Ludwig Premium: Why and How. An open letter to our friends and users

Dear friend and user,

This open letter explains to you why and how we decided that Ludwig would have a premium version.
Everything at Ludwig revolves around bringing more democracy to the English language. We think that if English is supposed to be the universal language, then it should belong to everybody and not only to those born in English speaking countries. Writing in English with confidence is a right: this is why we made Ludwig in the first place and decided that it would have to be free.
We can’t say that we have already accomplished such an ambitious mission, but the numbers don’t lie: Ludwig has become the writing soul-mate of millions of people in the world, without whom nothing of this unbelievable story could have been possible. In 2016 we were about to launch Ludwig, had 100 users (testers), and didn’t know if anyone but us would like and use Ludwig.
Unfortunately, even if you have hundreds of thousands of users and you are doing something good for the world, you need to find a way to pay the bills (especially the servers) and to put bread on the table.
We started making some revenue by putting a few banners on Ludwig. The revenue coming from advertising helps us to cover the server and maintenance costs (please help us by disabling your Adblock on Ludwig!), but it does not cover salaries.
Eventually, several users asked for an ad-free version of Ludwig and for several advanced features that they wanted us to develop. A few months and hundreds of emails later (I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your feedback), we launched a Premium version to help you to unleash the full potential of your inner writer.

This is you, unleashing the full potential of your inner writer.

WHAT ARE THE PREMIUM FEATURES?

Ludwig premium has several advantages over the free plan. It was 2018 and since then we have been adding new premium features to the product.

Unlimited Queries: while the free plan gives you 8 free queries per day, with Ludwig premium you have unlimited daily queries, both from the website and the Desktop App (check it out if you haven’t already!)
Translation: makes you search Ludwig in your own language. It translates a sentence for you and then searches for results
AI feedback: gives you an opinion about your sentence, if it’s usable and grammatically sound. Being AI-based, it is always good to take this suggestion
Paraphrase: We’ve been serving the rewrite function since 2022 and it’s one of the most loved features.
Editor: It supports grammar checking and sentence fixing to make your writing run smoother.

As I'm a non-native speaker myself, I know how important these three new additions are. I'm not just a co-founder, I'm also one of Ludwig's most active users, so I'm seriously thrilled about these improvements, and I hope you are as well.

Don’t underestimate that you have an additional advantage: by paying for Ludwig premium you will bring more democracy to the English language and instantly feel happier for doing so.

HOW WE WILL SPEND THE MONEY COMING FROM THE PREMIUM VERSION

We want to be crystal clear about this: we are a small, ambitious and bootstrapped startup based in Sicily. Despite our budget and operating costs are 100 times lower compared to those fancy and plenty of investors’ money startups from Silicon Valley our product is on the same level, if not better. We can compete with them only if we remain frugal and able to live off of our cash flow.

We need to produce revenue to:

Cover our human resources expenses. This is the most important issue for us: we are 10 people working full-time on this project, and we need to eat too and try to live pretty normal lives. No, none of us is a millionaire (AT ALL!). If we can’t get a salary from Ludwig, at some point we will have to shut it down and find other jobs, and none of us (neither you) want this to happen.
Ensure the highest quality service to our users and compete in the global market. Until present, we decided not to accept any funds from venture capitalists because we want to be free to shape this project in the most sustainable way, aiming for the good of the user, not for the sole profit of a random investor. At some point in the future, we will find an investor but we really want to make sure that he/she will let us run the company the way we like and that he will intimately share our vision and mission.
Keep on working on advanced features and improving Ludwig. We want to make it more useful and reliable every day. Without money, we can’t hire and if we can’t hire we cant have hands free to do research and development.

HOW DID WE FIX THE PRICE?

Even if Ludwig is the best (for being precise also the only) linguistic search engine on the market, we decided to provide it at a super low price, because we really want to make it accessible for every single person on the globe and we are not greedy. Our Premium price is lower than the majority of other services for English writing you’ll find online. Coherently with our mission, we decided to keep a free version of Ludwig without the advanced features, with advertising and with the limitation to the number of daily searches, so that everyone who needs Ludwig can count on it.
On top of that, we heavily discounted the price for the yearly subscription: one year of unlimited Ludwig Premium will cost you as much as an ice-cream per month, without the calories and the fat?
In one word, everything designed to be sustainable, for Ludwig and its users.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE?

We made an FAQ page where you can find an answer to most of your questions and if you have any other questions or concerns, you can just write us at contact@ludwig.guru.

Yours sincerely,
Antonio + Ludwig team

This is us, from left to right: Salvo (Backend engineer), Francesco (Frontend dev. and UX), Roberta (? and CBO), Francesco (Backend engineer), Antonio (CEO), Federico (COO).