Discord's Monitization Scheme is Just Bad

Look, I would love to pay you guys for the service you provide.  You provide a great service, and I and players get a lot out of it, but the fact is that your monetization scheme is terrible.  Clearly, your developers are awesome, but engineers aren't normally good at predicting and shaping human behaviors.  (Go figure!  They'll tell you this themselves, in fact!)  

OK, so, let's compare to, for instance, Roll20.  I pay $8 a month for Roll20 Pro or whatever it is.  It allows the my games to use all of the APIs and code that I want to write.  It unlocks everything and is worth every penny.  Honestly, this is the best $8 I spend per month.  

With Discord, I care about one thing and one thing only.  (I suppose that I could care about other things, but text channels in Discord work flawlessly.)  I care about voice quality.  You can keep your emojis and whatever else.  I don't care about or use such things.  As long as I have thumbs up and thumbs down and perhaps another half-dozen emojis that I use for practical, work-flow purposes, these mean nothing to me.  

So, I run too servers that I care about, and the players care about them.  I would love to give you $8 a month to improve the voice quality on those servers, and we really only use the voice on those servers for 4-12 hours a week on average.  But, I can't do that.  There's simply no option for it.  I mean, I think I can pay to boost them for hundreds of dollars a month, but for that price, I could literally buy and operate my own web radio station and pay for hosting:)  In terms of opportunity costs (ask accounting;  they'll explain it to you), Discord monetization is just bad. 

You've created a situation where you provide an amazing product, but there's simply no inventive whatsoever to support the product, even if people wanted to.  And, it's genuinely sad.  As it stands, I love the product, but if I were to pay for a Nitro subscription, I would honestly just feel ripped off, which would make me feel emotionally bad.  And, this is the LAST thing that you want to do in terms of marketing.  What people feel is way bigger than money:)  I'm going to assume that, based on the monetization that you've created, that Discord doesn't have a marketing department, or they would explain this to you.

So, if I were to pay you for something that provides no benefit, it instantly turns a positive experience into a negative one.  If you are thinking "Oh, no, what have we done."  then you understand the problem appropriately.  

The issue isn't with the way that Boosting works.  The issue is that the entire Boosting system is broken.  Just allow people to buy a subscription to run servers and grant them the features that they want.  Problem solved.  And, obviously, make it a price that people will pay.  (Remember opportunity costs!  It's important at understanding consumer behavior.)  A good metric in any time and place is to literally base your produce in terms of cost on the current price of a loaf of bread.  Seriously, that has worked for 7000 years:)  Anyways, people aren't going to pay $50 a month for the above unless they are using this service commercially.  (And, that's a whole different ball of wax in terms of support!)  So, for most hobbiests, the right price is certainly no more than $20 a month, depending on how competitive that you want to be.  The $120 you'd have to pay for "Level 3" or whatever it is is just absurd, and you know it.  That's a car payment for a lot of people, which is why no probably nearly no one buys it.  *You remember the supply and demand and price chart from Econ 101, I'm sure."

Anyways, you don't understand monetization.  That's fine.  You've got a great product here, and you literally have access to all of the experts in the world that would be happy to assist you free of charge.  

Best of luck in making this thing functional.  You've revolutionized voice and text communication for games and various hobbiests.  You've changed the world, and you deserve to be rewarded for that!  You really, really do.  So, I very much want to see you succeed.  So, please, for me and for you, give me a valid way to pay you for this awesome service! 

Thank you!

Kind Regards!