{"id":2476,"date":"2025-08-26T12:40:33","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=2476"},"modified":"2025-08-26T12:40:33","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:40:33","slug":"algorithmic-pricing-bad-for-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2025\/algorithmic-pricing-bad-for-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Algorithmic Pricing – Bad for Everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A gift membership<\/a> seems like a great way to get someone started. However, this is what you get if you want to go down that path<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Two plans, and either 6 or 12 months.<\/p>\n

Contrast this with what just subscribing offers you<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

Then weirdness started. The first attempt to take the logged in ancestry account and subscribe<\/a> landed at a page that offered up a different price.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Great, now we only see a monthly price? No more multi-month discounts?<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Just like casinos, the house always wins<\/a> with algorithmic pricing<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \/ … Continue reading “Algorithmic Pricing – Bad for Everyone”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-soap-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2483,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions\/2483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}