There is so much promise that technology has, but it feels like we’ve taken the wrong turns somewhere along the line and now we’re in a very weird place. While this post will focus on ancestry.ca – the intent is to comment on the wider problem, not this particular website.
From a family tree / genealogy point of view – having computer access to mountains of data makes searching for information so much easier than it used to be. Now, there is also something satisfying about traveling to a given location and finding the original paper records, or walking an old graveyard and finding tombstones that tell a story about the people who lived in that community. Ideally you want to combine all of these approaches to have a rich experience about exploring a family history.
While you can use ancestry.ca for free, the real value is access to the trove of data they have available. To get access you pay a monthly fee – and this is fair – running a website (even this one) isn’t free. But what do you charge people? It’s pretty variable, it depends on some fix costs – but there are many other variable costs, and coming up with a fair number is hard.
Of course with marketing you also want to set a fixed price, but offer deals to encourage customers to make the leap from fee to paying. Here is where I struggle with the approach when those discounts move around dynamically.
A gift membership seems like a great way to get someone started. However, this is what you get if you want to go down that path
Two plans, and either 6 or 12 months.
Contrast this with what just subscribing offers you
Ok, well – there is a lower plan that is significantly cheaper if we consider a 12 month plan. So maybe a good gift is that “All Canadian Records” version. That was my plan – and so I printed out the website page and said – hey, here you are I will gift you the 12 month lowest tier plan.
Then weirdness started. The first attempt to take the logged in ancestry account and subscribe landed at a page that offered up a different price.
Wait, what? Where did my 12 month option go? This is not nearly as good a deal. Let’s grab another computer and visit the site to see what’s going on.
Great, now we only see a monthly price? No more multi-month discounts?
Of course, the next thing I do is start trying different browsers. I get a variety of the 3 possible choices all captured above. However, I’m still struggling to figure out how do I purchase the right “cheap” one of $119.88 / year?
In the end, I kept creating new incognito windows in Chrome until I got the right price. This actually took a bit of trying as mostly I was getting only the 6 month option. Once I got the right price I clicked on the “Become a Member” button, and signed in on that window. As I worked through the credit card payment page, it seemed – yes, I was paying for the right $119.88 price – my total was +tax, and it went through on my credit card at that price. Problem solved.
This does make me wonder, how would a normal person do this? A gift membership would push people to a higher level plan (and extra $60/year). If they got only the monthly cost ($14.99) that stacks up to an $60.11/year. The 6-month plan is an extra $20.10/year. From a yearly price point – the cheapest gift membership is 50% more expensive; monthly payments also work out to 50% more expensive, and the 6-month option is 17% more expensive.
Just like casinos, the house always wins with algorithmic pricing. This type of pricing makes me less (and likely many others) less likely to actually buy things from companies that do this. I value the service they are providing, but I want to pay a fair price – not one that is a roll of the dice.
