Pricing

BibleStudy.tools offers free and paid services. To use paid services first sign up for an account, then log in to your account, and finally visit the Payment Methods page under the Account menu to either make a payment in advance or set up automatic payment in arrears. Once you've done that, each page with a paid service shows your account balance near the top of the page.

Paid services are metered, meaning you see your balance go down as you use each service. If you've set up automatic payment in arrears, called "Automatic Online" on the Payment Methods page, then your balance can go negative and automatic payments are made monthly to erase any negative balance. If you don't set this up then you need to pay in advance and keep a positive balance to use the paid services.

The pricing table is below. Down the far left column each service is named for the main page you access it from, and across the top its costs are broken out by the backend resources that service uses. See "Understanding Pricing" for more info.

The best way to understand pricing is to see your balance go down as you use each service. Services usually cost a few cents or a fraction of a cent, and keeping an eye on your balance, which is shown near the top of every page where you can use a paid service, is the best way to become comfortable with pricing. If you want more details on what you're paying for and some ideas on how to pay less, read on.

Your cost depends on the services you use, and they correspond to the names down the far left column of the pricing table. Services are divided into Bible, Study, and tools, which are also the first three options at the top of every page. The Bible area has free PDF Bibles and the "Your Own" area under there has any custom PDF Bibles you've made, the Study area has any PDF Bible studies you've made, and the tools area has what you use to make these PDFs.

The tools are:

Generate

Create PDFs

Choose books of the Bible or a Bible study you've written, and generate PDF files for selected page and font sizes.

Studies

Write Bible Studies

Take notes on Bible passages and develop your notes into Bible studies.

Chapters

Read the Bible

Pick a chapter of the Bible to read, then browse to other chapters and books.

Concordance

Find Cross References

Enter a word or phrase and find all its occurrences in the Bible.

Common Contexts

Show Contexts of a Word

Enter a word to find other words the Bible uses the same way.

POS Tags

Group Words by Part-of-Speech

Expand a tag that represents a grammatical part-of-speech to see all the words with that tag.

Many services can be used from more than one page. For example, the main service of the Concordance page is finding cross references, but from that page you can also read chapters as from the Chapters page and write study notes as from the Studies page. The cost of a service is the same regardless of the page. For example, taking notes costs the same whether you do it from the Studies page or from the Concordance page.

Within each service costs are broken out by the types of backend resources the service might need, and they correspond to the names across the top row of the pricing table. These are:

Run

Execute Software

Use CPU power to generate your results. For example, tools/CommonContexts runs natural language processing software to scan Bible files to find passages that contain words similar to a given word, and tools/Generate runs desktop publishing software to create PDFs of your Bible studies. Behind the scenes additional compute might be needed to encrypt results as they're stored, decrypt stored results as they're retrieved, or scan incoming requests for known threats.

Transfer

View Results

Use network bandwidth to receive your generated results. For example, tools/Concordance uses bandwidth to send you all the passages it found, and Bible/YourOwn uses bandwidth to send you the PDF Bibles that tools/Generate created. Behind the scenes additional bandwidth might be needed for backend services to talk with each other as they assemble your final results.

Store

Retain Data

Use long-term storage to retain your data. For example, tools/Studies stores the raw text of your notes and Bible studies, and the Study/ area stores the generated PDFs of your studies. Behind the scenes additional storage might be used for backup copies and previous versions to help protect against data loss, and for replica copies across the world to help protect against regional service disruption.

Examples

Discussing some examples can help clarify pricing and give some ideas for lowering your cost.

Generation

Potentially the most expensive service is generating PDF files, since it can have the longest run time. Run times depend on the size of the documents, and can depend on backend resource availability. As an example, generating a completely scripted lesson that takes forty-five minutes of speaking to deliver might take from twenty to ninety seconds and cost between one and five cents. Each generaton run is capped at a max run time of around fifteen minutes, so the max cost of a generation run is about forty-five cents. You normally hit this max only if you generate several books of the Bible in a single run.

Storage

In addition to their one-time generation costs, your generated files incur ongoing storage costs that depend on their total size. To get a rough idea, one hundred completely scripted lessons that each take forty-five minutes of speaking to deliver would probably use around fifty MB of total storage and cost less than five cents per month to store. You can also generate customized books of the Bible, and all sixty-six books of the Bible could be about the same size and monthly cost as these one hundred lessons.

If you regenerate a file then its two most recent prior versions are kept, possibly tripling the storage cost of that file. Finally, all older versions of a file are kept for ninety days, so if you regenerate the same files many times you could see your storage cost go up temporarily.

The raw text of your notes and Bible studies also incurs a periodic storage cost that depends on how much text you've written. For example, one hundred completely scripted lessons that would each take 45 minutes of speaking to deliver might be about 300 KB of total storage and cost ten cents per month to store.

Putting all these storage costs together, the raw text and generated PDFs of one hundred completely scripted lessons that each take 45 minutes of speaking to deliver, including two previous versions of each PDF, might cost about twenty-five cents a month.

Each day a fraction of your monthly storage cost is assessed, so if you see your balance go down slightly and you weren't using any service, it's possible that your daily storage cost was posted at that time.

Reading and Searching the Bible

While reading chapters of the Bible or using tools that search the text of the Bible you pay for the run time to generate the results and for the network bandwith to transfer these results to your screen. However, these results don't change since the Bible doesn't change. For example, searching the Bible for the word "elect" will always return the same twenty results. To take advantage of this these results are cached in your browser, and if you request them again they're pulled from that cache and the backend isn't used at all. This means that ideally you'll pay only once for any given set of results. This caching is used by the Chapters, Concordance, and Common Contexts tools.

Clearing your browser's storage erases this cache. Also, if you've set your browser to not allow access to storage, or if you use a "private mode" browsing session, you might not be able to use this cache. If you like to clear all your browser data then you can consider keeping the data for the BibleStudy.tools site.

Accessing Notes

When you access the notes and Bible study texts you've written these are pulled from the backend each time. Unlike the Bible which doesn't change, your notes are subject to change and don't use the browser caching described in the section above. Each time notes are requested you pay for the run time to check for them, even if there are none, and you pay for the network bandwith to transfer any notes that are found. These costs are generally only small fractions of a cent, but they can add up. To reduce this cost you can take care to close notes areas you aren't using. For example, if you're browsing chapters of the Bible but aren't interested in any notes you may have written for them, keep the notes panel closed.