A Plan for the development of Dictionariez Pro, your input is needed!

[river]

Over the past few weeks, I have been busy upgrading our community website pnlpal.dev to make it better host dictionaries and other learning resources. Than last week I have also started the challenging task of refactoring Dictionariez to meet Google's new Manifest V3 standards. It turns out to be a ton of hell work.

It made me realize that it's been quite a while since I have added any major new features to Dictionariez. Most of the updates have been just bugfixes, and the progress has been painstakingly slow. A big reason for this is the lack of incentives. I did receive some generous donations from a few of our amazing users, and I deeply appreciate the coffees, but it hasn't been enough to make a significant difference in the prospect of the project or my personal life.

Working on Dictionariez is something I love, but keeping an open-source project going requires more than just passion—it needs resources and time. Seeing the potential of Dictionariez and hearing your requests for new functionalities has been quite motivating but also a bit frustrating. I know there’s so much more I can do to make Dictionariez better. Balancing daily life with the desire to improve Dictionariez has been tough though. It's more and more clear to me that while the love for Dictionariez is strong, a more structured incentive could really help make some of these great ideas happen.

So here is the Plan:

To speed things up and better integrate into the software market, I’m excited to announce the launch of a pro version of Dictionariez.

Of course the basic features of Dictionariez will stay free. The pro version will include some awesome enhancements that won’t interfere with the daily workflow of the basic version but will offer advanced features for power users. Some of these enhancements have been on our GitHub issues list for years, and many of you have requested them via Telegram, Discord, and even personal emails. Imagine how cool it would be to make these ideas a reality! Here are a few examples that could be included in the pro version:

• Advanced text parsers for languages like CJK
• Sentence translation capabilities
• Customizable Anki fields
• Mobile version
• Cloud-based word synchronization
• PDF lookup functionality

These features will take a lot of time and effort, but they’ll be super beneficial and I’m sure many of you will love them.

Your Opinion Matters:

I need your feedback to make this happen. Do you support the idea of a pro version? How much would you be willing to pay for it, and in what ways could you support its development? I’m thinking about a subscription model, like many other software services out there. Let me ask you straightly.

Would you be willing to pay the equivalent of 1, 2, or 3 cups of coffee per month for Dictionariez Pro? What specific features would you like to see included?

Please share your thoughts in the comments. Your feedback is invaluable in shaping the future of Dictionariez.

Thank you for your continued support!

[soumyaranjan]

please I request you ardently that don't make this dictionary a pro version because it will only benefit richer ones in our society. Richers ones are greedy , immoral , blatant, dishonest, and they don't think about development of our society . They only think about their personal gain. it is true that they also take advantage of your free version . if you make it a pro version then extremely poor educated youth will get suffered .

[river]

@soumyaranjan

Thanks for the comment. I think you raised a valid point. I agree with you about the growing divide between the rich and poor. And I definitely share the concerns about some of the rich are greedy, immoral , blatant and dishonest, and esp some high tech companies are making the rich richer and the poor poorer. However that doesn't say that we shouldn't monetize the product one's making. After all without profit, there is no product to benefit anyone. The development of our society needs good products that charge people fairly, right? There are several ways we can work towards bridging this gap through our product. One idea I'm considering is offering alternative ways to access the product for free, such as through coupons for academical users or by sharing with friends. This approach could help expand the user base while also securing funding from wealthier sources.

By the way, thank you for being the first to comment on the plan! As a token of appreciation, I'll give you the pro version for free once it's released. And that's not all—you'll also receive 5 free license keys to share with your friends. Congratulations!

[river]

Please, I need your input. A valid comment here will get you the pro for free

[iman]

@river What about ads? I would whitelist them for myself.

[Curiosity]

@river I would be happy to pay for the pro version, especially the mobile version,, but only as long as it's a one-time purchase, not a subscription. There are too many subscription services now, people are starting to get subscription fatigue. Having another regular money-sink is hard to justify for something so niche and specific as a dictionary. Would be happy to pay a bit more upfront to just have and own a version, rather than rent a license. Having said that, if there is a useful service that actually makes sense to require a subscription to access, something that would require you to maintain servers or provide regularly updated content, then I think having that as another subscription-based add-on would be acceptable.

[river]

@iman I tried to put some ads on this website, obviously the result didn't look good, as nowadays everybody hates ads and blocks it. So it doesn't really excite me nor users. But it's good to hear that you would whitelist it. Thanks for your support. You will get the pro for free plus 3 codes for you sharing too I promise.

[river]

@curiosity Thank you for your insight. I can see that the mobile version is highly anticipated. According to my plan, and if all goes well, the mobile version will also be free for basic features, similar to the browser version. Premium features, like PDF support or cloud storage syncing, will be part of the pro version. My goal is to make the app enjoyable and ad-free for casual use, with payment being optional for those who want to access more advanced features and spend more time with it.

I understand the frustration with subscriptions, but I’m concerned about the sustainability of a one-time fee model, especially given the ongoing costs of cloud services. I also plan to regularly update content, build up the community, and share more learning resources. It's all need time, passion and incentives as I talked about.

Thank you for the support. You will get the pro version for free too, plus 3 codes for your dispose . Hope you will like it

[kamyar mazaheri]

that is a good idea and I support it if the basic features that we use today are free

[river]

@kamyar-mazaheri Thanks pal. Good to hear that you would support it. Again, you will also got a ticket for free once it's out. Stay tuned!

