This from Eric…
“We are shifting to a traditional subscription model, with clear value for subscribers, to allow the community to thrive today and in the future. Features that help you save time in managing your cellar, provide actionable insights, and simplify choosing a bottle of wine through improved algorithms will be part of a subscription.”
They did add a feature where you just forward your receipt for wine - haven’t tried it yet. I guess you can always go to putting it in a spread sheet!
Could not disagree more.
This is absurdly untrue. You are able to export your data from CellarTracker to Excel or a text document.
Guess you missed the part where he said:
We will continue to provide the world’s best free offering for reading and writing community reviews and tracking bottles in your cellar.
Sounds like it’s still going to be a freemium model to me, but instead of “voluntary” payments, there will be fixed costs for certain features.
You didn’t take the time to actually read his entire email. Too bad.
“We will continue to provide the world’s best free offering for reading and writing community reviews and tracking bottles in your cellar.”
They could have easily turned the site into an advertisement filled mess and most people would still use it. It is a great resource that isn’t free to run, to say nothing of the time spent on it, not unfair to have a cost. And let’s get real, if you’re using CellarTracker at all, you have a few bucks to spare.
That’s how I read it as well. Though as it stands if you don’t make a payment, some features aren’t available. I guess this means you can’t “pay what you want” (e.g, $5) to get those features . . . you’ll pay whatever the price is (which I’m guessing will at first align with the current suggested voluntary payments.)
I talked to Eric once about this and at least at the time his view was that allowing free access was a benefit to the business because it created a broader set of comments/scoring available to all. I don’t see how that would have changed.
I’ve always donated because it is a very good product. It is hard to tell what the new features will be, but I admit I’m really just interested in the basics. That being said, I have little doubt I will subscribe.
Agree, though looking at the recommended payments it gets pretty steep:
Agreed. It is a bit odd to base your payment based on the number of bottles you have in the system since I doubt that has a proportional impact on the cost of managing the data. Seems more like, “hey, you’ve got 2,500 bottles, you can afford to pay us more.”
Not cost based, but like many things there’s “introductory” pricing, and it may make it more attractive for new subscribers with small cellars to be asked to pay a lower amount than those with larger sellers.
Maybe. I’m looking at some other SaaS platforms here, and you can get Adobe Lightroom plus 1TB storage for $120/year, OR Adobe LR PLUS Photoshop for $240, and I humbly submit those have more value/underlying expense than CT (where I would note a decent chunk of the value comes from users themselves, uploading wines and reviews). I’ve always paid for CT, but admittedly always at lower levels than recommended. Hopefully “required payment” brings in more new revenue which allows overall payments to not be too high.
Agreed. I always pay the recommended amount, but I’m shocked at how high the prices have risen.
I’ll wait to see what the “new features” are when the model shifts to a forced subscription based on levels. Frankly, I’ve always paid an annual amount, but less than the suggested amount for my number of bottles. I use two features of CT: tracking my bottles and looking up other users comments about a wine. None of the other features are needed for me. I’ll probably end up with the free side based on Eric’s description, but I have no problem kicking in some sheckles of my own determination, as I do today.
I think that’s true, but not because a cellar organizer is not worth the recommended amount for my cellar size. The issue I have paying $500/year for CT is that CT is not that cellar organizer - it’s missing many features that would greatly improve the process. It does a great job at tracking where I put something and my pending purchases, but as far as managing my cellar, it doesn’t really offer much in the way of power user features (bulk moves, multiple levels of location/bin, advanced searches, etc) and there’s been no improvements to any of that stuff in years. Most of the time I request stuff I hear “the underlying architecture doesn’t support it” and it’s a dead end. That doesn’t really feel like the kind of product that you pay $500/year for. But in its current form, it is worth at least $100/year or something.
I think I am ok paying in the $100-150 range, but $500 is a little silly.
I feel that the degree to which this rises is excessive. Don’t penalize me because I have a mental illness and can’t control my wine buying. I can’t afford to pay $500 because I spent all my money on wine that I’m never going to drink. 
i love how freely people use the word ‘force’.
it’s fucking hilarious.
principly agree… tho i think comparing to Adobe (or any of the more broad saas biz) might be apple/oranges a bit. they have a much more broad user appeal and in turn can keep subs rate lower.
Think - Netflix - if Netflix is $150 a year and they spend more on one tv series than what CT probably has spent life to date 
So i think some of the niche premium definitely exists.
CT to me is more like a patreon account for a personality u want to sub content to… or like Todd French’s onlyfans account…
Don’t tempt me with a good time…
We should all reserve significant comment until we know what’s going to happen. Speculating ‘he’s going to charge us XYZ’ isn’t helpful…unless he’s using us for market research, in which case I won’t pay more than $1.50/month.