Oh, no, that was totally my fault! I was using $50/year as a shorthand for "$50 for a 12 month block and the correspondingly smaller amounts for the other intervals". Zero plans to drop the smaller blocks of time even though more of them get eaten up in transaction fees, I promise; that's part of why I'm dithering so hard about the price increase even despite this outpouring of "good gravy, woman, raise your freaking prices already if you have to" support from all you lovely folks, because $35 divides up into round numbers a lot more nicely than $50 does, heh.
If you pay month by month under the current price structure, $3 x 12 months = $36 compared to the $35 for paying for the full year at once, so the difference is incredibly minimal but you still do get a very small discount for paying for the full year at a time. With $50/year, you're either looking at $4 for 1 month, meaning you'd actually get charged $2 more for paying all 12 months at once -- which is absolutely not something we ever want to do, because that pushes people towards paying month-by-month and we prefer longer blocks (if and only if people's budget and usage patterns allow for it, the RP use case of "throw a month of paid time at the top three characters I'm playing this month so I can have their icons" is absolutely fine and please don't think I'm saying it isn't!) because fewer payments = less lost to fees. (Like all payment gateways, ours charges us a base amount + a percentage of the transaction, so more transactions means paying the base amount repeatedly instead of just once, etc.) So obviously we'd have to go with $4.25 instead, which would preserve the $1 difference between paying monthly vs paying the entire 12 months, except $4.25 is a really weird amount and even $4.50 would feel slightly less weird, except that increases the discount for paying yearly to $4 instead of $1 which feels like penalizing monthly payments too much, and anyway the inflation calculator says that $35 in January of 2009 when we set our prices is actually $52.18 now, and and and ...
Basically I keep putting numbers into spreadsheets and sighing a lot, which is why I haven't made a followup post announcing the plans (which are probably, but not definitely, going to be a two-year phase-in: whatever the new long-term goal for prices wind up being, we'll probably take the difference between that and the current price, divide it in half, and add half of it for 2025 and the other half for 2026, unless that math is extra impossible, which it kinda is, and auuuuugh why did anyone ever let me start a business) because I keep chasing my own tail in circles. (and also possibly because I am extremely sleep deprived and my brain has roughly the computing power of a bowl of warm applesauce this week.)
But I did want to say -- thank you for trusting us enough to be the only place you give money to! (even though other sites do not have one of the owners hanging out in the comments admitting she hates numbers.) I keep saying it over and over, I'll keep saying it until the end of time: we are so lucky to have such a wonderful group of users as all of you. My industry colleagues look at the comments to our news posts and absolutely shit themselves at how wonderful y'all are and how much easier you make running this place, seriously. I am so thankful for all of you.
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If you pay month by month under the current price structure, $3 x 12 months = $36 compared to the $35 for paying for the full year at once, so the difference is incredibly minimal but you still do get a very small discount for paying for the full year at a time. With $50/year, you're either looking at $4 for 1 month, meaning you'd actually get charged $2 more for paying all 12 months at once -- which is absolutely not something we ever want to do, because that pushes people towards paying month-by-month and we prefer longer blocks (if and only if people's budget and usage patterns allow for it, the RP use case of "throw a month of paid time at the top three characters I'm playing this month so I can have their icons" is absolutely fine and please don't think I'm saying it isn't!) because fewer payments = less lost to fees. (Like all payment gateways, ours charges us a base amount + a percentage of the transaction, so more transactions means paying the base amount repeatedly instead of just once, etc.) So obviously we'd have to go with $4.25 instead, which would preserve the $1 difference between paying monthly vs paying the entire 12 months, except $4.25 is a really weird amount and even $4.50 would feel slightly less weird, except that increases the discount for paying yearly to $4 instead of $1 which feels like penalizing monthly payments too much, and anyway the inflation calculator says that $35 in January of 2009 when we set our prices is actually $52.18 now, and and and ...
Basically I keep putting numbers into spreadsheets and sighing a lot, which is why I haven't made a followup post announcing the plans (which are probably, but not definitely, going to be a two-year phase-in: whatever the new long-term goal for prices wind up being, we'll probably take the difference between that and the current price, divide it in half, and add half of it for 2025 and the other half for 2026, unless that math is extra impossible, which it kinda is, and auuuuugh why did anyone ever let me start a business) because I keep chasing my own tail in circles. (and also possibly because I am extremely sleep deprived and my brain has roughly the computing power of a bowl of warm applesauce this week.)
But I did want to say -- thank you for trusting us enough to be the only place you give money to! (even though other sites do not have one of the owners hanging out in the comments admitting she hates numbers.) I keep saying it over and over, I'll keep saying it until the end of time: we are so lucky to have such a wonderful group of users as all of you. My industry colleagues look at the comments to our news posts and absolutely shit themselves at how wonderful y'all are and how much easier you make running this place, seriously. I am so thankful for all of you.