We sometimes get asked "Why don't you put everything up for free on the website?" There are many reasons why, and even though we do charge something for the eBooks, it is an enormous challenge to pay all our costs and continue producing the materials we're producing.
We're a small team of English teachers, and just like everyone else, we need to eat, and pay our rent and bills. Every pack we produce takes many months' full-time work. They are in fact so labour-intensive to make, that we usually end up working very long days and through the weekends.
We therefore don't have time to do any other paid work at all, and need to somehow earn a living from what we're doing.
Besides basic living costs, we have a huge number of additional costs to pay. Some of the packs are HUGE and contain up to 170 different conversations, recorded in different locations and with different people. We pay people for their time, and we also have lots of other costs to pay just to have the websites up and running. Some of these regular costs are:
- Web hosting costs
- Domain names
- Email list service
- Customer service ticketing system
- Podcast hosting services
- Software licenses
- Recording studio rental & sound engineering
- Recording equipment
- Translation costs
- Design costs
We don't want to generate the money to pay all these costs by filling the websites and products with advertising. We think this would distract people, and seriously reduce the quality of your experience using them. This means we have to sell something.
We think we have found a good compromise doing it the way we are. By giving at least most of our audio away for free, the majority of people get to use our products without having to pay anything.
If people really like what we're doing, and want to learn even more English from it, they can choose to support us by investing in the eBook packs, and know they are really helping us to continue with the project.
We hope this makes sense, and thanks for listening!