DeepL is a German company and a startup. I enjoyed their earlier products and happily switched to DeepL later. The translation accuracy is quite high and better than their competitors, but writings still need to be heavily corrected, which hampers the workflow. I mostly enjoy their functions to find alternative or synonyms that have a better overall fit for my text. I barely use it for translation. Maybe that's not what it was intended for, but I can see a use case. However, I broadly agree with others. It's a real shame that such a great tool (and technology) is priced and marketed so poorly. The pricing strategy is neither very customer-friendly nor well-structured. Surprisingly, the chosen pricing model is rather aggressive and at times a bit opaque in terms of real cost to the private customer. I assume for companies it might make sense to pay a yearly subscription, but in a B2C model, it doesn't seem to add up with the actual customer needs and only plays into the company's hands. Additionally, what is quite odd for such a type of company is that no discounted offers are given, nor any sort of flexibility. The monthly cost is charged per year, but broken down to a monthly price on their website, which is highly misleading and potentially only there to make it look friendlier. Customer service and usability should be improved.
