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Sorry, I guess it's voice of dissent time.
First off, I haven't bought a Permanent account and I'm not in the demographic for Paid. I have little use for the features, so it's not really worth it to me.
Nevertheless, I'd been planning to buy during your next half-off sale (which seemed to run about once a year), to show my support for the site.
I'm a lot less likely to do that now, due to the following:
I was one of the “Sort of” voters in the poll you posted in your journal yesterday, which I only found out about by accidentally clicking “Members” instead of “Recent Entries” when I wanted to see what led up to this.
And while I believe that as the site owner, it's entirely your prerogative to do whatever you like for whatever reason you choose to give, I also think it's a little unfair to ask your personal journal's readers, more or less in private (since there was no link to the poll in any “official” place) about a proposed change, and then present that to everyone else as some sort of userbase feedback, especially given the few brief hours between the posting of the poll and the making of the official annoucement.
It's feedback, yes, but a rather biased feedback, in my opinion.
I'll admit, I lost a little respect.
If you'd just gone and said, ”Hey, we've been getting a lot of new users lately and the extra load's a little hard on the servers and staff, so we'll be upping the prices a bit to keep the site running smoothly.”, I'd consider it entirely reasonable.
If you'd gone and said, “Hey, we just feel like raising the prices for the heck of it but we'll wait a week! Strike while the iron is hot!”, I'd have been a little annoyed, but admired your brazen honesty.
But between the timing of the announcement and the short term of the permanent account sale, it feels rather like a cheap cash grab in disguise.
Now, I have absolutely no objection to your trying to accommodate the likely influx of people jumping ship (or at least setting up an alternative) from LJ, by announcing they can get the new paid accounts that they want, and in fact I encourage it as clever marketing.
Short term paid accounts are a good idea: they give people a chance to check out the extras before deciding to commit, and let them buy gifts for friends while supporting the site.
What seems a little underhanded is to hike up the price on the Permanent account, present that change as making it more “fair” for people who choose yearly Paid, all the while announcing a Last Chance sale that will last less than a week.
That makes it look like a ploy to encourage the next few days' worth of newcomers to do panic buying, get themselves a “deal” before the price goes up, without having had much time to try out the site and see if they really want to spend $30 straightaway instead of only shelling out $10 for 6 months as a trial.
Mind you, a lot of the LJ users will have probably already experienced paid time on that service and will know beforehand if they want to buy the same things permanently here.
But I think that it would have been better to have a much longer period for the sale (and quite frankly, I'd have much preferred that there be no need for the sale at all.)
On a more positive note, I really like the fact that on the order page, you have varied coupon amounts to give as gifts, in addition to allowing people to buy others paid time and extra userpics. I think it'd be nice if people could set up something in their accounts to say that whatever amount is given, they'd prefer to use it coupon-style towards whichever upgrade they wanted, or only accept coupon gifts and be able to re-gift the excess to someone else.
I say this because I have absolutely no use for the extra userpics upgrade or a rename token, should someone ever buy me one, but I wouldn't mind putting it towards a Permanent account, now that I'm probably not spending my own money on it.
Also, I hope that the extra $10 will cover the cost of removing the ads not just for the account holder, but for their journal pages, too. One of the things holding me back until a half-price sale was the fact that the Permanently Insane journals seemed to be serving up ads to others, even if their owners never saw ads themselves.
Thanks for reading, and apologies for the length.
First off, I haven't bought a Permanent account and I'm not in the demographic for Paid. I have little use for the features, so it's not really worth it to me.
Nevertheless, I'd been planning to buy during your next half-off sale (which seemed to run about once a year), to show my support for the site.
I'm a lot less likely to do that now, due to the following:
I was one of the “Sort of” voters in the poll you posted in your journal yesterday, which I only found out about by accidentally clicking “Members” instead of “Recent Entries” when I wanted to see what led up to this.
And while I believe that as the site owner, it's entirely your prerogative to do whatever you like for whatever reason you choose to give, I also think it's a little unfair to ask your personal journal's readers, more or less in private (since there was no link to the poll in any “official” place) about a proposed change, and then present that to everyone else as some sort of userbase feedback, especially given the few brief hours between the posting of the poll and the making of the official annoucement.
It's feedback, yes, but a rather biased feedback, in my opinion.
I'll admit, I lost a little respect.
If you'd just gone and said, ”Hey, we've been getting a lot of new users lately and the extra load's a little hard on the servers and staff, so we'll be upping the prices a bit to keep the site running smoothly.”, I'd consider it entirely reasonable.
If you'd gone and said, “Hey, we just feel like raising the prices for the heck of it but we'll wait a week! Strike while the iron is hot!”, I'd have been a little annoyed, but admired your brazen honesty.
But between the timing of the announcement and the short term of the permanent account sale, it feels rather like a cheap cash grab in disguise.
Now, I have absolutely no objection to your trying to accommodate the likely influx of people jumping ship (or at least setting up an alternative) from LJ, by announcing they can get the new paid accounts that they want, and in fact I encourage it as clever marketing.
Short term paid accounts are a good idea: they give people a chance to check out the extras before deciding to commit, and let them buy gifts for friends while supporting the site.
What seems a little underhanded is to hike up the price on the Permanent account, present that change as making it more “fair” for people who choose yearly Paid, all the while announcing a Last Chance sale that will last less than a week.
That makes it look like a ploy to encourage the next few days' worth of newcomers to do panic buying, get themselves a “deal” before the price goes up, without having had much time to try out the site and see if they really want to spend $30 straightaway instead of only shelling out $10 for 6 months as a trial.
Mind you, a lot of the LJ users will have probably already experienced paid time on that service and will know beforehand if they want to buy the same things permanently here.
But I think that it would have been better to have a much longer period for the sale (and quite frankly, I'd have much preferred that there be no need for the sale at all.)
On a more positive note, I really like the fact that on the order page, you have varied coupon amounts to give as gifts, in addition to allowing people to buy others paid time and extra userpics. I think it'd be nice if people could set up something in their accounts to say that whatever amount is given, they'd prefer to use it coupon-style towards whichever upgrade they wanted, or only accept coupon gifts and be able to re-gift the excess to someone else.
I say this because I have absolutely no use for the extra userpics upgrade or a rename token, should someone ever buy me one, but I wouldn't mind putting it towards a Permanent account, now that I'm probably not spending my own money on it.
Also, I hope that the extra $10 will cover the cost of removing the ads not just for the account holder, but for their journal pages, too. One of the things holding me back until a half-price sale was the fact that the Permanently Insane journals seemed to be serving up ads to others, even if their owners never saw ads themselves.
Thanks for reading, and apologies for the length.