Suggestion
Bunpro lite (free):
Bunpro pro ($5/month):
Not a bad idea, except for this part. SRS is the whole point.
That’s like YouTube introducing YouTube Red, but saying, “We still have a free option, don’t worry. Just, no video”
Seems kind of bad to charge for a service that largely links to other people’s content and has quite a few “borrowed” sentences. Especially since the community here has provided so much support with finding problems and often even providing solutions.
The Anki app is like $25 on the app store.
Do they make any content?
And it seems like the main use of Anki is to use flashcard sets pirated from people who did make content.
Anki for desktop and anki for andrioid are free, only ankimobile cost money
All of the decks that I have ever used in Anki were made from scratch by people who felt they wanted to help others, the only ones that have content from other people are the ones that have sentences from Iknow which used to be free. Plus the best way to use anki is to make your own flashcards… almost everyone knows that 
What you’re implying here is preposterous “The main use of anki is to pirate stuff from others, anki is for ilegal flashcards”
Statements like that only do a huge disservice to such an awesome program, and to the anki team and all the people that have put a lot of effort on their decks and shared them, or maybe you believe that no one would ever share stuff for free when they have put some effort on them? and everything is “pirated” 
I guess sharing knowledge is a big crime these days… seems people forgot how we got to our modern era by sharing knowledge with others.
You cut out the “seems” both times you quoted me. Just going based on what people talk about here. The recommendations tend to be things ripped from sites. I know you can make your own decks.
But my point is that it’s not Anki’s fault what people do with their software, and people still don’t complain that they earn money for making the software despite not producing the content.
You also cut out all of that.
It was a response to people claiming that Bunpro is somehow doing something wrong by earning money by building an SRS service and then not creating all of the content for it.
After rethinking on it for a while, I feel that its just not ready “yet”, as mentioning the words beta and alpha in the same email as paid service is a bit odd, but I would be more than happy to pay for a lifetime option similar to wanikani, I much prefer one time payments than ongoing subscriptions.
The main reason I was so…I guess you could say " startled" by this was because I had only just come back to learning grammar from a long break and it felt like what was currently available to me was being taken away with nothing extra being added, sort of like having to pay to use tap water in your own house all of a sudden.
But Bunpro is good, and will get better, and I think will definitely be worth it in the long run.
Well anki is not a paid service or subscription based, while bunpro wants to be paid, that’s a huge difference… anyways everything you said about anki was wrong, so your whole post shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
You can’t compare them both or use anki as an excuse to make bunpro paid, as anki is not a pay2use service, only the iOS app costs one time payment of 25$ like you sad not a recurring charge and no it’s not for pirates or whatever.
To be fair if bunpro wants to charge for everything they should make everything themselves period, charging for stuff that don’t belong to them just because is their software is not exactly fair and it’s no different than anyone ripping the whole site or the blogs and making anki decks, after all it’s not theirs and you can’t copyright Japanese grammar or a language
if people do this then the bunpro team should keep their mouths shut and don’t complain as it’s not different than what they’re doing.
Anyways I believe them when they say this is not about greed and it’s only about making bunpro better for everyone, they want to help the students/community that’s why it was free… but so many things start with good intentions then the money starts to rolling in and people change their priorities, a lot of people who used the site feel betrayed as it wasn’t very clear that this was going to happen, and adding another monthly fee on top of all the others feels like a huge kick in the kintamas for many of us as we don’t have a magical tree that grows money.
I’m with the people who suggested other ways of monetization like donations, ads, and leaving everything that is free like that forever while charging for new updates and new content that will come in the future like N2, N1 and other goodies for supporters, that will please almost everyone and make it accessible.
Just my 2 cents.
… You don’t? O_o
I pay a fee based on the size of my house, it is also possible to get a tool to measure how much water you actually use and pay based on that instead… ^^;
I said three things.
I guess we disagree about the meaning of “wrong”
No, you can use anki freely. There is absolutely free android app, mac os app and windows app(and maybe linux).
The only one that you have to pay for is iphone app. But you can still use Anki using webb app for free if you are on iOS so it is not mandatory.
Well yeah, they do not. Anki is POWERFUL srs app, the content has to be yours.
But those people are not charging money for using someones sentences etc.
