A while back I had a scanned PDF I urgently needed translated. Google Translate and DeepL both failed - the document was a flat image with no selectable text. I ended up manually retyping chunks just to get a rough idea of the content. It was painful.
So I built a tool to fix that. Instead of traditional OCR, it uses AI vision to read and translate scanned documents - including low-quality scans and handwriting - into 130+ languages. I also added a specialized mode for legal and technical documents where precision matters.
Now I'm getting traffic, but retention and conversion are lower than I expected. I think the disconnect might be in pricing.
Currently offering:
- Pay-per-document (for one-off use cases)
- Monthly subscription (for regular users)
My questions for this community:
- Does offering both PAYG and subscription confuse users, or is it actually a plus?
- For a utility tool like this — where most users have ONE document to translate — how do you build retention at all?
- Any red flags in the positioning you'd call out?
Brutal feedback welcome. This community has saved me from bad decisions before.