New features and new pricing on EasyPronunciation.com

Hello,

It’s Timur, the founder of EasyPronunciation.com.

Table of contents:

The recent attack on our website

As you probably know, two weeks ago there was a successful attack on our website.

I already posted the details about the attack and the security measures that we implemented lately.

Long story short, the attacker used one single card, bought the most expensive subscription 1,055 times, and started asking for refunds. Our payment provider Stripe couldn’t block the card in the middle of the attack and asked us to send refunds, which we obviously did. With the payment method used, if a refund is sent and the transaction is later disputed by the bank, the client receives his money back TWICE. And guess what — all the transactions were disputed!

Now, imagine the following is deducted from our account:

  • the price of the subscription (99 euros)
  • transaction fees
  • refund fees
  • lost dispute fees

Everything multiplied by hundreds of times.

Hundreds of emails about lost disputes. Stripe trying to debit thousands of dollars from our bank account and asking us to add funds to cover the negative balance.

It was not fun.

In the end, they adjusted the balance of our account in their system, but decided to close our account despite the additional security measures we implemented. And they also keep our funds from the last 2 weeks for 90 days.

Now we are in search of another payment provider. In the meantime, the only available payment method for new subscriptions is PayPal.

New pricing

Last week we introduced new pricing. It is more expensive.

Right away, I want to reassure everyone with an active recurrent subscription, there will be an option for you to pay a reduced price.

Before I describe all the available options, I want to give you some context.

Our income has been steadily decreasing over the last two years. As a result, I started investing less and less in our ongoing projects:

  • hiring voice-over professionals to make audio recordings of words
  • proofreading the printed dictionaries and expanding our database with phonetic transcriptions

It got so bad that right now I have only one part-time freelance developer who helps me with the updates on the site.

Over the last seven years I spent most of my time and money on EasyPronunciation.com. The site became incredibly popular:

390,000 people visited us in October, but… there are only several hundred active subscribers.

31,000 visitors from China, and only 7 paying customers.

Something is not right…

Learning languages is very popular, there are tons of free resources (including on our website), and a lot of people think that language learning should be 100% free.

Well, it’s only free if you are constantly bombarded with ads. I don’t like the idea of flooding EasyPronunciation.com with ads. My previous experience with placing ads was quite negative. However, considering the circumstances, I may reconsider in the future.

I was always afraid to increase prices — after all, a lot of our customers are students who may not be able to afford our services.

I spent a lot of time analyzing the usage statistics on EasyPronunciation.com, thinking about how to make the pricing fair. And I realized that there are a lot of occasional users — people who use our website only once every month or every 2 or 3 months.

You may be thinking: “The person bought the subscription and uses the website 4 times a year. Timur, why are you complaining?”

Well, it’s not very rewarding when you invest your heart and soul in a product and people don’t use it.

It’s especially not rewarding when people start asking for refunds for annual subscriptions or start calling their bank to dispute a transaction because they forgot about EasyPronunciation altogether. They don’t even check the email they used to sign up to notice the message about the upcoming renewal.

To accommodate the occasional users, the new pricing includes weekly plans:

  • 9.99 USD/week for the subscription “Basic”
  • 14.99 USD/week for the subscription “Premium”

Weekly plans could also be an optimal solution for students who just need their assignment for the phonetics course done. And this is totally affordable in all the countries where people use smartphones. 60% of our visitors use mobile devices.

The monthly plans are priced at:

  • 29.99 USD/month for Basic
  • 44.99 USD/month for Premium

You may be saying: “Timur, are you nuts? It’s almost double the old price!” Yes, you are right (about the price being higher), but bear with me for a moment.

EasyPronunciation.com was always about saving people time. And if you use our website a lot on a regular basis, most likely it saves you a lot of time.

You may still be thinking: “45 dollars for phonetic transcription? Are you kidding?”

To make the premium subscription more attractive I am adding several new bonuses.

New bonuses for premium subscribers

First, I am introducing online monthly meetings. This is your chance to get the most bang for your buck, so to speak. If you need a new feature, tell me.

People attending the meetings will have a chance to discuss different options and decide what should be our priority for the upcoming month. Read more about the monthly meetings in our FAQ.

At first, most likely, I will be tailoring our services to teachers and content creators — people who actually make money using our website. But I don’t know yet. I will only know after the first meeting which is scheduled on Sunday, December 17th at 9AM Pacific Time.

The thing is, over the last ten years, I created a lot of different tools for EasyPronunciation.com.

Some tools took a lot of time to create and became quite popular. While others also took a huge amount of time to develop, but, unfortunately, they are very rarely used.

80% of the time I decided myself what to do next. Now you have a chance to guide me so together we could create something really great. EasyPronunciation will help you save even more time and learn (or teach) a language even more effectively.

The second important bonus is the possibility to get the link to your website published on EasyPronunciation.com.

And the third bonus is that now the premium users can publish guest posts on our website and promote their products and services. There are some requirements to the guest posts, so please read carefully the above link.

Additionally, I am increasing the maximum text size for premium subscribers. The new limits are:

  • 20,000 characters at a time in phonetic converters
  • 40,000 characters at a time in word frequency counters.

I also extend the money-back guarantee to 30 days for all monthly plans.

