>>Not really.... What you do is get folks to pay for a year, and give them a 13th. free. If they don't like the service, they can get a refund. In any case, it is no cash out of your pocket. And, it is of no risk to the customer...
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>>Think of the dog wagging the tail, not the tail wagging the dog here...
>
>That's an idea to put on the table, too. But I still tend to think that at least a little view of the product is a good idea. There's a lot of things I've purchased that I wouldn't've (legal word?) without a demo of some sort. The pay-now-get-refund-later-if-not-satisfied is usually discouraging to me...

Even more discouraging if a purchase requires $200 worth of labor to do a procurement (as was true of the Federal Government years ago for larger procurements, but maybe not for no-bid small purchases).

I think that the model we have now is the right one. Because people contribute both with money and with useful answers (which increase the value of Michel's service) it is not a simple model to evaluate. It should be remembered that free members answer a lot of questions, they don't just ask them. Many valuable contributions have been made by people who live in countries from which it is difficult to send dollars (US or Canadian) and who would need many hours or days to earn C$125. This thread would become a lot less international and a lot less useful if those people couldn't hang out here.

I don't think that UT performance is unacceptable. Whenever I find it slow, I go elsewhere and soon realize that the bottleneck is at my end. I do think that C$125 is too much, even for us in the Western world, and will cause a decline in PUTM numbers. That is just a guess on my part. The UT is certainly very valuable to me, but the price will have just about doubled in a couple of years. It's starting to look like a lot of money. I don't see rapid increases in the number of messages right now. It might be better to defer hardware upgrades if the alternative is to price PUTM out of more people's reach.

I was one of the deadbeats for a long time. I was finally motivated to pay up when I decided to buy the 6 book set from Hentzenwerke. The discount paid for half my membership this year. It all was at my own expense, not tax-deductible.

I think that the terms of free and paid membership should be left more or less as they are, without the large increase in fee. In order to increase the incentive to become a PUTM, Michel and maybe other sysops should continue to dream up interface improvements for the PUTMs. He should also offer a one-month membership for, say, 15 or 20% of the cost of a yearly membership. I, for one, never realized how useful many of these UT PUTM interface features would be. People might not realize how much more efficiently they can read the UT with all those features activated. They should be able to try it without spending so much.