Boosting not worth it - Ripoff.
Ok, dont get me wrong, im not crying out loud because im poor, listen before you begin throwing sh*t in my direction:
-By separating the comunity this much with some "kind of necessary" features by overpriced subscription based practices. 10$ a month to unlock 720p what is basically screen sharing? NOBODY honestly needs that many emojis to begin with, 128kb audio quality? Excuse me if im wrong, but wasn't this the standard for free, before locking it behind this, what i find of an absurd paywall? Same goes for the 50mb upload limit/ file.
It is totally out of touch for such a financially strong company to ask that much for perks that should at least be availible for a permanent time at a set price instead of "let's pay monthly for something that at the end of the day is a load of cash.''
On another note: want that HD screen sharing with only 100mb file limit when the cost for servers for hosting is WAAAAAAAAAY less than it used to be in the past? Be ready to shell out only 149.7$/Month! Or simply put 1796.4$/ Year. BUT WAIT! if you're a nitro subscriber, and remember , a NITRO, not Nitro Classic subscribor it costs you 30% less / boost! And the humble discord gods above also give you 2 free boosts!
And i didn't even mention the lack of regional prices where, indeed, the internet is dirt cheap , but salaries are low as 100$/month, where people also use your services and WOULD be interested to support the discord initiative at a fair price.
What comes next? Down the road i expect lootboxes and DLC'S for a chance of completing a chance at a boost.
"When the product is free, you are the product, until the company gets greedy and starts to mark up prices, limit the usabilty of the original app in order to greedily get more $$$' - Voltaire, EA CEO
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All of the features in Boosting were already implemented into the client years ago, but were gated off for verified servers (only Hypesquad Events/Partnership at the time). The reason why the benefits from boosting are so minimal is because they were only designed to be a small edge, and very little extra work needed to be put into monetizing them and pretending they were new additions.
Let's not forget how in the blog post advertising the changes, they used the original boosting figures of 2/10/50 (I'm still laughing at how they expected people to get 50 boosts) instead of what was actually being used, 2/10/20, to cover up how they were actually making it more expensive to reach every tier beyond tier 1.
Boosting a server to 30 is a total of $1049 even with the Nitro discount ($979 if you're already using the 2 included Nitro boosts). These prices are quite frankly exorbitant and the reason nobody is buying boosts is because they provide absolutely minimal benefit to you, and very likely benefit nobody at all because you need to spend exorbitant amounts of money to push a server up in tier. The cost of putting a server at the very lowest tier, with the discount, is $70. You're nearing the price of a World of Warcraft subscription, but for a glorified IRC client. As bad as modern WoW may be, I don't think anyone would argue the fact that it still has more content than Discord.
While boosting is conceptually okay if executed well, in its current state it's demonstrating a massive disconnect between the developers and what a user can reasonably afford. It legitimately feels like they're exclusively trying to target a whale audience with this, and not anybody else in their userbase.
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Allright, we will have to agree to disagree from the start , because i know that no matter how much backing/facts i will ever provide to back my opinion/statements, discord fanboysm will persist even touugh they have a sub bar business freemium model.
So, starting with "None of these things you mention that you think you are suddenly paid for, were ever free." Yes they were, i don't have a clue if it was because me and my friends were among the first people started using the app, if we enrolled into a beta program or whatnot.You also seem to ignore the fact that this are absurd and out of touch prices , where people WOULD want to support them if only they didn't overpay by that much, we are approaching , like Englo said, WoW subscription prices, or i might add, Netflix.
Simply put the amount compared to the benefits is not the only problem. The lack of choices and the greed they are trying to push alienates the majority of those self claimed 250M users. I will have to repeat myself because it seems you either did not read my whole post or you didn't care enough to adress all of the points i made. No regional prices, no option to permanently buy the features or buy them separately , asking a s**t load of cash when they make SO much money.As for "Besides investors, the only way discord makes money is through Nitro. I would not say they are as well off of a company as you seem to think they are, but there's also no way of knowing (unless of course you work for them). "
- I do not indeed work for them but a simple google search will reveal that besided selling merchendise:In December 2018 the company announced it raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners. With this latest bout of cash, Discord has now pulled in more than $280 million in funding. - As of dec 2018, Techcrunch.
So is this the small indie company that we so need to support to stay afloat? Not to add that the current cost of doing business in this sector is much, much more smaller than you think it is. And is not about not giving them money, i am not making that point , is that i WOULD give them money if only it wasn't this expensive, bad perks/$ plus the monthly subscription. Is 1.700$/y ever ok?