[SanHolo]

Hello! I've only started using this extension this week so I apologize if some of this is already feedback you've received or if some of it is already a currently available feature.
Even though this extension is new to me, I've used a few other similar dictionary lookup extensions in the past when learning Japanese and can see a few potential points of improvements that could help overall or for the pro version.

To answer you directly - with the right features, ease of use, speed of updates etc. I would be willing to pay for a pro version. Certainly a one time payment, and possibly for a subscription depending on various factors. I realize that an extension (and accompanying mobile app etc.) can take quite a bit of development time, but it would be pretty difficult for me to justify paying more than $5 per month for a pro version, although I can't say concretely without knowing exactly what the product is and how helpful it is to me.

One thing I've noticed is that the lookup times can be a bit slow for words. I assume this is because the Dictionariez is making the request out to the appropriate API, waiting for a response, and then showing that as the results. This works well, but I do find sometimes the wait times are becoming frustrating. This is particularly true when I'm reading something outside of my comfort zone and am having to look up multiple words in every sentence. In other extensions when I was able to locally load a dictionary into the extension myself, the lookup would be quite a bit faster and that could be a good feature here. Even if it did a local lookup and got a near immediate result, and simultaneously made an API request to the other dictionaries and expanded the popup translation window when those results were returned that could be pretty cool.

I'm currently using Dictionariez while reading French, and one thing that I think would be helpful is when I look up a specific verb that is already conjugated, I often don't know exactly which conjugation is being used. Dictionariez will tell me the meaning of the base verb, which is great, but if I don't know or understand the conjugation in context then I find myself going into a new tab and Googling. If the popup could either 1.) show the conjugations for that verb that I'm looking up, or 2.) just link to an external source that shows the conjugation tables, I would find it extremely helpful. Obviously this is language dependent, but I could see it being useful in many languages that have complicated verb conjugations.

And just to add some support to features already mentioned in this thread, support for use in PDFs and a mobile version would both be really great selling features in my opinion.

I think that's it for now, I'll keep using Dictionariez and see if I come up with other ideas as well but I hope you'll find something in here useful!

[river]

@SanHolo
Thank you for the feedback and thoughtful suggestions on the development and potential improvements for Dictionariez. This is exactly the kind of input I’m seeking. The idea of enabling local lookup for dictionaries installed on the device is excellent, and I’m keen on implementing it.

The Pro version is designed to offer added value for users who find it worthwhile, and your suggestions are motivating me to enhance the product even further.

Please continue sharing your ideas here on the website—they’re incredibly valuable and inspire me to keep improving. I’d like to offer you a free Pro version as a token of my appreciation. Thank you!

[honnkyou]

Is it possible to add a feature that allows the selection of multiple dictionaries and displays the search results from these dictionaries on a single page?

[saman aran]

This post is deleted!

[saman aran]

@river said in A Plan for the development of Dictionariez Pro, your input is needed!:

@soumyaranjan

Thanks for the comment. I think you raised a valid point. I agree with you about the growing divide between the rich and poor. And I definitely share the concerns about some of the rich are greedy, immoral , blatant and dishonest, and esp some high tech companies are making the rich richer and the poor poorer. However that doesn't say that we shouldn't monetize the product one's making. After all without profit, there is no product to benefit anyone. The development of our society needs good products that charge people fairly, right? There are several ways we can work towards bridging this gap through our product. One idea I'm considering is offering alternative ways to access the product for free, such as through coupons for academical users or by sharing with friends. This approach could help expand the user base while also securing funding from wealthier sources.

By the way, thank you for being the first to comment on the plan! As a token of appreciation, I'll give you the pro version for free once it's released. And that's not all—you'll also receive 5 free license keys to share with your friends. Congratulations!

Hi, I have an idea for this problem
The developer can find out the status of the user by checking the user's IP address and the type of phone model and similar information, including which country he is from and whether he is a rich person or not. I myself am from Iran and because of the sanctions that exist for our country. We don't have access to global banks and internet payments, etc., and we have to use a number of middlemen to make such payments, which due to the very bad economic conditions we have and the long process of such payments We will pay more. Perhaps the use of payment methods made by cryptocurrency and providing discounts to users in countries that have problems accessing banks or have a weak economy in their country can solve these problems to some extent. ( Also, you may be able to create a list of tasks required for app development and assign them to volunteer users to give them a pro subscription key. and to request give a selfie image from a student by student card to get discount )

[saman aran]

Highlighting words with different colors to show the status of learning (good, weak, bad)
Ability to translate and add to the history in each section using OCR
The ability to share flash cards with other users
The ability to compete and share the level and status of learning
floating the app translation box to quickly use them and easily add to flashcards
Special attention to the use of appropriate fonts and dialects for each language [ Ability to add custom css style for card and app and the possibility of sharing them by the user community ]
The possibility of export words to Anki [ use a AI for make a full flash card with image and all of users select ] with a special temple Beautiful and simple

[Ahozura92]

@river said in A Plan for the development of Dictionariez Pro, your input is needed!:

Sentence translation capabilities
Customizable Anki fields

Hi, I've been using this app for around one year and really love the Anki related features. I can fully understand that you need financial support for further developing this app.
From my perspective, the equivalent of 1 cup of coffee wouldn't be an issue, especially if the mentioned features are in place. They comsume a lot of my time.
Disclaimer: I'm from a "rich" country (Germany) if that's from relevance