Supporting a free language study application?

As far as I can see, there is nothing wrong with your plan. So, in the absence of anything to say but "go for it!", let me work on your philosophy a little.

When you say:

I don't want to monetize this application and turn this into a 'product'.

You're wrong. That's exactly what you want to do. That's exactly what you're planning to do.

There's nothing wrong with that. There's certainly nothing hypocritical about that. Yes, "most of the magic" was built by other people, but that's true of everything we do in life. Most of my professional tools were built by other people. A lot of them are products, but some are open-source projects. Linus Torvalds is a much smarter programmer than I, and he works a lot harder, and (thank god) I get to use his freely-available work without paying him, and then I get to charge money for doing so. Because Linus gave it to me for that very purpose! (And I'm very grateful.)

I'm saying this because you sound like someone who is used to thinking of his time as cheap -- and like you can't quite believe that this thing you've built is a "real" product. (Which it is; it sounds more real than 50% of the products on the web.) And I wouldn't want to see you do something silly, like price your product without considering the cost of (e.g.) your time. [1] You need to be paid for the development time you've put in, and for the maintenance time you're going to put in, and for the opportunity cost of keeping this thing alive instead of devoting all of your time to some other project. Otherwise, you will ultimately abandon this project and go do something else -- something that will make a profit for you, and pay you a living wage, and let you go to conferences and take people out on dates.

What I'm trying to say is: Embrace the fact that you're going into business, and take it seriously. [2] Don't undersell yourself or your product, and for god's sake don't price it at cost without paying the system administrator and the management team (i.e. yourself). Remember that it's really easy to lower an asking price and really hard to raise it afterwards. Test the market a little, see what competing products are charging, and go for it!

[1] For all I know $20 a year is overpriced for an app like yours. I don't know what your market is like, or your competition. But consider charging by the month instead and asking $9.99. -- or, at the very least, sell 6 month subscriptions at $29 per. (Think: semesters.) Don't make the free trial more than 30 days. Remember the possibility that many of your customers won't be repeat customers: Only a certain number of language students remain language students for years at a time, so it's not as if the cost of acquiring a customer can be amortized over ten years. Speaking of the cost of acquiring customers, don't forget to budget for the Google ads!

[2] If all this going-into-business stuff just sounds like too much trouble for you... don't go into business. Upload the code to Sourceforge or github and get on with your life. There's no shame in that, either. It happens all the time.

I was thinking of something like yours for a while. But mine is more close to accent training for several different languages. I think you don't need to avoid monetizing the service. Instead, if the stuff is good and easy to use, your contribution by removing heavy flash cards gives users more convenience.

In real life, people help each other as friends. But since we can not help each others as strangers, so we exchange money. When you have money and you really like your service and users, you will put the money into making your service better because now you have resources to hire more people to deal with something that volunteers, users community won't/can't. And you still can have money for yourself to live a good life, and I think they won't mind that and are happy that because you deserve it!

Also, you somewhat underestimate the chance that your learning tool is really better than flashcards and help students learn better. Think about this: there are probably around order of 100 millions kids in the world that need to learn English in schools. Maybe 5 millions of them really want to learn English well for their future careers and they will invest their time and money to learn it well. While your contribution to make 5 millions people have a better time in life. They may just buy a set of flash card for $10 for a semesters and throw them away, meanwhile your service is fun and they learn much faster and better. So in order that your server can handle the traffic, you can just price it as the flash cards and see how people take it.

Begin of edit:

Your product is not Microsoft Windows. You don't force people to use it. You don't bully your competitors. So you should not feel guilty of taking money for your achievement. If you really want someone else to take care of it. Make it open source and see how the world react to it.

End of edit.

Well, could you write it in Python and host it on Google's AppEngine?

You might want to consider lifetime pricing too. The prospect of having to dig out a credit card and make an online payment every month or year is annoying to many, and they'll be much more willing to pay if it's a one-off thing. As mechanical_fish points out, language students often don't study the language for too long - a year or two - so it may even turn out beneficial for you too. Of course this may not work for your specific application, but it's worth a thought.

On a separate note, your app sounds really interesting, especially since I'm learning Japanese too (currently using Anki for vocabulary learning). Also I've been thinking recently about how to apply SuperMemo-style learning to more complex language learning than vocabulary, such as grammatical structures, and it sounds like you're working towards that sort of thing. I'd like to take a look at your app if you're opening it up for more general testing. If you're interested in discussing further, please email me: callosum at gmail etc.

Thanks for the responses. I'll need to talk things over with the other person that has become involved in the project, because even though it's more-or-less my baby, I don't want him to feel that his work is just going to go towards making money for me.

I think mechanical_fish may be right, in that I've been thinking of my time as cheap, which is strikingly uncharacteristic for me. It is true that I've put a shocking amount of time into this, when I could have been doing something to earn an income, so perhaps it isn't so unreasonable to try and get a bit of cash out of the process.

Thanks!

Also, I like the 'semester' and 'lifetime' pricing models. The lifetime subscription model appeals most to me, as most language students seem to fade out after two years. So, if I base my pricing on that assumption, the application should be able to cover its costs, and for those who stick around longer, it'll just be a little reward for their hard work.

callosum: An email is on its way.

queensnake: Unfortunately, while I could write the application itself in Python, the supporting libraries are not readily portable, and neither are the bits of C glue that I've had to write to link everything together. So, AppEngine is out.