I invite all to this thread, but please if you're going to blindly take a corporation's side , you would save both of our time by not starting a pointless discussion where you won't change your mind/opinion no matter how much evidence is presented before you.15 -
As a note: this post wan't created to blindly throw shade at the developer, but as a way to criticize in the hope that the discussion will spark a reevaluation of this bad corporate practices, as Discord itself stated, is used by "250 milion daily gamers".
Feel free to adress this topic in a civil way.12 -
ActuallyLegendaryBro, I honestly just think it doesn't worth 10 bucks per month.
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$100 dollars a month to get a tiny banner, an image on invites, and 100 MB file sharing. It's almost as if it's made to be paid by many users. The cost of my 1000Mbs internet.
It's still bullshit trash and forces us to us other means to send files. It's already easy enough to use google.Mixer lets you stream fast. Win+G and you're up.
A fix would be making Nitro linked to your server. Giving all the stuff you sub that Nitro for.
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I do think that 10/month is very expensive for 1080p desktop streaming. The rest is fluff. It should be 1.99/month.
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@ActuallyLegendaryBro
Might be that some of us have an issue with fawning over others. We have our own friends and groups and the only people that will pay into your severs are fans and the obsessive people that pine over a person. Almost no one is boosting to support a community that isn't focused on some sort of lust for a single individual.
You can't panhandle on the road so you do it on the internet. There are of issues with the situation and this is a single reason of many to take issue with. If someone starts selling a service for excessively overpriced amounts compared to all over forms of the server because they have the most in their communities. Could you picture Facebook Premium?4 -
Over all both sides have great points.
No, they don't. The prices (and especially features) of boosted servers are ridiculous.
I can, as a private individual, rent a vps that would be able to support hundreds of users in text/voice chat for less than 5€/Month. That server can do a LOT more than a boosted Discord. And a company the size of Discord pays just a small fraction of that for their servers.
Unlocking 384Kbps and a 100mb upload size limit is literally 150€/Month/Server, that's 1800€/Year. For that money, you can rent a dedicated server with an Epic 7302P(16C/32T), 128GBs of RAM and 8TB of storage. (For those not involved with servers and hosting: A server of that size can easily provide a community of ~500 members with a 10GB personal cloud per user, a heavily modded Minecraft and other game servers, voice servers, a website, e-mail and other services, all at the same time and still have performance left over. And most importantly: It will do so on your terms - you know and control where your and your users data goes.)
Considering the worrying amount of data Discord collects, the price gets even more absurd.
Sure, Nitro offers more than just server boosts, but as an admin of a community, I don't care about those, I want to offer a good experience for my members and these features can't be unlocked separately.
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ziplock9000 It's not 10$ a month though. If a single user want to get 1080p streaming it's 4.99$ US a month which is sort of fine. There's not much difference between Nitro Classic and Nitro outside of the 2 server boosts and 50MB file upload instead of 100MB (nothing game breaking there). For a single user Nitro Classic is perfectly fine.
I think the point of this post is to express how much the 2 server boosts are lackluster for small communities. Let's say you want to boost your small community of 18 regular people to level 3 perks. It's going to be 30 x 5$ = 150$ USD a month to boost your server. I don't see many people paying that alone. So let's say the community (of 18 regular) will be boosting the server. Then by buying Nitro, 15 of them will be needed to boost the server to level 3 perks. But then what's the point since almost all people in the community will have Nitro and it would be less costly for them to just get Classic. Server boosting is great for big servers like Ruin Gaming with lot of people. 15 Nitro members is required to get the level 3 perks and then the remaining people get the benefits without paying. But for small communities it's pretty much useless.
I'm the GM of a small WoW guild and i would like to boost my server. I like Discord and i used to pay for a TS server back in the days. I jumped on Discord right away not because it was free but because it was awesome. I would gladly pay to boost my own server but the only perk i really care about is 1080p streaming. If you're alone to pay it's just not worth the price asked to boost your own server. I feel like the level 1 perks should offer more so that the owner of a server could boost it alone and improve the community. I don't know 7020p60 screen share and 1080p30 GoLive! maybe. But as it is the level 1 perks are almost pointless and for a small community boosting the server with Nitro instead of just getting Classic is not cost effective as it will require pretty much everyone getting Nitro to get the perks thus not really requiring the server to be boosted anymore.
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I honestly think that the server system is ridiculous
Why?Well, let’s start with the fact that it is $10, for animated emojis? Animated avatars? Custom tag? What about the people who luckily get the 1010 title? Or the 7777? Etc etc. I mean, jump into reality. Nitro is only really to show of.
