bring your memberships down

ive been a member of chess.com for 4 years and its one of the enjoyments i get in life but its getting two expensive the price is going up far to high. where if more people are joining then why are the memberships not coming down. please chess.com not get greedy and make the poor suffer.

agree!

are you kidding? if skiing or golf is your enjoyment, the starter kid is 10 times a chess.com membership. And why should prices go down, if more join? This is a private enterprise not the soviet-union 5 year plan

can you not see Robik skiing and golf are rich peoples sports. chess is just a broad game and prices should come down to help the poor. this would make the memberships go up. give the poor a break bring the prices down.

Sorry, but I see this as one of the best membership value I have. I paid $99 for a year, that is less than $9 a month.

In the States, that is less than 2 pack of smokes and Chess is MUCH better for you than smokes.

BTW, if more people are joining then the demand is high - prices go up. It is when there is a lack of interest in your product that you lower prices to drive people to your business.

right!

Ahem. No.

Well, maybe or maybe not, but in any case it's not that simple.

Price of most goods go higher with higher demand because the supply curve (ie the number of produced goods as a function of price) is going downward, the demand curve (ie the number of people who are ready to buy as a function of price) is going upward, and the equilibrium price is where they intersect. In this case, the curves look like this :

If you move the red curve (demand) somehow upwards/to the right, indeed the equilibrium will increase.

The reasoning holds because both supply and demand have elasticity in a huge domain, ie if the price of bananas get smaller producers will just stop working (not worth it) and more customers buy it (because it's cheap), and if it goes up producers will output more (more people go to work in that field, they invest in irrigation, etc.) and less customers buy it (because other food is cheaper). There is practically no risk that some production will not be bought - even though price might go down - or that there are more people willing to buy than to sell - because price will keep going up until enough sellers appear and buyers quit.

For memberships on a website, the reasoning does not hold for two reasons. First of all, the supply is highly unelastic : once the server is paid for, the marginal cost of one new account is small, so the demand curve is almost vertical near the quantity that corresponds to the server limit. If that limit is ten billion accounts, the limited population on Earth makes the reasoning invalid because the intersection point is outside the reasonable range. The consumption will never equal the output.

And second, which is more important, we are talking about the memberships on one website, which is a monopoly situation. If tomorrow another site (chezz.com) starts offering memberships for half the prices from chess.com, it does not mean that all chess.com customers will run away. It would be the case only if the service offered was the same (fast-food snacks did not kill high-class restaurants, despite their much lower prices). Even assuming perfect customer information about the service offered (ie that before buying a membership you are able to assess objectively what it is worth, and you look at all websites before deciding), chess.com's best business strategy is to offer memberships at the price that maximizes its profit (= number of members * benefit of an additional member). chess.com sets the price depending on the market situation, but has no external contraint to do so  (if they decide for humanitarian reasons that memberships should not exceed $0.01 a year, the price will eventually be less than this sum ; if a banana consumer decides not to buy any banana that's more than $0.01, the fruit guy does not care, he has other consumers).

The fact that more people want to join in does not mean prices should go up, or down - it depends on how the demand curve is shifted near the current point that maximizes chess.com's profit.

If some people appear that will buy the membership no matter what the price is (ie a shift on the right of the demand curve), it will push the prices up. But if some large number of people appear that would all buy the membership at 99% of the present cost but not at higher cost, the price will go down by 1%.

Reversly, if some people decide that they will not buy any more memberships unless it is free, the price might well go up if these are the kind of people who found the price almost too high when coming and all remaining members are ready to pay more.

I am talking from a purely marketing standpoint.

And theory is nice but .....

Rsava you sound like you have money being a yank but how about the rest of the world where they want to play like india and africa think about them.

Roma60

They have free memberships here; I was one for several years before I could afford the premium membership.  How much cheaper can you get than free?  You are not excluded from this site if you cannot pay, you are just limited on what frills you can access.  I think this site does a great job--you don't get freebies on the ICC.  It's the amount of time they let me stay here at no cost to me that made me decide to scrape up the money to pay them for a membership.  I've gotten more out of this site than they have gotten from me.