If you choose an annual plan, you will get 3 months for free.

With the new pricing, the only way to get the lifetime access to the phonetic translators is to buy the annual premium plan.

What about regional pricing?

I honestly tried making our service more affordable in less developed countries. Let’s look at the numbers:

India in 2023 (January-today):

  • 126,000 visitors – 8 paying clients

Colombia in 2023 (January-today):

  • 130,000 visitors – 9 paying clients

I guess it’s good for my karma that I help a couple of million people in developing countries for free every year. But all this good karma was not enough to prevent the recent attack. Apparently, that’s not how karma works… 🙂

Please, people, if you use EasyPronunciation for free and don’t want to subscribe, at least share the link to our website! It helps a lot!

If you have a YouTube channel, blog, website or social media profile, let other people know about us!

Back to regional pricing — an interesting fact — did you know that the price of iPhone in Mexico, India, or Brazil is higher than in the United States or Japan?

If you don’t live in the United States, eventually, I will try to add an option for you to pay in your local currency, but the price in all countries will be equivalent to the price in USD.

“I have an active subscription. How am I affected by the new pricing?”

First of all, if you have a lifetime access, your account is not affected in any way. I still recommend you continue reading – there will be a special offer for you.

Everything below concerns only the users with recurrent monthly or annual subscriptions that were active today November 29th 2023.

If you used PayPal to buy the subscription, your account is also not affected. I highly recommend you keep your payment method up-to-date. If your subscription expires or you decide to cancel it yourself, you will have to pay the new price.

If you used any other payment method, the situation is a bit more complicated.

If you read this message, your recurrent subscription was automatically canceled today. You will never be charged again using your old payment method.

I will be extending all active recurrent subscriptions for free until December 17th — the date of the first monthly meeting — or until I find another payment provider (whichever comes first).

If your recurrent subscription is active TODAY, at some point in the future it will expire. When it expires, you will have two options:

1) If your financial situation allows it, I encourage you to switch to the new pricing to support our website.

If you want to participate in the monthly meetings, get the link to your website posted on EasyPronunciation, or publish guest posts please choose this option.

2) If you can’t afford the new pricing, you will have an option to pay a reduced price. There will be a button in your account “Request a reduced price.” Click this button, and I will send you a personalized link that you can use to buy the subscription using the legacy pricing introduced in July 2022:

  • Basic monthly — 14.99 USD/month
  • Basic annual — 74.99 USD/year
  • Premium monthly — 19.99 USD/month
  • Premium annual — 99.99 USD/year

You will be able to choose any of the above plans.

If you were paying a different price because you subscribed before July 2022 or because of the regional pricing, unfortunately, I won’t be able to offer you your old price.

Note also that this legacy pricing will be a LIMITED-TIME offer. The button to request a reduced price will be available only for 10 days after your active subscription expires.

Now, if you have a lifetime access and you are not subscribed to a recurrent plan right now, I have a special offer for you:

Until December 25th, you can buy the subscription Premium using the legacy pricing mentioned above. It will give you access to the premium features in the phonetic translators (text-to-speech and translation into your native languages) and the video recordings. If you cancel your premium subscription in the future, you will revert back to the lifetime access.

Commercial use of EasyPronunciation.com

I added a new section in our FAQ explaining how you can use our website for commercial purposes.

Notes and notebooks

Currently, you can’t save any text, transcription, or computer-generated audio in the phonetic translators.

Right now, we are working on the algorithm that would allow you to save your text, transcription, and audio in your account in a note. You will be able to access your saved notes later. Premium subscribers will also have an option to share the notes, transcriptions, and audio with other people.

The algorithm for saving transcription will still take a couple of weeks to finalize.

Today, I am releasing notes and notebooks. How can they help you?

You can use them to learn new words. Recently I used the notes to expand my Spanish vocabulary. Here’s the process:

I am listening to an audiobook. Each time I hear a word that I want to memorize, I create a note with the sentence containing this word. There is an option to highlight words in a note, so I highlight all the words that I want to learn. Later, I review my notes using the spaced repetition method.

Eventually, we will add an option to automatically generate audio for the notes and highlight word frequency.

New features in word frequency counters

In October, we released some pretty big updates in our word frequency counters. Note that some features are available only to the premium subscribers.

  • We increased the number of frequency intervals from five (for 5,000 most popular words) to ten (10,000 words).
  • You can set the number of frequency intervals yourself. For example, if you are only interested in the 3,000 most popular words, set this setting to “3.”
  • You can set your own custom color for each frequency interval.
  • We improved the algorithm that analyzes words with apostrophes in English, French, and Italian. For example, in French, the words “l’ami” and “ami” will be counted as one word.
  • The same thing goes for words with hyphens in French. For example, again in French, “ouvre-le” and “ouvre” are counted as one word.
  • You can now have the option to see the list of words for each frequency interval (previously, it was only available for Chinese and Japanese).
  • We redesigned the appearance of the tables with statistics and made them more mobile-friendly.
  • We introduced real-time highlight of the word frequency. In other words, you will know the word frequency as you type in the browser.
  • We significantly improved the algorithm of the Japanese word frequency counter. Previously, it was available only as a beta version.