⛱ Adding Lifetime pricing, misc updates

[phil]

Hey folks, hope all is well

Here’s what we’ve been up to for the past few weeks, some of which you may already know if you keep up with the forum:

Same Pronunciation

It helps to know when there are overlaps in the mnemonics, especially for the sound characters. To that end, we’ve added the Same Pronunciation section:

This brings up only those with the same tone as well. We can also look into adding those with different tones, but this is a start

Audio playback speed

Due to the how fast the sentence audio was, we’ve made it so you can slow it down. It’d be hard to build your listening skills otherwise

There’s three options of:

• Normal
• Slow
• Extra Slow

Try it out and see which one works best for you

Curriculum Filter shuffling

We moved Unknown and Learned over to the SRS Stage filter within the Curriculum list pages.

This enables you to look for items that were both skipped and learned, or unknown and skipped, which was previously impossible to filter for.

Lifetime pricing!

Today we have added a new lifetime pricing option to HanziHero. For a one-time discounted payment of $349, one can have lifelong access to all of HanziHero. This includes not only the thousands of curriculum items we have today, but the thousands we will continue to add. And of course, the many improvements we will make to the app itself.

This has been one of our most requested features, and we are glad to finally offer a plan that allows those who prefer a one-time purchase option to pay once and never worry about any subscription payments again.

We have also opted to make it so that existing annual and monthly subscribers have their current “balance” applied to the lifetime pricing fee. So if you are an annual subscriber that has only been subscribed for a month or so, 11/12th of that initial annual payment will be applied to the lifetime fee automatically!

You can read more about upgrades from the docs here.

The long journey to lifetime pricing

Adding lifetime pricing is something we have been thinking about ever since we started on HanziHero over two years ago. However, we have also felt strongly about not launching it until we felt that HanziHero lived up to our initial vision for a truly streamlined and handcrafted Chinese character learning app.

Since we launched the initial paid version of HanziHero over a year ago, we’ve worked steadily to finally reach that threshold. In that time, we made countless improvements. We went from having no simplified course to having full parity between our traditional and simplified course options each with full HSK character coverage. In that time, we went from our initial scarce offering of ~200 words to the 3.7k+ we have today that we continue to add to each week.

Towards the beginning of next year, we plan to have 6k+ words such that each character, on average, has 2+ words associated with it to help drill in the meaning and pronunciation. We will continue to add to the curriculum after that, working our way up to 4k+ characters with associated words for each character, as well as beginning to add thousands of HSK words that fit into our system.

Likewise, we have also made countless improvements to the app as well, almost too many to list out in entirety:

• Item skipping
• Item prioritization
• Word usage examples
• Extra study
• Revamped lesson flow
• Revamped and modernized spaced repetition algorithm
• Word usage example audio

We are proud of what we have built so far, but even more excited about what is to come. In many ways, we are just getting started.

Other pricing changes

There are no pricing changes for existing subscribers.

In lieu of the aforementioned changes we’ve made since we first launched HanziHero, we have also made some pricing changes to bring the pricing of the app in line with others in the market. Existing subscribers will not be affected by any pricing changes as they will continue to have their legacy pricing locked-in.

The new subscription options are:

• Monthly: $15/mo + taxes
• Yearly: $10/mo (billed annually for $120) + taxes
• Lifetime: $349 one-time payment + taxes

You can read more on our pricing page.

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Anyway, that’s it for now. These pricing changes were more involved than they look! It required us to wrangle with large parts of our codebase in addition to requiring a large amount of consulting and inquiry with our payment provider to find an implementation that would work as seamlessly as possible. With it out of the way, we can go back to what we like to do best: make even more improvements to HanziHero!

Happy studying!

[kaysik]

I really like HH. I don’t see myself stopping using it for a long time since it provides a service I see great value in (hence I’m subbed). Soo, I’m kind of invested in it living for a long time. I’ve been wondering this for a while, but is HH actually viable long term? Are you guys making enough $$ to keep it alive/updated indefinitely at this point?

Feel free to not answer the question lol, you don’t have to disclose anything. But starting something new is super hard so I know there is a good chance it isn’t viable or doesn’t last. I hope it is though, because the site shutting would suck for me lol!

[tonibui31]

I seriously make HanziHero the center of my Chinese learning journey, spend at least 50% of my learning time on it. As I’m a beginner, I would love to recognize as much characters as possible, creating a solid foundation for later on. Keep it up HanziHero.

[kevin]

I definitely hear you on that concern. That is actually why we have refused to have a lifetime pricing tier up until now. We did not want to offer a “lifetime pricing” for a product that was incomplete with no definite timeline on being “complete”. We now are fairly certain that we will reach a fairly “complete” version in terms of the app functionality and curriculum content towards the beginning of next year, hence why we finally released a lifetime pricing option.

To answer your question more directly: we will definitely be around for a very very long time. The reason for this is simple: the non-labor fixed capital costs (hosting, business fees, external service providers) for HanziHero is extremely low. We built it from scratch with this in mind, making sure it can be hosted anywhere and choosing a technology stack that scales easily with minimal resources. A couple of handful of subscribers more than covers all of those fixed costs each month, allowing us to continue to host the application indefinitely.

So the main question comes on the labor side of things, where I define labor as improving and expanding the curriculum in addition to improving the app. Our current revenue more or less covers the current amount of time we put in each month, and the revenue continues to grow month over month, allowing us to put in more and more time.

However, even in the hypothetical scenario that we only make enough to cover server costs (or less), we would still continue to improve and expand the app. That is more or less what we did for the first year where we worked on it a couple hours a day indefinitely as we ironed out our initial MVP. We paid all costs out of pocket and put in many hundreds of hours of work into it for its own sake. After all, the reason for us building it was to help ourselves learn Chinese first and foremost, so we are committed to improve it as the app itself serves as our own best tool for learning Chinese, and the curriculum serves as our own ever-growing repertoire of knowledge as we continue to go down that endless path towards true mastery.

[Robocan]

How are the taxes calculated? I want to upgrade to lifetime. Even with two months and change left, I’m still over $400 (375 euro). Does that sound correct?

[kevin]

Yeah unfortunately our payment provider offered no way for us to show an itemized breakdown when we preview an upgrade. It’s really frustrating for us, and there is a path for us to eventually show it but it requires a couple weeks of error-prone work to migrate to their brand-new payment API that is still stabilizing. However, the receipt you receive will include the full breakdown.

The taxes are calculated after the pre-tax balance is applied.

So, for example, if one has two months left on their (legacy) annual plan, that is roughly ~$17 dollars in credit (regardless of how much tax was paid for the annual subscription payment). That would by applied as a discount to the pre-tax price of $349 coming out to $332. A e.g., Ireland VAT of 23% would then be applied on top of that, $332 * 0.23 = ~$76. Which then comes to approx $332 + $76 = ~$408. (All calculations done in USD)