Cost
Beggers cant be chooses dude! u pay for it or u get what u can and like it....
My point is, you make the best money when you remain popular and maximize the price x buyer number. With half the price on, for example, the yearly subscription, you would probably sell 10 where you sell 2-3 today, which is of course better for chess.com AND for us customers.
if i believed this then i certainly would do it. but guestimating at price elasticity and the demand curve for chess mentor is just speculation :) i wish i knew the answer, but i don't. i have a hard time thinking that if chess mentor cost only $100 per year, or $10 per month, that we would get 50-100% more subscribers. the truth is we spend thousands of dollars per month creating new chess mentor content, and it is already SO much more economical than getting live personal lessons. i am open to any evidence of a different demand curve than what i am hypothesizing.
Too expensive? Yes
Does it matter? No
Why? Because of freedom of choice. No one is forcing it down your throat. Don't like it? go buy chessmaster. Chessmaster too expensive? Go borrow books from your library. Library too far? Search on the internet. Don't have internet? Then how are you reading this?
haha, i found this to be very hilarious. :) Coming from someone who spent 2-3 solid months building the product, and that doesn't even including the cost for us to hire all the GMs and IMs to produce the content, it's hard for me to see this product as too expensive. As stated, it's not REQUIRED, so if you can't afford it or don't like it, then by all means don't buy it. However, if you read even half of the testimonials in other forum threads of those that HAVE purchased it and are using it, you'll see that the satisfaction level is VERY high.
but platinum costs 1/2 of a chess mentor yearly subscription... why would we include it? :)
for those who think it is too expensive, how much WOULD you pay? :)
Shruikon, the platinum membership is $79.95/year, and if you include the extra free gold you get, the base gold you get for yourself, + the tshirt, + the additional perks, its easily over $80 right there. Chess Mentor is VERY costly for us to build/maintain, whereas most of the membership perks are costly to build, but not as costly to maintain. We have to separate these two since the cost of a platinum doesn't come close to covering our costs of chess mentor content, and many users would love a platinum membership WITHOUT having to pay for chess mentor. Including chess mentor as part of our platinum package would have increased the cost significantly.
I think that the problem is the subscription . IMHO I think people would prefer to pay money for something they can physically keep ( ex a nice box , with chess mentor software and maybe a booklet with some puzzles to accompany with it ) . So I would update the software with the current lessons you have , add some aesthetic touches to the software and then try to market it that way . That plus a lower price ( not more than USD 50 ) IMO should sell quite well . Maybe that's not feasible pricing though .
I don't think everyone is broke , problem is , it is just commonly accepted thinking ( even though it's incorrect ) with people my age (I'm 19) that everything online is free , and if it's not than it should be . This is why it is getting hard to sell software these days , people would either go for :
- inferrior product which is free
- pirate the software and download it for free
No, it's not that we don't work (well, me anyway). But it's that schooling really sapps the money out of you. And yet, I still can't spell to save my life, :( .
I understand that typical shrinkwrap software is something you buy once and then own, but most shrinkwrap software does not continually add new features/content to itself for free. Take World of Warcraft, you buy it, then they come out with an expansion, and you buy that one too. Since we are releasing new content every month (which costs us a lot of money to pay the people to create the content for us), then having a one-time purchase model does not work.
For those that say they don't know how much they will use it, that's the whole reason we did the hourly options. Buy a couple hours of it, and see how much you use it. If you don't use it much, than the hourly options will be much cheaper for you.
Well, b/c of the way it is built, we have to give you access per "course", not per "lesson". However, some courses have 270 lessons, others just 20. What do you think is a fair price per course? Should each course have its own price? That you could buy and own permanently? What would you pay for a 20 lesson course? a 270 lesson course?
well, honestly, the whole reason we did subscriptions is so you don't have to worry about time. Think about it...so you'd pay $20 for ONE course...which you could probably finish in a couple days...whereas with ONE month of a subscription, you could probably get through 5-10 courses? I highly doubt if we charged $20 for ONE course, anyone would buy that course as opposed to just getting a month subscription and doing the course in a few days, or even a couple weeks. It's still cheaper either way to get a subscription.
How much does an Intel CPU really "cost" ? I mean, forget all the time they spent buying/building the machines, hiring people to build the schematics, designing the chips, testing them, etc, how much does one of those tiny little things in a little bit of plastic wrap actually cost? Probably $5 after you've made 10 million of them...but how much did the FIRST one cost?
Same goes for any business...sure its easy to say its easy to run the website NOW after we have bought the 15 servers (3-6k each), hired the 10 developers, have the code, tested the code, fixed the code, designed the database, optimized the heck outta the site so it actually can support all the hits...sigh...
"I wonder though exactly how much does a website cost to run per year..."
The folks who envisioned, gambled on, and toiled long hours to execute Chess.com want to recoup their costs and earn a profit. What exactly is wrong with that?
Comcast charges $1.90/day toconnect you to basic cable channels.
Chess.com charges $0.12/day to connect you to other chess players.
Vote with your wallet for which is the better deal!