I do think about them.

I volunteer with organizations to bring fresh drinking water to places that have none. Hands and feet on the street, physical labor. How about you?

My kids volunteer packing food bags for starving kids around the world. My oldest is currently working on a project to bring a $2500 system in to pack 10,000 bags of ready to cook meals. Hands and feet on the street, physical labor. How about you?

I have also donated months of premium memberships here at Chess.com to others.

Don't give me your garbage about the "poor". As dasjkee94 posted memebrship is free. Paid membership is a luxury. I work hard to see that basic human needs are met. Membership at Chess.com is not a basic human need.

Not everyone can have everything. Thats the way it is. Go live in your utopian world (which when tried has ALWAYS failed throughout history) and let us know how you get along. 

Rsava dont give yourself hart attack mate you sound like you do a great job. im in a wheel chair most of the time so chess.com is a big thing for me not being able to leave the house. i was just saying lets keep the price down. so be cool.

Like anything you have to decide where you want to place your money. Chess.com is actually very cheap if you buy the year package (pennies a day!) but even if you can't come up with the money all at once there is a fairly cheap monthly plan. I think diamond membership is $14/month. That  is about $0.46 a day. Of course if you pay in full at once at $99/year, then that is $0.27 a day. That is for the most expensive plan, the plan I am on is even cheaper at $7/month or $49/year (which I did) so that is $0.13 a day. I can find a way to free up a dollar every week.

In some countries the US dollar is very high against their currency and might be more expensive to do a premium membership but a lot of countries the US dollar isn't that high against their currency and it shouldn't be much different than myself. Because this is a US based business (as far as I know) their pricing should be geared toward US economy standards which they have to spend their money on for their overhead costs. But at these prices I think most people could find a way in their budget to get a membership if they really wanted and those that can't are probably not in the position to even consider getting a membership in the first place.

In my opinion, the prices are fair.

Roma60

I'm on disability myself (due to a head-on MVA in '94) so I know how precious each penny is.  I'm in the process of saving the bucks to renew my membership here--I feel it's one of the best deals available to me.  Of course, I would like to pay less for the same service, but the price here is not outrageous.  I just have to pass on some things that I would like, but do not need.

Rsava, well said.

I have a free membership here.  Lots of great resources.  Once I've exhausted the free resources, I may upgrade later.  But for now, the free membership meets my needs.  Free is good.

For better or worse, in a capitalist system, companies are motivated to maximize profit. That means raising prices as high as the market will bear. I decline to get into the debate as to whether corporations have a moral duty to make their products affordable to the poor, but do note that such an argument has more force in the context life-saving medicines or other necessities versus an arguable luxury/recreational product such as a chess website.

I also note that I disagree with Irontiger's contention that supply in this case is perfectly inelastic. There definitely are marginal costs that increase for each additional user -- above and beyond server costs or other fixed costs. Customer service is one example. Moreover, as load increases, there is greater likelihood that server response rates will be slower and customer satisfaction will decrease.

Finally, I dispute the contention that chess.com is a monopoly. There are numerous competitors offering very similar products. Moreover, if chess.com were truly a monopoly, they would charge higher prices than they are now. That is why monopolies are detrimental to society (I.e. increased dead weight loss), and that is why there are antitrust laws designed to prevent or break up monopolies.

there's actually an unlimited number of memberships possible here, so i'm not sure the supply and demand model works here. the supply and demand model is for products and resources where there is a limited number. the number of possible memberships here is not limited

I think most people want to get rich. Chess.com is a way to get rich.

Oh, come on, don't tell me getting rich is bad, on the contrary it's a good thing in your life.

And don't tell me chess.com is a service to chess community. I don't it's their mission.

And don't tell me chess.com is a way to make chess popular bla bla bla.....

So, buckle up, the price will go even higher.

Does anyone who is saying it's too expensive know anything of their costs? Or finances at all?

If you can't afford it, don't pay, simple.