Forum Discussion
Localization News!
Hi GingerSwart please correct me if I'm wrong here, but reading this explanation, what I think Articulate may be doing is called dynamic pricing, which is a very common thing with tickets for gigs nowadays, but not with things like software licenses.
It's just a bit frustrating/disappointing that Articulate are going down this route with these new features, as many (most?) people/companies won't be able to afford the running costs of these great features if they are based on dynamic pricing. It can be difficult to put an exact estimate on the number of translations per year on your work pipeline, as requirements aren't always set in stone.
The same goes for the cost of Articulate AI.
When you add up the costs of all these features on top of your standard Articulate 360 license, it's quite simply too much for your average department/team budget.
Hi PatriciaNunes-d (& cc SusanLoubser who brought up this question initially). My name is Noele, I'm the Director of Community here at Articulate and have been following this thread and feedback closely, and wanted to chime in and share some thoughts:
First, wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to you both for taking the time to share this feedback. As a community person I know writing these comments effort, and I want you to know we do read them, chat about them internally, and learn from them—so thanks for that!
Patricia, you shared a concern that we are doing dynamic pricing on this feature that I want to address really clearly and directly: Articulate does not use dynamic pricing (in other words, "surge pricing" based on supply & demand, like how the price of your taxi goes up during rush hour) on our localization features, or on any other features.
I completely get why when pricing doesn't feel transparent to you, it may make you worry that there's something like that going on—but, I want to really reassure you that the reason we don't publish pricing is not because it doesn't follow a fair and predictable model, but rather because we feel really confident that that model would be too complicated for our customer base to self-serve on interpreting.
In other words, we think that if we were to publish the full pricing model, it would lead to customers misquoting themselves regularly enough that we think we can give you better service by giving you a quote through our sales team (something we are usually able to do in about 1-2 business days). To give one concrete example of how the pricing model can get really tough to self-quote (above and beyond the factors of number of courses & number of languages that GingerSwart already mentioned): many customers of Articulate have different contract term lengths, contract ages, and contract renewal dates that influence what adding localization to those specific contracts would look like, and makes it so that although the pricing model is static, almost no two cases end up being exactly the same in practice.
What I can say that I think will reassure both of you (and anyone else who may be reading this!) is that although we're choosing not to publish a pricing chart for the reasons I shared above, when you are having a conversation with our sales team about pricing for your specific case, they can absolutely share with you what factors influenced your quote during that conversation. Which is to say—once you get a quote, it shouldn't feel mysterious why the quote is what it is and what factors went into it, and it wouldn't be the case that, say, two people with exactly equivalent scenarios would get different quotes.
Let me know if this helps reassure and answer some of the questions you raised here—I'm watching this thread and happy take note of any other feedback!
Dear Noele,
can you please elaborate why such a complicated pricing structure is needed. I understand that you need to pay for each API Call to an AI model (one for Turkish, one for German, etc...and again for each text change) in the case that multiple translations are needed. However as I understand it these costs are very minimal and I am not sure how multiple dollars of costs can be generated from the translation of one project to lets say 20 languages multiple times (worst case). At the same time your pricing model does not seem to reflect customer reality. Some projects only need the translation into one or two languages others may be 12 or more languages. Some projects only consist of 5 slides others of 100. Once we purchase your translation credits the pricing is the same for each of these projects. All of this is occuring in a world were we are used to getting AI text translations more or less for free from multiple sources. It somehow does not seem fair from a customer perspective.
Thanks for clarifying Noelle, it's good to understand a little bit more about the rationale behind Articulate's decisions.
I loved trying Articulate's new features during the trial period, they were fantastic. However, in the current climate, the costs are very high, and it will be difficult to be able to afford these add-ons, so we'll just have to be creative with our solutions, even if it's not our preferred route.Hi Noele_Flowers I just got a quote for the localization service and it appears to be out of the reach for small providers and freelance Storyline developers. The lowest tier 25 credits works out to ~$11k USD ($440 USD per translation). I think the price per credit is fair, but a lot of us smaller providers won't use the 25, pushing our price per translation cost up significant. We don't do enough translations to justify purchasing 25 credits per year, we'd be using closer to between 5-10 depending on the year. We can't add that cost to the projects we work on (between $1k - $2k per translation depending on how many we do in a year). That's not a cost we can pass on to the client with confidence.
If we could purchase what we need when we need it, we can then just add as a line item to a quote. Articulate could charge a bit more for each translation (+$100USD), with purchasing 25 offering a significant discount.
Are there any plans in the works to roll this out in future, or will it continue to be the 25 for $11k for the foreseeable future?
The service is a good one and I was really impressed with it when I trialled it, but it would be great to see it more affordable to smaller providers and freelancers.