Also, most of decks are made by enthusiasts themselves, and are published to be used and shared freely. Not to mention japanese learners aren’t even the biggest group using anki(which is used by students of other languages, people studying medicinem law, IT etc…).
Don’t you see the difference?
Do they earn money from the iOS app.
I actually don’t, the water is payed by someone else 
I think you should reevaluate the meaning of pirating content; I am not pirating something if am I owning it (ripping a DVD which I own with sub2srs and then importing cards to anki).
If you want to make your life harder buy materials with DRM only, buy yourself an iPad, become a lobbist at the service of the copyright industry, but I believe I have the right to use the information I own, however I want and use it in the way I want.
There are laws for this topic, we do not need to make the life even harder to ourselves.
Sorry for being a bit harsh, but I used to own an ipad and read ebooks there and guess what? When I wanted to replace it for a kindle I could not export my ebooks there, in fact even if I wanted to copy paste a sentence it had character limits and carried a copyright statement every single time making it extremely annoying to mine sentences for study.
Say that anki is meant to be used only with pirated stuff is like saying that all cars are meant to transport drugs/illegal stuff.
Everyone.
People are questioning whether it is ethical for Bunpro to make money while they link to these other sites.
Anki makes money and doesn’t produce the content, and some of that content comes from other sources that gave no copyright approval to distribute it that way.
It’s just an example of something everyone seems to think is fine, so why are we complaining about Bunpro.
You are suggesting that the people who, for instance, use the decks that come from iKnow are all also paying for iKnow’s subscription?
Or that people who use sentences that come from books, all bought those books?
The one of the books, yes, unless someone is sharing that with a friend (which I believe that it should be OK as much as you share study notes with your friends).
The ones from iKnow, not necessarily, because they distributed their materials with a copyleft license and eventually the company behind the community decided to change their business model and relicense their materials. The problem is that you cannot retroactively relicense already released materials and still the company claimed copyright infraction (which is not true).
That said I used to pay the yearly subscription for iKnow and I still believe there is a place for paid contents as much as for free shared contents as part of the community.
There are several laws on the Intellectual Property topic, they are different from country to country and usually there are also different views based on the culture/society you come from.
But my personal opinion is that seeing paywalls in every second page, stupid DRMs, not being able to dispose from my digital purchased goods in the way I want make me more and more supporter of civil rights in the digital era (which is nothing else than the rights you have in the real world, also in the digital one).
For more info read about the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Sharing with a friend, even though you don’t have to know that person.
Who is the friend that made all of these sentences from a random Shin Kanzen book available.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/shin%20kanzen
You don’t have to buy that book or know the person who did to get that content. And you can argue, if you want, that it’s not the entirety of the book… but that’s not really much to pat on the back for, that it’s not just the entire book wholesale.
I’m not arguing that Anki is bad, but I don’t see how people are upset about Bunpro (for that reason anyway; the completeness, errors, etc, are a separate issue)
EDIT: Oh, and all of WK is on there, too. So, everyone feel free to unsubscribe.
That’s an objectable usage of the ankiweb; especially because they are publicly mass-distributing it. That said that still would be legal in many countries with the current Intellectual Property laws that exist; not in every country though, in US I think that would not be legal.
I personally believe that this some of this kind decks are only useful with the original content next to it, to memorize after the study with the book (I just looked at the examples). And the truth is that someone seriously interested in study, they will worry about buying good quality material which is reviewed, free of errors, etc,… so if I was the editiorial of that book I would not worry much about the piracy and I would celebrate it because they are promoting my books and attracting more customers.
I think Bunpro people has the right to make their own company, with their owned and self licensed material, and I would like to encourage them to do it. That said the way they bootstrapped was abusive from their side. They still can correct the few mistakes they did and create a great service valuable for everyone and still earn some money from it.
The only thing Anki are charging for is their SRS application (and only on one platform). They are not charging for anki decks, they don’t even make most of the anki decks AFAIK.
It is a false equivalence.
It’s not about them being equivalent, it’s about the ethics of making money and using that content at the same time.
Do the people who think Bunpro is unethical think Anki is unethical? (the degree of unethical-ness isn’t part of the discussion).
Maybe they do, and that’ll be the end of the discussion.
It’s nice of Anki to not charge people for WK’s content, but you can still get it all there.