great Praxis. We have to give props to John Pasden and ChinesePod’s developer for providing access to their data to us and other sites who will be using the brand new ChinesePod API. It has been great working with these awesome people in Shanghai. We’re putting the finishing touches on the system, and it should be available within the next few days.
More good news today: new textbook vocabulary lists are up. We’ve added lists for Ni Hao, Boya Chinese, Elementary Spoken Chinese, Chinese Through Tone and Color, Communicating in Chinese 1, and Chinese Link. We want to thank all the users that recommended the books and provided us with lists. You know who you are.
The third big change is the addition of a full fledged User’s Guide, a Quickstart Guide, and a welcome page. Skritter has long suffered under the tyranny of too little documentation as well as too little direction for new users. Those days are drawing to a close. With these three documents and the soon-to-be completed tutorial system for the Try It page, we hope to destroy once and for all the confusing introduction to Skritter that many users have had. We want to thank in particular one of our dedicated users, Rachael, who gave us a lot of feedback and helped to make the User’s Guide more helpful for the good of the land.
So, lots of new features, but that’s not all the exciting news. We’ve been working on Skritter full time for almost a year now and we’re proud to announce that we will be launching the paid service in two weeks on Tuesday, May 12th. This means a lot of things for Skritter, so read on for details.
Firstly, every user that signs up will be given a two week free trial period with full access to Skritter. And if you have signed up by launch, you will receive four weeks instead of two as a token of our appreciation for putting up with all the bugs and being willing to work with us to improve the site. After your trial period ends, should you choose not to pay for Skritter, you won’t be able to add new words without an active subscription. But you’ll always be able to freely practice the words and characters you’ve already added. We won’t lock you in, and we want to encourage long term retention as much as possible.
By the end of May we anticipate we’ll have finished the custom list builder that will let you create and share your own lists. In the near term we will also be adding definition and pinyin practice, a mnemonics sharing system, greatly improved scheduling, teacher-oriented tools, exporting learning data, and character decompositions. As they are developed, each of these features will be available for no extra charge to paying users. Also on our short term development list is the Japanese beta version of Skritter. We’ll keep that free for everyone until its launch as well. We’ve got hundreds of feature ideas beyond that, too. Skritter will be yet more efficient than can be imagined!
Regarding pricing: up to this point, we have been intentionally quiet about the details for a lot of different reasons. We’re finally ready to announce what we’ll be charging for access. You can check out the pricing chart here. The upshot is that we’re trying hard to balance financial feasibility and affordability for users. We think the current price structure leaves us enough room to make sustainable revenue without pricing ourselves out of students’ range. If you just can’t afford Skritter, let us know and we’ll work something out.
In addition to individual subscriptions, we have also worked out what we are charging for institutional site licenses. We’re offering college and university site licenses as well as licenses for K-12 schools. Because we are willing to work with institutions and site licensing is a bit more complex than selling individual subscriptions, I would encourage anyone interested in further details to contact me. I would be happy to provide you with an official quote, let you know what exactly the licenses include, and what our installation timeline would be.
Although we’re pretty settled on our pricing choices, we welcome feedback and would be very interested to hear what people think.
That’s a pretty long blog post, but there’s a lot to cover. Thanks again for everyone’s help and patience in building Skritter. We look forward to continuing helping you be the smartest Chinese students on the planet!