![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Due to feedback we have received, the IJ owners have decided to bring back the Self-Committed [paid] account type. With this we are going to introduce a new pricing model.
$10 - 6 months Self-Commited [paid]
$20 - 1 year Self-Commited [paid]
$40 - Permanently Insane
We are still offering Permanent extra userpics and Rename tokens for the same low prices that they have always been.
This change will be made Friday, July 27th. So you have until then to take advantage of the current $30 Permanently Insane price.
$10 - 6 months Self-Commited [paid]
$20 - 1 year Self-Commited [paid]
$40 - Permanently Insane
We are still offering Permanent extra userpics and Rename tokens for the same low prices that they have always been.
This change will be made Friday, July 27th. So you have until then to take advantage of the current $30 Permanently Insane price.
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.
*cough* I'm not sure if I understand you right, but permanent account holders only serve ads on their profile pages, isn't that so? I've got two accounts here, one of which is a permie (this one isn't). The account which I bought for my friend also doesn't reflect this tendency. Might I ask where you saw it?
The only places where I do notice the ads being placed are on the profile pages (which frankly, aren't that much). I take it the rationale is that those pages which you can't customise are the ones where you'll not be ad free? Which to me is fine.
While I do agree that not having the hike will be nice, like many people I feel that the price is reasonable. It's only because I've been here for a while (like more than a year) that I feel a little irritated with the hike (because it means that I'm paying more).
But then again, when I take into consideration the fact that the pricing will probably be too close between the paid and permanent I recognise it makes sense to raise it.
By the way, squeaky, I've been wondering if the send permanent account code by email works? Because I paid for that service yesterday (to try it out), but I've not received the code yet? So I was wondering, is it something on IJ's end or hotmail's. Any idea?
Actually, if the account holder has the custom comments page style turned off, their journal entry pages are served up in the default style, which includes the ads, regardless of their account status. I tried this out on
While I do agree that not having the hike will be nice, like many people I feel that the price is reasonable. It's only because I've been here for a while (like more than a year) that I feel a little irritated with the hike (because it means that I'm paying more).
I don't really care about the pricing (which I think is reasonable to increase if they need to cover the server costs or even just plain feel like it) so much as the timing and the way it was presented. I was wondering “Feedback from who, what, when, where? Did I miss an earlier announcement/request for comment?”.
I haven't been here long, so it seems a bit like they're trying to get any upcoming new users to rush to buy a permanent almost right after signup and sort of justifying it by saying “we asked around and people said that's what they wanted” (which, to be fair, it looks like they do), only without having asked in a more public place where a wider range of users could have given their opinions and they'd have gotten a better sample size of what people really wanted before presenting these things as fait accompli.
I don't know; it just feels like a kind of LJ-ish tactic and that's a turn-off for me.
I held a poll on my personal journal in a public post. I know not everyone reads it, but there is a fair amount of people who do.
I know I can't please anyone, but I only raised the perm price so the year account would be worth buying. I can't offer the year accounts for any less that $20 unfortunatly as the money they generate just isn't enough to justify it.
I am not running this site to get rich, I run it because I love to run it. Right now we are running about even on costs considering the amount of time i have to put into this site. It's really not that easy to run.
Unfortunately I am not the most tactful person in the world, I'm just a computer geek who happened to start this site at just the right time.
Like I said, I'm okay with that aspect of the price raise; it's just the short term of the “Last Chance” sale combined with the timing and the relative non-visibility of the mentioned feedback and my natural cynicism made things look kind of bad.
Thanks for your frank response. I appreciate your taking the time to explain.
Seriously though, did you know that LJ had begun collecting information about users' searches on the site and never made an announcement in news about it? In order to opt out, you had to stumble upon the old announcement in lj_biz.
Before Strikethrough happened, I was going to buy three permanent accounts on LJ. After Strikethrough though, I came here instead and bought fifteen. Not sure if you've ever checked prices, but running a site is damn expensive, especially one this size.
Of the sites that use the Danga software (LJ-type platform), IJ is the ONLY such site that has free accounts AND has a VERY responsive owner and support staff.
GJ might have free accounts, but there's no way to buy a paid account there. Don't use your account? They'll start trimming your icons out. Have an icon they decide is too revealing? Permanently suspended account. LostJournal, DeadJournal, and JournalFen ALL require either a code to join or for you to pay up front. There's Blurty, but I'm not very impressed by it.
I still think IJ is the best of them all.
That among others.
Seriously though, did you know that LJ had begun collecting information about users' searches on the site and never made an announcement in news about it?
I used to keep up with the stuff they tried to put over their userbase via no_lj_ads and that made me decide I'd never give them money out of my own pocket.
Before Strikethrough happened, I was going to buy three permanent accounts on LJ. After Strikethrough though, I came here instead and bought fifteen. Not sure if you've ever checked prices, but running a site is damn expensive, especially one this size.
I do have and pay for my own hosting, which I'd probably blog on instead if I weren't too lazy to set things up. But the thing is, like I said, I don't consider myself to be in the usual demographic for LJ and its clones.
So a lot of the connectiveness and features and stuff which are important to other users just don't mean as much to me.
But I'm glad you've found a place that suits your needs so well.
I still think IJ is the best of them all.
It does seem to be one of the nicer alternatives.
Just as a note? I was one of the folks who saw and feedbacked the poll on
This particular point in your comment makes it sounds like he just asked his friends -- and, while I enjoy having him on my f-list, I don't think I qualify as a friend.
This particular point in your comment makes it sounds like he just asked his friends -- and, while I enjoy having him on my f-list, I don't think I qualify as a friend.
And I would have had no way of knowing that until you made a point of mentioning it.
My point was that the poll was in a relatively out of the way place, and only people who were already following
And since that particular journal seems to be as much as about his own life as what he does on IJ (unlike system on JournalFen, which is reserved purely for system news and status messages), while it's still the owner's account, it's not as much an “official” place to check for just plain site stuff as
Incidentally, if people have been opening up Support requests just to say they want to buy subscriptions, then there should probably be a
That way, users could make suggestions, other users could say “yea” or “nay”, and you'd get a better overall picture of things.
Because while a lot of people are willing to write in and say “I'd really like it if you could do this, this, and this, if it's not too much trouble”, far fewer will go and tell you “I'm satisfied with what you're doing now and I'd rather you didn't do this, this, and this if for some reason you were thinking of it”.
It would put everything up for public review and hopefully cut down on potentially wasted Support volunteer time.
Also, when I type in suggestions, it keeps coming up ideas. This is a little confusing; at first I thought it sounded like a comm for people to share their plot and art bunnies.