If you have deep pockets, go ahead! It’s your money, not mine. But for the ordinary people, it’s ridiculous.
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No, that's not what people are complaining about. It's value versus cost that's the issue and your value isn't the same as others.
Can you say "make money" another time?
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ziplock9000 it's pointless to have a discussion about better business with people who lick the boots of the companies and corporations that like to bleed them dry for every single subscription, feature or upgrade to get better service. There is simply no getting through to people who've been brainwashed by a company into a certain way of thinking. Free thinking is pretty rare nowadays and ! Demmenter (Little Fire) doesn't want to understand anything because their brain has been washed of all logic and sense that should be common. This is why we have so many problems with not only Discord, but other programs and subscription services, season passes and so on. It's one thing to sustain a business and profit, but a whole other thing to be blatantly scalp cash by any means possible with recursive fees.
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Server boost cost and modeling needs to change. The current state of things is made for Fat Cat customers. It's pretty much capitalism the way things are with boosting. We started boosting our discord server some months ago thinking, "Great, this is helping Discord stay alive and us to enhance our server." Then we saw how things really work and decided that it was ghastly expensive upgrading level tiers.
Long story short, we won't be investing anymore money into discord boost other than to maintain our level 1 tier so that we can stream in 1080p. We'd like to pay for upgrades, but not recursively the way things are now. There is literally no good incentive for small to mid and even large sized communities to upgrade their servers. Until things change, I we won't spend another dime on server boosts. Our community will also not be contributing boosts to our server because they know the cost to reward value is realistically unreasonable nor fair.1 -
! Demmenter (Little Fire) firstly to start off I'm going to say you need to drop your Discord fanaticism into the trash can and leave it at the door in this discussion. Nobody is saying Discord is bad. You simply don't want to understand nor do you actually get the point people are trying to express here.
I'm not sure where you've been this past long while, but boosting cost a lot more than $10/mo. Maybe in the USA it's $10/mo., but elsewhere, it's not. When you do the currency conversion outside the USA, prices change. For example in Canada, the price jumps to CDN$12.69. However, this is not what we're actually talking about here. We're talking about boosting and maintaining those boosts. When you upgrade to level 2 or 3, it is a monthly recursive fee. Not a one time fee, but a recursive fee that happens every month. If you stop paying for the Discord Nitro subscription, you lose your levels. So, you have to keep paying to maintain boosts and the Discord Nitro subscription. Stop paying and you lose even lose level 1!
Using Canada as an example again, even with discount of 30% they get on server boosts, just to reach level 2 and maintain it is CDN$45.37/mo. So that means in total just to receive a few marginal benefits, people have to fork out CDN$58.06/mo. (before taxes keep in mind too) for such few noteworthy features that actually make the server better. Lets say 10,000 people (again, Canada used as example) are subscribed to Nitro and boost their server to level 2. That comes to CDN$580,600/mo. that Discord receives just in one month from all those people. That's only for level 2! Do the math for level 3 boosts times 10,000 people. Your jaw will hit the floor. For people in Canada to boost to level 3, even with the discount of 30% it cost CDN$97.72/mo.! Start doing some math and you will see for yourself just how ghastly expensive the services are as a recursive payment.
This is why people want it to be changed to a one time fee for server boosting while still maintaining Nitro subscription fees to keep levels. That's fair. Discord makes money through many other venues than just server boosting. There needs to be a better balance. It would not only help them make more money, but also give us more incentive to actually spend money on the Discord services, games they sell, cosmetics and merchandise. The way boosting is set up is short sighted greed and all it's doing is making people not want to spend money.
Furthermore, Discord is backed by investors including Benchmark Capital, Tencent, Greylock Partners, and Spark Capital. So if Discord is backed by these other corporations and making what they do, most of us can probably agree that Discord can afford to be a bit more flexible with their business model and make the business end of things with consumers, more consumer friendly.Discord is making ample money and more than the general public wants to acknowledge. Anyone who can do basic math can see these things for themselves. It's pure robbery to ask for so much and deliver so little. between levels and then charge for cosmetics, merchandise and sell games on top which I didn't even include in any of the above figures. Just imagine how much they make from other things. Discord is making huge money and that is a fact. If they weren't their investors wouldn't even be backing them.
Your statement shows your closed mindedness. In future, think before you speak.
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I already do.
I just really like how well Discord works and would love to use it. It’s a shame they’re this greedy company.
