Genealogy Chat

Thanks for your email J****, We were carrying out price testing on the site yesterday, which is why you may have seen a different amount if you went to the upgrade area. I can confirm that the fee for members renewing their membership is still currently £9.95 Please let me know if you need any further assistance. Best regards, J**** The Genes Support Team

I e-mailed GR yesterday re; the price of renewal which had apparently jumped from £9.95 to £13 and pasted below is their response.

Thank you, Janet. I remember when they did 'price testing' before.

What on earth is 'price testing'? Trying it out to judge the reaction to see just how much people will pay? What sort of way is that, to do business? Christine in NZ

Just putting their toe in the water to see how we react to another price rise. However, I do hope no-one went ahead and renewed yesterday. I bet they'll have fun trying to get a refund.

My thoughts exactly. Even T****'s don't do that! (Though knowing them I'm sure if it is legal they will soon!) 'Sorry Madam, we offered that carton of juice to you for 95p but we've decided that we are price testing at the moment so we're going to charge you £1.30. If you don't complain we'll increase the price for everyone.' Every little helps. Perhaps I should 'Price test' in my shop, at least my profits are for charity.

Just as I suspected. Lets see what people are willing to pay then we will charge them all that!

They said that in February when i renewed and they caused all that confusion then! The trouble is that a lot of people who dont use these boards wont challenge the price hike.

What a load of baloney!! I also e-mailed, and haven't yet had the courtesy of a reply. However, since I'm a cynic I've just tried to join and they would like me to part with £17.50 I look forward to their comments.........

I renewed on the 6th Dec. I'm in Australia and I paid $19.95 which is what I paid last year. That doesn't work out at more than 8 pound. It would seem that we are all paying different prices. Susan

In my opinion they should place a message on the boards and e-mail all members a month in advance of any price increase.

Like Susan I paid $19.95, renewing only two days ago I didask them the proce before I did so as when I ticked automatic renewal years ago it said it would be renewed for $7.50 - maybe I should havc challenged them when they said $9.50! JA

ABSOLUTE UTTER NONSENSE-THEY WERE SEEING HOW MANY BITES THEY WOULD GET !! same as all these prepaid credit things they do-they are relying on a proportion to not know any better-its the worst kind of cynical commercialism-they are panicking over falling numbers and targets set by the big cheeses.......wouldnt mind but they could actually save a lot of money winding down the throttle-they wont have to pay the remainder of the 120 million that way-£55 million still left to pay depending on future performance !!

Interestingly the NZ price is the same as the Aussie at $NZ19.95, so we are probably paying the least. Please don't tell GR that of they will put our price up!! There are a number of free sites that offer as much help as is available on here, and by many of the same people. So why pay?? Christine in NZ

JA Challenge them now! It's not too late.

Perhaps we should get BBC's 'Watchdog' to challenge em! That could prove interesting!!!!

Against my better judgement I renewed in October. What a waste of money this site is now. Haven't had a hot match worth pursuing for ages now. As someone has said, there are plenty of free sites which do much the same as here, and most of the lovely helpful people here are also 'elsewhere' (not mentioning any site in particular you understand!) This matter seems to come up every couple of months. The bubble of GR has burst and unless they get their act together it's just not worth the money any more!

Is the poster of this thread NOT aware that it is against GR policy for people to copy and paste PRIVATE e.mails from them ?? Thats what they told ME when I did the same thing last year !! They deleted my post !!!! Hope it stays long enough to get noticed x

dear member, you may have noticed that we have increased subscription charges and the increases vary during the day-this is due to the demands brought about by acute server hiccups - so if your screen jerks as you apply the price goes up with it........the trick is to monitor the rhythms of the site hiccups overa few hours and click the send button during the intermittent lull period between jerks.....we hope this helps. yours faithfully gr support

Doesn't say anything in the T&C about not copying and pasting the e-mail but I would never do something that may cause a problem. I typed it out. I will now remove any identifying features just to make sure I'm not in breach of any copyrighted contents : -)