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Comment by aculver | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on launching this!

Have you considered scaling back the free version to a portion of Hiragana and Katakana? (Maybe half?) And maybe throw in a few simple kanji? My thinking is that there is going to be a large portion of users who can immediately see the value of the app when they first start learning Japanese, but won't ever make it to the point in their own study of the language where they're trying to write Kanji. I think a lot of people don't stick with it.

I've spent a small fortune in my pursuit of Japanese (and would probably buy this too, if it were on iOS.) But if I only paid for the books and tools I stuck with or got more than cursory value from, I would probably reduce my purchasing by about 90%. My wife just said 95%. :)

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Yes, I've thought a lot of what to include in the free version and I'm still wondering if it should be changed. As you say, a lot of people quite early, so maybe the free version includes too much. How much do you think should be included?

I've also thought about adding ads to monetize it and having paid ad-free version.

The more I think about it, the more I think I would skip the free version and do $0.99 for the Hiragana and Katakana and then have the Kanji available in a price point similar to what you're doing now.

An example of this is http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-Pict-Graphix-Japanese-Mnemonics/... , which also offers the pocket size http://www.amazon.com/Kana-Pict-Graphix-Mnemonics-Japanese/d... . I've owned Kanji Pict-o-Graphix for almost a decade, but I also bought the cheaper, pocket size Kana Pict-o-Graphix for my brother-in-law (who hadn't studied Japanese before) before our trip to Japan.

Don't you think a free version is needed to so you can try it out before buying? It's my impression that most people want to be able to try out the functionality before buying. But limiting the free version some more or adding ads and having a cheap ($1-2) full hiragana and katakana version may be the way to go.

I agree, you definitely want to keep some sort of free tier. There are a lot of apps out there that claim to do this, or something similar. After trying a bunch of them I found one or two that I liked, but for the most part they weren't very good. I would not have wanted to pay to find that out.

I think you wouldn't want to offer less that one full alphabet, so people can get a good idea of what it will be like to learn using your app. If it's just a few characters that they can practice with, then they won't spend enough time with your app to make them feel like they should purchase it over trying another one out.

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