The worst part of all this is that Discord is basically the standard for gaming communities now and by not using it you’re making your community less accessible.1 -
y'know at least Discord stores server messages for infinite amount of time (at least 4 years so far) for free unlike an awful LOT of other services that either require paying for it (Slack) or don't store messages at all (Skype)
The way server boosts work though is that it's a way to support a server, not something that a single person should pay for. Relatively popular server will probably get 3lvl boost in no time. And if it's something serious and enterprisey like official company Discord, and they don't want to depend on the community, then they can afford that price even by a single entity/person.
I can also see why uploading 100mb files is not granted to everyone by default considering it takes space on their servers and posting of files is essentially unlimited rate-wise.
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second of all, the minimum price to boost a server is $150 if 15 people get nitro, which also gives them perks
Other than the "server"-wide perks, they just get additional emojis and some customization options for their profile. It's a joke, even for 5$. They still don't get control over their data or the option to self-host.
third of all, discord nitro literally costs the same as spotify premium A.k.a not that much, plus you can access nearly all of discords features for free compared to spotify where you have to pay to choose songs, have no ads etc.
Spotify has to (in addition to their running costs) pay all the artists you listen to.
if you're really complaining just know that discord could just lock all of the app behind the same paywall
They already do, you just don't pay with money.
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> second of all, the minimum price to boost a server is $150 if 15 people get nitro, which also gives them perks
totally not true btw, there are 2 free boosts per nitro, so $75
Still a lot though considering you could buy your own server for $35 lol
But only for a single person1 -
I'm going to save everyone from this entire debate.
They are still implementing the sound for streaming and adding API for bots. Other than that it's free and has many more features Discord lacks and were greatly needed for those leading communities. You can also set up your own pay tiers if you choose and members can then REALLY help support the server/community because Guilded only keeps 2.5% of subs meaning you can actually use the money your members are willing to give up to help the community, FOR the community not some corporate pockets.
You are welcome +)
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Ok, first of all i didn't insult you and not planning to as i invited everyone to a civil discussion. BUT i am free to assume anything about your intelligence level as you are free to do that in return.
Please allow me to quote yourself without cherry-picking, for the last time im going to debunk what utter false information you wrote:
"They also don't sell merch. I've seen them give it away at conventions, but they don't have a merch store so I have no idea where you got that idea from?"
https://merch.discordapp.com / or merch(DOT)discordapp(DOT)com .bUt yOu Re nOt gOiNg BlInDlY iN tO tHiS ,
Do you, yourself, "Ane" , know even what an estimate is? Utter misinformation and ill will in passing facts as opinions just to serve your own:
"1Estimates and 2. How much the company would be worth if sold, because, a valuation is how much the company is worth if the owner sold it, and the 150 million is just an estimate. No one besides the inside of discord can confirm those numbers. So I'd take them with a grain of salt."
So here we go:
1 The company is ESTIMATED to be worth at bare minimum a whooping 1 billion dollars. https://www.businessinsider.com/discord-funding-2-billion-value-2018-122. Indeed this is not how much they earn. And yes, i can pull an educated guess of how much money they have by the fact that after the 2nd investement round they got over 279 million dollars. If you want me to break that down for you, not all the investment fund actually goes into investmend, wow, big surprise, but a lot of that remains as actual funds, suplimented by the cashflow of different partnerships, nitro subscriptions and actual free marketing.
I provide sources, i put the low effort of actually tiping 3 words in the google search engine, unlike you who tries to refute information based on feelings. Please yeet some common sense into your noggin and stop derailing the conversation by playing a victim and a fake sympathizer.Appreciate the ignorance, i'mma go eat now.
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I haven't the SLIGHTEST CLUE where you're all getting your prices from? But assuming that's american you're entirely wrong.
Nitro is $10 a month (which is fair considering the benefits like importing animated emojis and livestreaming movies and stuff with all your friends.)
And boosts are $3.50 each.
It takes 30 boosts to level a server to max level.
That's less than $100 to max out your server. I have NO idea who told you $1000 or $900 or whatever. But you're wrong.
This is coming from someone WITH. a maxed out server. (By the way? Having a vanity link is cool as hell) discord.gg/syleria
The bottom line is this wasnt designed to be entirely paid for by one person.
It was designed to reward communities that have come together. If everyone just used their two included boosts. That's only 15 people needed to chip in!
