Outgoing President Rodrigo Chaves Robles stood before a crowd at the historic Antigua Aduana in San José, the venue for our country’s Hello Brete employment fair, and made an announcement that sent tens of thousands of Costa Ricans rushing to their phones and laptops. The government had officially launched a free, nationwide
English-learning program called Hello Brete, powered by the international platform Open English and administered through the Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje, or INA. It is, by almost any measure, the most ambitious language education initiative in Costa Rican history.
The initiative, with support from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and the Ministry of Science, Innovation, Technology and Telecommunications, will initially activate up to 500,000 annual licenses for Costa Ricans age 15 and older who want to learn or strengthen their English. The longer-term goal is bolder still: the government aims to benefit up to two million people over the next four years.
The program is entirely digital but accessible around the clock, featuring live lessons, self-paced classes available 24 hours a day, voice-recognition tools to improve pronunciation, AI-based assistance, and multimedia study materials. Instruction is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, or CEFR, meaning participants will graduate with internationally recognized skill benchmarks.
Upon completing the course, they will receive an official certificate co-issued by INA and Open English. To qualify, applicants must be at least 15 years old, have completed sixth grade, have internet access and a device, and be either a Costa Rican citizen or a legal resident with a valid DIMEX card. No prior knowledge of English is required.
When President Chaves announced the program’s price tag, he cited a total investment of $74 million over four years, framing it as a bargain compared with other public education expenditures. The per-license cost the government negotiated with Open English is approximately $80 per year, representing an 83 percent discount off the platform’s commercial retail price.
Those two numbers, however, do not reconcile cleanly. If you multiply $80 per license by 500,000 licenses per year over four years, the maximum cost comes to $160 million, more than double the $74 million figure the government presented publicly. The gap is substantial and worth examining. A plausible explanation is that the $74 million reflects the government’s internal projection of what it expects to actually spend, based on estimated average annual uptake rather than full activation of every available slot.
The contract is structured on demand, meaning INA only pays for licenses that are actually used. If average real-world enrollment across the four years lands closer to 230,000 active users per year rather than the full 500,000 cap, the math produces a figure near $74 million.
In other words, $74 million is the budget forecast, while $160 million is the ceiling if every single license were filled every single year. The government has not publicly reconciled the two figures or explained the assumption underlying its cost projection, which leaves a transparency gap that critics and oversight bodies may want to press.
The investment case, whatever the final cost, is not difficult to make. INA President Christian Rucavado noted that being bilingual in Costa Rica can increase a worker’s salary by between 20 percent and 38 percent, with gains reaching 34 percent in technical roles. English fluency is increasingly a baseline requirement for employment in the country’s multinational sector, tourism industry, and export-services economy.
The demand for English training has long outpaced public supply. In 2025, INA offered just 19,800 spots in English courses while at least 71,000 people expressed interest in learning the language, a gap of more than three to one. Hello Brete essentially multiplies the country’s English education capacity more than twentyfold overnight. For a nation whose economic competitiveness depends heavily on attracting foreign investment and skilled-service exports, closing the language gap is not a luxury. It is a needed investment.
The huge launch-day response proved both the program’s appeal and its greatest immediate liability. Within hours of the announcement, hellobrete.com was overwhelmed.
Users attempting to register encountered a multi-step process that required completing a personal data form, undergoing biometric verification including a photograph and national ID scan, and taking a placement test to assess their starting level of English. Under normal traffic conditions, the system might have handled this smoothly. Instead, the simultaneous rush of tens of thousands of registrants caused the servers to buckle.
The biometric verification form failed repeatedly for large numbers of users, with many reporting that the page would load partially and then freeze, forcing them to start over from the beginning. Others made it through the personal data stage only to be ejected from the platform before the verification step could be completed, losing their progress entirely. Some users reported refreshing the page for hours without ever reaching the placement test.
Social media quickly filled with frustrated posts, screenshots of error messages, and questions about whether the scholarships were already gone and the registration window had closed.
INA moved to respond publicly, with staff members posting replies across social media comment threads and sharing three contact channels: an email address, a phone number, and a WhatsApp line for people who could not complete their registration. Open English itself published an acknowledgment on the platform stating that the site was experiencing intermittent outages due to exceptional demand and asked users to try again later, without specifying when conditions might stabilize.
Government officials then appeared publicly to address the most pressing fear directly. They said the scholarships were not exhausted and that the problems were purely technical, related to server-capacity adjustments being made in real time.
They also said that hundreds of people had successfully completed enrollment despite the difficulties and that the platform would be fully normalized by the following morning. Authorities were careful to stress that Hello Brete is a four-year program with no hard deadline on registration. There is still time to secure a spot before licenses run out, because the contract is structured to accommodate demand over time rather than on a first-come, first-served basis within a fixed window.
The rocky debut and unanswered cost questions may end up being footnotes, not the main story. The real story is that Costa Rica has made a bold, data-backed wager, betting that putting English within reach of two million people will pay dividends in employment, wages, and national competitiveness for a generation.
The stumbles of launch night may be ironed out. Whether the program fulfills its promise, and whether the government can account transparently for what it actually costs, are the questions worth asking a year from now.
