As of Monday, 19 October, the new payment model is live where you will have to buy credit packages for performing handwritten text recognition. Apart from this, everything works the way you are used to. Your purchases will enable us to keep Transkribus alive into the future and keep this wonderful community going 🙂 Everything you need to know about buying credits you find here. But don’t worry: Every user will get 500 free credits.

Please check out https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/credits/ – there you will find some info on how to apply for free credits as a student or teacher.

You can pay using PayPal, Creditcard (handled by Paypal without having to set up a Paypal account) or bank transfer.

Everything about the management of credits you find here: https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/credits/#info

Pylaia is the less costly engine because it is open source (but its operation and maintenance still mean costs for us), HTR+ (which will soon be updated with a newer version) is a closed-source engine and, on top of operation and maintenance, entails licensing costs for us, and it is therefore a bit more expensive to use. The new version will probably cost more, but will be technologically more advanced and also be able to use existing HTR+ models. We can’t make a general recommendation as to which engine to use: it often depends on the processed material.

We don’t 🙂 If you have trained a model with printed text or found a shared model that is obviously for printed material, please write us an email that you would like this model to be classified as “print” (don’t forget to include the model name in the email). Then we will check it and switch on print mode for this model if it actually is for printed material. From now on and as long as the model isn’t changed/retrained, every recognition performed with this model by anyone will use a lot fewer credits per page.

If you buy a credit package as a subscription and not a one-time order, this means that you will be billed automatically for the same amount the following year, too. In exchange, you get a discount. Subscriptions can be cancelled at any time without any direct consequences, but we encourage you not to exploit this by cancelling before the second year just to get cheaper credits. We may discontinue this offer if there is too much exploitation. It will only work if everybody plays fair. 

No: training, layout analysis, using Transkribus for manually transcribing, etc. – i.e., everything but text recognition proper remains free of charge.

No, unless you got a concrete quotation by us and agreed to financially support us even before the payment model starts (a huuuuge thanks to everybody who did, by the way 🙂 ), then you will not be charged for such pages.

We have a simple solution for this: all credits but the “120” and “500” packages that are bought in the online shop can be shared with other Transkribus users. This means that a representative of an institution can buy a large amount of credits and thus make the most of our quantity discounts for larger packages and later distribute them among the users at their institution who need credits.