At this point my server is in the thousands and 15 contributors feels like a very easy goal. I understand not all servers are large but these benefits are DESIGNED for large servers. And no these features were not available before it's always been a 5mb upload limit and 50kbps audio. >_>
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+1
Discord server boosting is not worth IMO. I see a tough future for discord as a company. I already see many of my friends who boosted servers in past are unwilling to do that now. IMO, revenue expectations may be justified but I don't think that the value of the purchase is appreciated by users after initial few months. With incoming investments and soaring valuation of the company, the story of supporting company through boosting of servers is very hard to digest. I doubt if discord has huge number of recurring payments from users beyond 2-3 months. Even if they have it now, that retention average could be going down with time.
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Real_Bruh_
That's just it. Small servers struggle to populate due to this whole issue and unless you've got a large volume of clients on the server contributing, it all falls on one or a few people to pay the bill to keep the perks up. Discord is making money hand over fist already as it is. There is no real legitimate reason to do what they're doing other than to scalp their customers for everything they can - which they pretty much already do. Until they change their boost model, we're not boosting.
Discord figures they're doing the right or best thing for their business, but truth is they are missing out on a vast population that would be happy to pay them once and continue paying for Nitro to maintain the levels they've paid to have. I'm not paying $50/mo. for a Discount subscription through Nitro and a $13/mo. fee on top for Nitro just to maintain access to some few features in level 2. Just to maintain level 1, you have to stay subscribed to Nitro to keep that level.
What Discord is doing with this Boost subscription model is straight up and flat out financial greed. The only way it's going to change though is if people stop throwing money at them for level 2+ subscriptions. Pay your Nitro access to maintain your existing level 1 and leave it at that. It's really the only way Discord is going to even listen to us all. Until people do that though, Discord has no need to change anything.0 -
Why is it so god damn expensive to get 1080p stream in 2021? Just boosted a server to Level 1 and never realized it does not unlock 1080p streams.
This vague "high quality streams" badge is just inches away to be considered a fraud dishonesty.
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is the Level 1 720p 60fps as pixelated as their supposedly 720p fps? I don't want to pay 10$ to have a shitty quality at a higher framerate. Twitch is also 720p but everything is clear.
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clee666
If quality is primary for you, use Twitch. It's not worth it paying nitro and server boost monthly on Discord. With Discord, you're taking losses and not getting what you should be getting. There is no guarantee of streaming quality by Discord. As mentioned above in one of my previous comments, I had been streaming and testing the service for months and came to the conclusion that the streaming services are subpar and doesn't adhere to any real quality standards. 1080p streamed like it was varied between 320p-1080p almost every single time I streamed. It's a gamble. You never know if the stream will be OK one day, garbage the next or in an hour into the stream. The quality of what we get versus what Discord is asking people to pay out shows us who's getting the better end of the deal.Discord = greed before need.
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If the only point of being on discord is to stream to random strangers than why be on discord period. The main point of discord is to talk and chat with people and not show someone your subpar skills in minecraft bedwars. I will admit with the main point of this comment chain is the issue with file upload size because if discord is gonna promote itself as a website where you can share art to everyone on its front page then the file upload size should be more than what it is now and not a measly 8 mb. Also against the main point of the comment chain, if you only earn $100 monthly than you need to find a job and stop living off of the allowance your parents are giving you for doing chores. Over all both sides have great points.
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TBH when I started commenting on this chain I was on the side that discord was fine with it’s prices but then I did more research on the cost of boosting outside of the free nitro boosts but it’s just ridiculous because your gonna need to pay $75 a year which isn’t the worst for certain items but when it comes to boosting one server that won’t even get the server to boosting level 1 it’s just stupid.
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The way server boosts work though is that it's a way to support a server
No they don't. A free "server" doesn't need support, and those running the "server" don't get anything from their "server" being boosted. Additionally, Discord does lock "server" features behind the boosting paywall. If you run a "server" on Discord, there's no way to unlock these features without being boosted.
I can also see why uploading 100mb files is not granted to everyone by default considering it takes space on their servers and posting of files is essentially unlimited rate-wise.
I'm not complaining about having to pay for a service, it's just the price that is bullshit.
Paying 150$ a month to upload 100mb files to a server you don't control is ridiculous. Especially considering Discord is collecting huge amounts of userdata.
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ok first of all. nitro costs $10 a month (half of that for classic which really just removes the free boosts)
second of all, the minimum price to boost a server is $150 if 15 people get nitro, which also gives them perks
third of all, discord nitro literally costs the same as spotify premium A.k.a not that much, plus you can access nearly all of discords features for free compared to spotify where you have to pay to choose songs, have no ads etc.
if you're really complaining just know that discord could just lock all of the app behind the same paywall
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