Learning and careers decision
HanziStroke Pro — Lifetime Access
A competent developer can build a useful replacement in about a week using existing open-source stroke-animation projects; paying only buys polished content, scale, and saved development time.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off34 h to build
$0/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Look up a character → show animated stroke order → practice writing on an interactive canvas with stroke matching → export printable worksheets.
What it still won’t have
- Polished UI/UX and accessibility polish
- Large prebuilt HSK vocab browsing and curated lists
- Existing content like 11,000+ ready characters and worksheets library
- Built-in email/reporting workflow and account management
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
HanziStroke Pro — Lifetime Access does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
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What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted Hanzi stroke-order practice app using React (TypeScript) frontend, Node.js/Express backend, and SQLite for metadata. Core features in scope: 1) character lookup by character/pinyin/radical and HSK lists; 2) integrate hanzi-writer (https://github.com/chanind/hanzi-writer) to render stroke-order animations; 3) interactive handwriting canvas that records pointer input and compares stroke sequence to expected strokes (simple geometric/temporal matching); 4) PDF worksheet generator producing Tian Zi Ge and Mi Zi Ge grids with selected characters; 5) a simple static export/deploy script (Netlify/Vercel or Docker). Out of scope: full SRS scheduler, multi-user billing, analytics dashboard, or advanced OCR. Include error handling for missing stroke data, unit tests for lookup and PDF generation, and end-to-end test for the practice flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score81
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productHanzi Stroke — Chinese Stroke Order
- official productHanzi Stroke — 11,000+ Characters
- official productHanzi Stroke — Worksheet Generator
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.