In December 2021, I was contacted by a slick, ESL entrepreneur, who charges $10 a month for access to his bank of resources.
This ESL baron slipped into my DMs with a business proposal: "Take down ESL Uncaged and delete all your worksheets from the internet."
He wrote: "We are interested in buying exclusive distribution rights."
Wow.
My lucky day. Finally, the hundreds of hours of work I'd ploughed into ESL Uncaged were going to pay off, I thought.
How much did he offer?
£200. Here's the screenshot.
Of course, I didn't accept. Even when he tried to convince me with this humdinger:
The experience made me reflect, however.
Why should struggling ESL teachers have to pay to get high-quality content - especially when they are just starting, and they are earning peanuts?
Why should big, faceless ESL content barons get to cream the top off our all-too-often meagre earnings?
From that moment, I decided to move to a pay-what-you-can model.
I took down the paywall around my 50+ ESL worksheets, and now it's up to you: how much can you spare to support ESL Uncaged?
Buy me a coffee if you want to put a smile on my face. Or, if you can't afford it right now, drop me a note to tell me which worksheet is your favourite instead.
Let's support each other. And the big ESL content barons can get lost!