You may have noticed the site’s new look. I have been looking to upgrade from the personal plan to a premium plan for some time to experiment with some of the better themes, but I really didn’t want to pay double the price per month. I held off for a while because I noticed a possible loophole with the price options and with the site functionality which gave me premium features without the cost. I finally made the upgrade purchase because using the loophole and a coupon, it effectively only cost $.50 more per month.

Here’s what I noticed on pricing. They offer a $4/month upgrade option for 12 months. The pricing has been available since the day I started the account and always applied for 12 more months. I waited and waited, planning to upgrade on the 11th month, effectively extending my plan for another year at the $4 price but with a premium plan.

However, I wasn’t sure if the offer would be valid at month 11 because that just feels like a very bad business practice, however it was plausible that the company wasn’t paying attention up to month 9 or 10 when I expect that they would start pushing me to extend my plan at $4/month or upgrade. Once this happens, I assume the $4 upgrade would be removed. So, there was risk of a price hike if I delayed too long.

Then today I saw an offer for 30% off, which makes the $4/mo only cost $33.60 for 12 more months. $33.6/12=8.4 months at $4/month. I was at month 7, meaning I was essentially getting the price as if I waited until month 8-9, but without the risk of a price increase. Good timing!

The cost of the next 12 months isn’t only $33.60 because I am only on month 7, so I calculate the additional cost for the next 12 months as the cost of the remaining 6 months plus 12 months, which equals $53.60 or $4.47 per month. Not a bad deal. Here’s a cost analysis.

I could also look at the total cost of 19 months, or $48+33.60=81.60 then divide by 19, which equals $4.29 per month to have a premium account. Even though the first 7 months were not premium status, I didn’t need any of the extra features that comes with more posts and storage requirements. Also, I managed to hack one premium feature, videos, by simply uploading them using my phone. Maybe I could even claim to pay only $2.80 for a premium subscription, but I don’t think that’s the proper way to do financial analysis!

It’s possible to go even cheaper if you buy your domain, buy a theme, upload everything and host it on a super low cost service where you pay pennies for bandwidth, but you wouldn’t get the organic growth that comes with an engaged blogging community. Also, it’s not really worth the hassle of setting everything up, coding, promoting, SEO, etc if you simply want to write and share.

What do you guys think of the change?

Published by BE

I write about my travel and money experiences. View all posts by BE