I had a monthly membership with bluefire (where you pay $100 signup fee and $30 recurring monthly) at the time Galfond left the site. I cancelled the subscription some time ago and wanted to check out some of their new materials now to see if it would be worth it to subscribe again.

Well they actually ask you to pay the "sign up" fee of $100 AGAIN, saying you only get a 30 day grace period of coming back after you cancel, otherwise you will need to pay it again. This is not mentioned anywhere visible on their site, and it's clearly advertised as a "Sign up fee," not some recurring fee you pay every time you want to come back. They did offer a discounted full year contract, but I don't exactly want to overpay for a product a full year especially with the biggest reason to consider getting them gone.

Whatever, I'll be checking some of the other sites out instead, just wanted to let others who were considering bluefire know this.

Standard. If they didn't have the fee you could just signup for a month, cancel, and then sign back up a few months later and watch $90 worth of videos for $30

/thread

Just wanted to reach out and follow up on why the policy is in place...

100% of the videos are DRM free. Basically, this means that you can sign up, download as many videos as you want, and no matter if you cancel the following month or remain a member for years, you will ALWAYS have the videos you downloaded when you were a member. On the contrary, if there was DRM on the videos, once you quit paying your monthly fee you would instantly lose access to all videos that you had downloaded in the past.

So, being 100% DRM free, if the signup fee was waived, presumably members could sign up for $29.99, download the entire site's content, and cancel. The entire video library database of almost 1k vids is worth well more than $29.99. Also, under that notion, those same people could come back a few months later (for $29.99), download everything that they missed while they were cancelled, and then cancel again. Under this plan they could basically get our entire library for $29.99 at a time, which would not be fair to the regular subscribing members.

Sorry for the troubles and hopefully this clarifies the issue for you!

How exactly do you quantify "$90 worth of videos"? I already have all the videos I was interested in (Galfond plo), I simply wanted to see if some of the new stuff was worth watching, and subscribe again but don't want to pay the sign up fee, so it's definitely worth it for me to just switch to another site instead now.

Didn't know these recurring sign up fees were "industry standard" however.

Yeah, I see. I still paid the initial $100 though, I thought it would grant me the ability to sign up again for $30 though. Anyway, I just wish it would have been more clearly stated that it's not the case.

Because I said something like "sign up a few months later" few months x $30=$90

You did not include the signup fee. Then you are quantifying the worth of the videos at $90. How exactly do you do this? If I sign up 2 years later is it $720 worth of videos now?

Anyway, my qualm was that I thought the signup fee allowed me to do this one month at a time whenever I wanted.

Sigh, not going to respond any longer. I tried to be nice in my first post, but the incompetence is overwhelming.

Too bad, but If I ever need to know the intrinsic value of miscellaneous items I can shoot you a pm right?

LT, you lasted a few posts longer than most would.

Thread seems to have run its course in under 5 hours.

Policy can be taken various ways by various people, as demonstrated above.

If anybody has anything major to add, PM me and we'll unlock this.