We found 1000 Caches before upgrading from Basic to Premium.
The best thing about Premium membership is the ability to create Pocket Quires which lets you download lots of Caches at once. You can still download Caches as a Basic Member but each Cache has to be downloaded individually and only the Difficulty, Terrain, Cache Size & Hint are sent to your GPS.
The improved statistics are pretty poor to be honest; in my opinion websites such as project-gc.com give you much more detailed statistics and are available to Basic Members.
Premium Caches are no better than Basic Caches. You just get more mag nanos, film cans, clip top boxes as well as some very creative and clever caches. The advantage of upgrading after finding all the local ones is it means you have lots of new Caches to find locally and don’t have to travel 20 miles to find the nearest Cache.
We’ll continue to renew our membership as it feels like we’re giving something back to a hobby that’s given us a lot more in return.