Mark 42

Just make the Android version free - those users can be trusted

Perhaps my memory has faded with time, but I don't remember spending that much back then. I looked at it like a donation because there were not many features the premium membership got for a user. Now the limitations of the free membership make the whole hobby feel far more commercial. But, $14.99 seems appropriate to me, and $2.99 is about the going rate for most droid apps... especially a phone app that you need in order to use a service you already paid for. I'm assuming the $30 membership doesn't include free downloads of the phone app. I just don't like the look and feel of the way the website has gone. The first thing I got when I came back after a few years of being away was an in your face popup asking for money. Some hobbies really should not be commercialized. I loved Geocaching when it was just people working together to hide caches and going out and finding them. Now it has become something else. If I hadn't seen what it was before, I might not mind what it has become, but I liked what it was ten years ago much better than what it is like now. I think it was the grassroots nature of the hobby that attracted me to it in the first place. I'm preparing for a vacation, and considered installing a geocache app on my phone and doing a couple of geocaches if time permits. For $1.99 I would have got the official app. For $3.99 I would have waited to see if I will have time to use it. For $9.99 it's not worth it to me. A free or $0.99 app would actually be a smart move because it could introduce people to the hobby, and they might opt for a premium membership later (which would be $15 to $20 max if I owned the company). Sometimes charging a lower price increases profits. As the hobby became more popular, it would have made sense for the cost to go down, rather than increase.

To be clear, Groundspeak, nor it's founders, never said that. What Jeremy said was "traditional geocaching itself will never be a pay to play service." You can come to this website today, and still do the same things for free, that you could do when the site was first created. You can still find caches without paying a cent. There has even been much improvement in the site for non-paying users. However, if you have the means, sure, you can pay a modest fee and get a bunch of perks that may make your experience better. But that doesn't mean that you have to. I seriously doubt Geocaching.com was founded with profit as the intent. I was here ten years ago, and it was not nearly as commercial in feel. The "modest fee" has gotten a lot less modest while I've been away. Advertising would have more than covered the costs of Geocaching.com, with a healthy profit. I have a geocache that dates back quite a while - and still gets found regularly. People have been logging finds recently, which made me think about finding a few caches again. I figured I might even return to the hobby, so I looked for the android phone app. $10... you have got to be kidding. $30 per year to be a premium member - and more and more content is becoming available only to premium members? Making a profit is fine, but the spirit of Geocaching has been lost at Groundspeak. It really makes me sad to see this. It was so much better when it was focused on the hobby more than business profits. I doubt I will return to the hobby other than an occasional find here and there, and my one remaining geocache hide. If that one ever gets plundered, I doubt I would replace it. It seems absurd to me that the work I put into hiding geocaches would go to a company that would also charge me to use their services. But I will say "kudos to Groundspeak" for leaving this message thread and allowing the discussion. There are other companies which would delete negative comments from their forums. This post (below) says almost exactly what I was trying to say, but far better than I could ever say it: