Day: March 8, 2025

I don’t know what’s going on, but X is getting flat out weird. They’ve literally doubled their price in just the past month or so.

I purchased a blue checkmark last year. My intent was to dabble a bit in monetization via putting out a virtual “tip” jar, seeing how that went then moving into subscriptions. 

I wasn’t expecting to make a lot of money, it was more about gaining experience and trust in the backend payment processing services. There are a lot of these services, and many have terrible reviews and/or horror stories about getting payouts. They’re not very highly rated on the customer support side of things either.

I’m thankful that I took advantage of X’s yearly subscription special because when I signed up for “Premium+” it was about $100 for the year.

4 Months later, that membership is $340. I’ve seen 2 price hikes in 4 months. Oh and I wasn’t able to test the subscription stuff where X paid me for content. I’ve dragged my feet on establishing the “tip” jar because their “preferred” payment processor seems like they have a lot more “Horsepower” and expense than I’m looking for.

That being said, it’s probably all a moot point anyway, because I’m not going to be renewing the subscription.

After the first price hike I was questioning renewal. After the second price hike their fate is sealed. Based on their averages there will be 4 more price hikes before my renewal date comes up.

I’m sure that I can’t afford that. As it is, I’m looking for a new web host. My current one has gotten way too expensive and every bit of their sales/support team is offshore.

Do we see a trend here?

Prices increasing, value per dollar decreasing?

X is kind of interesting. Their AI is interesting. But the value for either is not worth the price unless the algorithm allows you a wider audience that is also blue check marked. Without that wider audience making money sharing “pearls of wisdom” is a bust.

It’s funny too, when I signed up, there were always posts about people getting their first contributor check, or folks being excited to begin contributing. 

Pretty much 5 days after I signed up, those happy posts were gone. Now those sort of posts are exceedingly rare.

What’s become more common over the past few weeks has been people posting they’re not renewing their subscription, (monthly, or yearly,) and apologizing to their followers who rely on verified blue check users to remain monetized.

To be honest I’m losing my taste for X and I can’t really say why. 

I’m having far more, (as X puts it,) regretted seconds than un-regretted seconds.

That means the ROI for the subscription is low, and dropping. X increasing prices just drives more people to abandon the blue checkmark.

It’s their business, they can charge whatever they want, but I don’t have to support it.

My blue checkmark will be around until November then I’m going the be just another one of the unverified riff-raff.