When we first started working on Amanuens as a commercial product, we thought that having a way to simplify the translation process was enough. We though that the point was managing translations and updates. Well, we were wrong. It turned out that every single mISV owner we talked to, told us that of course, the localization process is hard and complex, however finding high-quality translation professionals is at least as hard.

Doing the aftermath tells us that offering infrastructure without the translation service does not make a lot of sense. People were like “And how many languages do you offer?” “How much do translations cost?” and so on. It’s such an obvious problem that they simply expect we offer translations too.

That’s why we’ll integrate a high-quality, human-powered translation service later this year. The roadmap for the technological platform is still the same and we’ll exit the beta stage in August.

We are designing the workflow in a way that reduces the overhead to a minimum for both the customer and the translators, and getting quotes and estimates is quick and easy.

We’ll not be hiring translators ourselves, but instead we’ll rely on partners whose business is translating content. At the moment of launch of the service, we’ll cover about 50 languages, that should be enough for everyone (like 640KB of memory).

As I mentioned in the previous post, last week we pitched about Amanuens at the local Pitch Slam event organized by Innovate!100. It’s been a nice evening, we met some other Italian entrepreneurs and it was funny to see that we were both the youngest company founded by the youngest guys.

It has come quite unexpected that we won the pitch slam (Mike, thanks for all the help). The judges told us that we’ve been able to identify and explain a real problem that real companies have, and how we plan to solve it. The pitch took us many hours of work and rehearsal, so it’s very nice to have won for the very best reason I can imagine.

All the pitches have been filmed and the videos are available on Vimeo. Here is my pitch.

These two pitch events (the one in Paris on May 25th and the one in Milan on May 28th) greatly helped us understand what people like, don’t like and would like in Amanuens. It’s something that we didn’t advertise much so far, but with Amanuens we want to build a one-stop solution for software localization, so that software companies just come to us to get infrastructure that simplifies the localization process as well as high-quality translation services. The plan is to release Amanuens 1.0 this August, with just the infrastructure, and then work to add the translation services. I’m confident we’ll be able to start offering the integrated infrastructure+translation service by the end of this year.

I’m very excited to announce that earlier this week we published the prices for Amanuens.

The rationale behind our pricing is a real pay-as-you-go model. Unlike those services that are allegedly pay-as-you-go but ask you a fixed monthly fee, we charge you for what you actually use. Everything comes down to key-days, that is the number of days a key (which is a translation entry, such as the text in a button or an error message) is stored within our system.

We believe the pricing is very competitive, also given that you don’t have to worry about number of users or projects. Basically, it’s all about the amount of your data that resides in our system.

Payments are handled with a top-up scheme. Basically, you top-up your account with an amount of money and we’ll charge your account daily, based on the actual service usage.

For all beta users, depending on the size of the top-up, we have set up a discount in the form of a credit bonus, that is added to the nominal amount of the top-up. Open-source projects get Amanuens for free.

Pricing will be effective after we launch commercially, that should be in August, this year. Until then, Amanuens Beta continues to be totally free.

As usual, we’d like to hear your opinions and thoughts.