On the same day that Pixelmator announced that its Pixelmator Photo app was switching to a subscription model (with a “lifetime license” option that raises the app price from $7.99 to $59.99), Jason Snell also announced some pricing changes on Six Colors. But he anticipated what people might be thinking:
I know where you think this is going. You think I’m buttering you up before announcing that I’m raising the price of a Six Colors membership, which has been at $6 a month (or $60/year) since the very beginning.
I’m not.
Instead, we’re doing here what we did over at The Incomparable from the very beginning (and what my pal David Sparks did with his website recently), and adding multiple membership tiers.
The “More Colors” tier is $10 a month, and it includes these things (descriptions excised for space, but check here for full details):
- Regular video reports and Q&As
- A special section of the Six Colors Discord for More Colors members
- Six Colors podcast live stream and bonus material
The third item posted after this announcement is shown in the screenshot below:
Now, I can’t say for sure what kind of content this is, because I can’t see it (or even who the author is!), but it looks like a blog post, which is not one of the perks mentioned as part of the $10 More Colors tier. Bonus posts are specifically a part of the now basic $6 a month tier. Except maybe not so much anymore? (I am subscribed to the $6 tier, which until today was also the only tier.)
My reaction was to ask myself a few questions:
- Do I have more content to sift through that I can reasonably manage? Yes.
- Do I need to pay for the privilege of reading a site that regularly exhorts me to pay even more? No.
And so, while I enjoy Jason Snell’s and Dan Moren’s site and have been a paying member for a while, I found it surprisingly easy to turn off auto-renew on my sub. As of September 12th, I’ll no longer be paying and will eventually probably remove the bookmark. It’s ironic that Snell specifically mentions David Sparks’ multi-tier membership approach, because it was when his site started getting riddled with PAY PAY PAY TO SEE SEE SEE that I opted to DELETE DELETE DELETE the bookmark.
I’m not saying what Six Colors is doing is wrong. I’m saying that I’m not fond of paying and then being presented with locked links saying PAY MOAR. It makes me feel like I’m being squeezed. If they need the money, good luck to them. But they won’t be getting any more from me.