How to Buy
How to Purchase Pleco Add-ons
Pleco add-ons are available both through our own online store and through Apple’s in-app purchase system.
In-app purchase is the easiest way to buy Pleco add-ons, since it automatically bills your Apple account. However, our website store is almost as fast, particularly if you use Apple Pay, and since we don’t have to pay Apple commissions on purchases made there, we also offer a modest discount on our Basic and Professional bundles if you buy through us instead of through them.
(due to a recent court ruling in which Apple was found to have willfully violated a federal district court injunction, we are able to link directly to our website store from the “Add-ons” screen for customers in the US)
Free Version
The free version of Pleco includes two pretty good Chinese-English dictionaries (the “Pleco Basic Chinese-English Dictionary,” based on “A Chinese-English Dictionary” ed. by Wei Dongya, and CC-CEDICT), but no English-Chinese dictionary, no flashcards / document reader / OCR, and stroke order diagrams for only a few dozen characters. All of Pleco’s powerful search features (wildcards, full-text, etc) are supported, though, and searches are as fast / smooth as with any other dictionary. Additional free dictionaries can be added without having to purchase any add-ons.
Replacing Your Device
If you lose or replace your iPhone / iPad with another device running iOS, you can easily transfer over your Pleco add-on purchases without buying them again. If you originally bought Pleco as an in-app purchase, just tap on the “Restore Purchases” button at the bottom of the “Add-ons” tab to reactivate your software; if you originally bought on another platform or through our website, tap on “Enter Registration ID” under “Registration” in the sidebar menu and use the same ID you were given before (you can retrieve it from My Orders if needed).
You can also activate your purchases for free on Android if you switch to that; just copy down the “Registration ID” from the Pleco “Registration” screen on your iPhone and enter it in the same screen on your Android phone.
You can be confident that any product you buy from us will be supported for years to come; we’ve been in business since 2000 and we won’t be going away anytime soon.
Additional Devices
You can share your purchase with up to three devices at a time, regardless of what platform they’re on or what account they’re connected to; simply copy down the “Registration ID” from the Pleco “Registration” screen on your Android device and enter it in the same screen on the other device.
Upgrades
Our official upgrade policy is that all software updates within the current major version (3.1, 3.2, 3.3, etc) are offered free of charge, and that major version upgrades (4.0, 5.0, 6.0) may or may not be free.
To date, we’ve never charged a fee for a version upgrade; we have customers who bought our software back in 2001 and are still using the latest version a quarter century later without ever having had to pay an upgrade fee. What we prefer to do instead is to release the basic software upgrade for free but charge extra for some new features (particularly those that require us to pay royalties or license fees).
Tech Support
We offer lifetime free e-mail technical support with all purchases; just contact us and we’ll be delighted to help you.
We do not currently offer telephone support; we’re not big enough to have a dedicated 24-hour line, and if we offered telephone support during business hours it wouldn’t do much good for the plurality of our customers who live outside the US, so we’ve decided it’s best to forego telephone support altogether for now at least. We’re very quick to answer emails, though; most messages are responded to within half a day, many within a few hours, and we don’t stop answering email on weekends.