There are almost 44,000 words of free information on this site plus (when the site first went live) more than 70,000 words of paid-for information, for a total of well over 110,000 words. This is the equivalent of a middling-to-thick printed guidebook: a really thick one can top 200,000, which we shall exceed in due course, as other countries are added.
The paid information is 50 cents (US) per 1000 words, with a limit of $3.00 (US) per country: the equivalent, fairly obviously, of 6,000 words. If we write more than 6,000 words it is because we particularly love a place, or have spent a lot of time there. There's likely to be a lot of extra information, but we weren't sure you'd want to pay for it. We thought it was easier to have a US $3 cap than to try to cut these extra-long entries and omit information that might be interesting or useful or both.
Paying by the word like this means that you get some odd amounts to pay. For example, 4,362 words will be US $2.18 -- though for convenience, we round down to the nearest 5 cents, so it would be US $2.15. Likewise, $1.71 would be $1.70. This seems to us an honest way to sell words, by length as if they were cloth or rope, or perhaps by weight as if they were sugar or flour.
Why the US dollar? Mainly because people who use other currencies are usually more or less aware of the value of their currency -- be it the pound, the Euro, the rouble or the rupee -- against the dollar, while citizens of the United States tend to be less aware of the value of the US dollar against anything else.
PayPal has a secure credit card payment system built in, so there's not a lot to worry about there. And they do offer guarantees against double-billing, mis-billing, and so forth.
For your money, you get the username and password to give you access to the country (or countries) of your choice, to read and/or print out. This so little money -- as we said, a maximum of US $3 a country -- that it would be unrealistically expensive to arrange refunds. If you feel we're not worth the money, you have an obvious remedy: don't buy anything else from us. Otherwise, we believe that there's enough solid information in our guides to be worth the small amounts we charge.
But if you feel you've really been ripped off, or if something went badly wrong, contact us. If we feel that there is even the suspicion of justification in your complaint, we'll do our best to put it right. But if we don't think there's any justification to your complaint, we can't even guarantee a reply: it will depend on how busy we are. You may not think that's the best way in the world to approach things, but at least we're up front about it: we don't want to string you along. If you are the kind of person who always finds problems in everything, and who likes to sue, do us all a favour: go away now.
Essentially, this site is run on the old hippie principles: peace, love and trust. We'll do the best to provide all three on our side. We hope you feel the same way.
last updated: 12/01/04
© 2003 Roger W. Hicks
