I am a longtime VIP subscriber–since February 2014, apparently, which surprised me as I thought it was a couple years later. I have been paying $30 since the start.
I’m not upset about the price increase per se. (And I’m not starting this thread to hear everybody posting about how they’re going to cancel, or about how it’s a doubling of the amount–yes, we understand math; the price should have increased gradually over the years but it didn’t, so here we are.)
It’s more that about 8 months ago, grandfathered users were told they would continue to be grandfathered. We haven’t even made it a full billing cycle for all users before that is being changed–IOW that hasn’t even been honored once for every VIP user.
I want to believe this was them, last year, trying to bend over backwards to thank early users, but the reality is setting in that it’s not actually sustainable because a significant portion of their VIP userbase falls under this exception. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it would do wonders to hear why this specific action was necessary so soon after being told otherwise, @justin .
For the record, I’m of the opinion that grandfathering can’t last forever, especially if you have a large population of grandfathered users versus newer users. And if it were me, I wouldn’t have made the relatively sweeping promises last September that they did. But the lack of acknowledgement about the change from that time to now is troubling.
(eta: I also know that removing grandfathering was never going to go down well with at least a certain percentage of grandfathered users, so there would be saber-rattling no matter what. But the way this was handled in particular is a very bad look.)