Is a More Expensive Copyscape Worth Every Penny?

Copyscape sent us an email to inform us about its decision to change their pricing to a variable pricing model based on content length, starting at only 3 cents per search.

Beginning April 2, 2018, Copyscape will charge $0.03 per search for the first 200 words and $0.01 per 100 words thereafter.

Here’s Copyscape’s message:

Since launching Copyscape Premium over ten years ago, we’ve been devoted to providing you the best service at the lowest possible cost – a flat price of 5c per search. In recent years we’ve seen a major rise in the number of customers checking long articles, which require significantly more resources to process than shorter pieces of content. As a result, maintaining a flat price of 5c per search is no longer sustainable, and we don’t want to force one set of customers (with shorter content) to effectively subsidize another. The new variable pricing means that each user pays exactly for what they use – with lower starting costs for everyone. The new pricing will apply for all users beginning April 2, 2018. Copyscape Premium will work the same as before, with your account showing a cash balance rather than a number of search credits. As part of the transition, any search credits purchased prior to 2018 will be granted a price cap of 5c per search until they expire. We are excited to offer you these lower starting costs and a fairer pricing model for Copyscape Premium, and look forward to continuing to serve you in 2018 and beyond.Copyscape

We’ve been using Copyscape here in iPresence Digital Marketing, Inc. for the longest time that I can remember. It’s one of our primary tools in our content writing services.

We wrote between 500,000 to 1,000,000 words per month in 2017. We are going to scale up between 2 million to 3 million words per month this 2018. You can imagine how many Copyscape credits we need to buy with such volume of orders we receive from our customers.

However, it used to cost us only $0.05 to check at least 2,000 words. Our editorial team makes sure that we do not go beyond 2,000 words per checking to get the best results as per Copyscape. That reminder is written below the “Paste text or URL” box.

Beginning April 2, 2018, it would cost us $0.20 to check 2,000 words. That’s a 300% price increase!

This made me remember that Grammarly has its own plagiarism-checking feature. So I turned on that feature on our premium Grammarly account.

Since I’ve offered content writing solutions in 2001, I understand that it’s not the plagiarism tool, per se, that makes our unique selling proposition great but our quality control processes that ensure high-quality delivery.

Customers don’t care that much about what plagiarism-checking tool we’re going to use for as long as we follow their requirements and we deliver non-plagiarized content.

I’ve decided to do a comparative test on Grammarly and Copyscape.

I’ve checked the article Hit the Bull’s Eye with Google Keyword Trends. This was published on December 28, 2017.

Both Copyscape and Grammarly failed to identify that it’s 100% published. You’ll find the Copyscape results here.

But that’s for the free version of Copyscape (not logged into our premium Copyscape account).

For the benefit of the doubt, I checked using our premium Copyscape credits.

Surprisingly, Copyscape Premium found the exact and same things that Grammarly found.

In this case, both tools found the same thing but both failed to detect that every single word on that article was already published last December 2017.

So I tried an older post.

Grammarly successfully detected that 100% of it is published on our website already.

Surprisingly, Copyscape’s free version failed to detect that.

On the other hand, Copyscape Premium (using credits) was able to detect what Grammarly detected.

I’ve learned three things from this series of tests I did:

Copyscape has more detailed search results than Grammarly.
Grammarly can detect what Copyscape can.
Grammarly is more cost-effective than Copyscape.

This made me decide to quit using Copyscape and switch to Grammarly’s plagiarism detector instead unless Copyscape reverts to its previous pricing model. While Grammarly can get the job done, we have a well-trained team of editors led by an Associate Editor and an Editor-in-Chief.

A well-trained and a process-oriented team of writers and editors is the bottom line. The availability of tools is just a bonus.
That has been the case in our company. It is one of the many reasons why the majority of our native English-speaking customers label us as their preferred non-native English-speaking content provider over our native English-speaking competitors.

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iPresence Digital Marketing, Inc.

Leader in Digital Marketing at iPresence Digital Marketing, Inc.

We has been helping SMEs build their online presence, drive traffic to our clients' websites, optimize conversion, and free up more time for our clients and their family through our internet marketing services.