Spellr.us Is So Good That I Want To Pay For It

February 10th, 2009 Sean Murphy

I sent Kevin Garber an E-Mail yesterday afternoon “I love the product, I would like to pay for it.” I had spent about twenty hours in the last week cleaning up typo’s on www.skmurphy.com and www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com (first of all who knew that there were so many different ways to spell bootstrapper and entrepreneur, to name two of the more embarrassingly frequent offenders). A couple of reasons why spellr.us is an outstanding product and definitely worth paying for.

I have to say first off that they have not announced their pricing, and I am not privy to it, so I am assuming that they will offer some plans in the $10-$50/month range that are appropriate for a firm like ours.

1. It’s clearly been in production use for a while. It performed very well and there were a number of features that were the result of serious use.
2. It’s very good at detecting misspellings, it can show you what it suspects by highlighting it in the original page, or in the HTML view if that’s necessary (some misspellings can be triggered by splitting a word inserting an HTML tag in the middle, this can be caused, for example by bolding a word in two passes or not linking the entire word.)
3. It allows you to build a custom dictionary that’s all your own. Because of the great number of personal names we mention on this blog, plus a fair amount of obscure but valid nomenclature, I ended up creating a 1200 word custom dictionary that can be re-used when I scan this blog.
4. It’s fast, the scan takes 1-2 seconds per page. It’s designed to be useful immediately and to run on a schedule to detect new mistakes you have added.

If you have a website of any size, I would encourage you to give it a try. It’s proven so useful for me that I will be happy to pay for it just to be able to rely on it (and to prevent them from deleting my dictionary).

Update Feb-16: Pricing plans posted, free for 20 pages, $24 for 2,000 pages, $47 for 5,000 pages, $267 for 15,000 pages.

Entry Filed under: Tools for Startups, skmurphy