FAQ

You can pay using a credit card (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, JCB, Discovery) or your PayPal account. The credit card payments on ESL Brains are secured and processed by Stripe.

Our default currency is USD (American dollar), but you can also pay in EUR (euro) or GBP (British pound sterling) or PLN (Polish zloty). You can change the currency you want to pay in at the Pricing page before selecting a subscription plan.

You will be charged for your subscription the moment you subscribe. The next payment date will depend on the type of your subscription. For a monthly plan, you’ll be charged each month on the day you initially subscribed, so if you subscribe on Jan 4, the next payment will be scheduled for Feb 4, then Mar 4, and so on. If you select the annual subscription plan, the next payment date will be scheduled exactly after 1 year.You can see your next payment date in the Subscription tab.

We’re protective of our lessons, but we don’t mind giving you a sneak peak! You can’t see all the Premium or Unlimited content without a subscription, but you can browse 80+ free lessons by going to the Lesson Search page and selecting the Free filter. If you’d like to check out our various lesson formats (i.e. e-lesson plans, Flipped Classroom, Speaking Class, and Critical Reading Club worksheets), then head to Discover ESL Brains content page for free samples!

Go to the Subscription tab on your Account page and click Cancel under the subscription you wish to cancel. You’ll have access to our lessons until the end of the current subscription period. If you ever want to restart the same subscription, just click Reactivate.

Cancel your current subscription plan in the Subscriptions tab of the My Account page. Once your current subscription period ends, you won’t be charged again and instead you will be switched to the BASIC (free) plan. This means you will be able to keep your saved lessons, comment or react to the lessons, as well as access Free lesson plans.

Go to the Subscription tab on your Account page and click Change subscription. You’ll land on our Pricing page where you’ll be able to select a new subscription plan. Follow the checkout steps to confirm the change. When you upgrade, the recurring payment date will remain the same but you’ll be charged the difference between the subscriptions. For example, you subscribed to the PREMIUM ($6) plan on Jan 3. On Jan 13, you want to upgrade to the UNLIMITED ($12) plan. As your next payment date is on Feb 3, the difference that you’ll pay when you upgrade is counted proportionally for the remaining 20 days of the subscription period. In this case, that would be $4. Then, when the next subscription period starts (in this case on Feb 3), you’ll be charged a full monthly subscription plan fee for the next period.When you downgrade, you’ll just need to confirm the downgrade in the checkout. You’ll have access to the materials from the UNLIMITED plan until the next payment date and then be switched to a lower plan, i.e. the PREMIUM plan starting from the next subscription period. For example, you subscribed for the monthly UNLIMITED ($12) plan on Jan 14. After 2 weeks you decide to switch to the PREMIUM ($6) plan. Since you’ve already paid for full monthly access, you will still have access to the UNLIMITED plan content until Feb 14 and on that day, you’ll be switched to the PREMIUM plan and get charged $6.

If you change from a monthly to annual plan, your annual plan will start from the beginning of the next renewal period. For example, you subscribed for the UNLIMITED ($12) plan on Feb 5, then on Feb 20 you decided to change to an annual UNLIMITED plan. You will then stay on the monthly plan until the end of your current monthly period, i.e. Mar 5 in this case, and then on Mar 5 your account will be charged for the annual plan and you’ll be switched to the yearly plan you selected.

Please follow the points below to exclude the most common scenarios:

1. Check whether you’re logged in (logged in users see their name + avatar in the top-right corner). If you’re not logged in, then please log in with the account you used for subscribing.
2. If you’re logged in, check whether you have an active subscription. Go to the Subscriptiontab and see whether the subscription status is Active.
3. If you can’t see any subscriptions in the Subscription tab, it is quite likely that you’ve logged in with a wrong account. This happens sometimes when you created your account first using just your email address and then the second time you log in using Google or Facebook (and your Google/Facebook emails are different than the one you used for ESL Brains account). This way you create the second account and the second account doesn’t have a subscription so the content is locked. If that’s the case, you need to log out and log in with the proper account – if you don’t remember your username/email address used for registration, please check your mailbox for an email from ESL Brains titled Your ESL Brains account has been created!
4. Check whether you have an appropriate subscription for a given lesson. Remember that the PREMIUM subscription plan does not unlock all the lesson plans!

If none of the above helped or you have a subscription with the status On-Hold or Pending-Cancellation, please write to us at [email protected] and we will look into it.

The invoices are issued automatically and you can find them in your Billing History tab on your Account page. If you want to change your billing details, you can change them in your Account Details tab. New billing details will appear on the subsequent invoices, but the previous documents won’t change.

You can update your billing details so that the next invoice includes your new details, however, updating your billing details will not change the data on the invoices that have already been issued. To change your billing details:

1. Go to the Account Details tab in the My Account page.
2. Scroll down to the Billing address section
3. Click Edit.
4. Make changes in your data and click Save changes.

Once you do that, please email us at [email protected] with a quick note that you want your new billing details to be applied for future invoices.

If you didn’t provide a valid EU VAT number when you started the subscription and you want to add it to a subscription that is already active, please follow these steps:

1. Go to your My Account page.
2. Click the VAT ID tab (if you don’t see this tab it means your billing address is not within EU).
3. Add the VAT number and validate it by clicking the Save button.
4. Email us at [email protected] or message us via the on-site chat so that we can properly apply the VAT number to future renewal payments.

1. Use filters. Click Lesson plans in the top-left corner of the page and choose a level or a category. You can also click See all lessons in the bottom-right corner of the drop-down Lesson plans menu. This is where you can search for lessons by level, category and subscription plan. You can also click on Show more filters right under the subscription plan types to browse through the lessons by length or type.
2. Browse through the topics. Go to the main page and scroll down until you find topics in rectangles. You can either use one of them or click See all topics under the rectangles.
3. Use our search engine. Go to the main page and use the search box in the top-right corner.

You can get your own editable copy of an e-lesson plan and make changes to it. To do so, either (1) make a copy of it on your Google Drive (preferable method) or (2) download it in a Powerpoint format (but formatting might be a bit off so we can’t guarantee that it will work well).How to do that:

1. Click File > Make a copy > Entire presentation
2. Click File > Download > Microsoft Powerpoint

We allow you to edit our e-lesson plans to adapt them to your needs as long as you don’t make substantial changes and do not remove, hide or change the logo on our slides. The same applies to our printable format (PDFs). Note that we don’t make our lessons available in .doc format.

What we certainly don’t want you to do is to edit our lesson plans so that it’s not clear we created them or to use our logo or format for your own lessons without our consent.

Most of the videos we use are available on YouTube. Downloading content from there is a breach of YouTube’s terms and conditions. If the lesson uses a TED Talk, you can download such videos and use them for educational/classroom purposes. Read how to do that and which TED videos are not downloadable here.

We don’t publish video transcripts on ESL Brains but it’s possible to get most of them on YouTube or TED.com. Please keep in mind that the vast majority of YouTube transcripts are generated automatically so their quality is not perfect.YouTube:

1. Open a YouTube video.
2. Click the More Options (…)button at the bottom of the video.
3. Select Open Transcriptfrom the drop-down menu.
4. Copy and paste all the lines of text that appear to an editor of your choice to have a complete transcript that you can use. To remove the timestamps, click the More Options (…)icon and select Toggle Timestamp.

TED:

1. Open a TED Talk video.
2. Click the Transcript link under the video player.
3. Copy and paste all the lines of text that appear to an editor of your choice to have a complete transcript that you can use.