[Paul the Sunman]

Following their recent admission that Flickr is losing money, they have put up their prices as of today.


We’re writing to inform you that effective today, the price of Flickr Pro subscriptions has increased to:

1 month: $6.99, plus tax
3 month: $18.99, plus tax
1 year: $59.99, plus tax
2 year: $117.99, plus tax

To thank loyal Pro members for your continued support, we are offering all current Pros the opportunity to renew now at last year’s price.

Current Pro subscribers can lock in up to an additional 2 years at the previous price for some unspecified (short?) period.

[FozzFoster]

Did everyone else get the email just before Christmas from the Flickr CEO Don MacAskill?
I read it as begging me to upgrade to a Pro account... imo it was pretty awkward:

"Dear friends,
Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—needs your help.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Now Flickr needs your help. It’s still losing money. Hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

Flickr is not a charity, and we’re not asking you for a donation. Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community for less than $5 per month.

You likely pay services such as Netflix and Spotify at least $9 per month. I love services like these, and I’m a happy paying customer, but they don’t keep your priceless photos safe and let you share them with the most important people in your world. Flickr does, and a Flickr Pro membership costs less than $1 per week.

Please, help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure it has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to invite you to subscribe to Flickr Pro today for the same 25% discount.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to upgrade your membership to Pro.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers and by photographers, we ask you to join us, and to share this offer with those who share your love of photography and community.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek
SmugMug + Flickr"

[aslyfox]

this thread has that email in it

I got an email: Opportunity to support Flickr.com with a discount - PentaxForums.com

[D1N0]

They are getting greedy

[RGlasel]

We’re writing to inform you that effective today, the price of Flickr Pro subscriptions has increased to:

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop where there are no more free Flickr accounts, but this announcement is a bit of a head scratcher. It's the free accounts that are bleeding money for SmugMug, why risk losing Pro customers before ditching the free accounts? Why not first announce paid limited accounts (basically the same benefits that free accounts are getting now) for almost as much as a Pro account and then gradually transition to a bigger spread in features between limited and Pro, at which time you can increase the price of Pro and position it as a mid-point between the "social-oriented" limited accounts and the "business-oriented" SmugMug accounts.

[luftfluss]

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop where there are no more free Flickr accounts, but this announcement is a bit of a head scratcher. It's the free accounts that are bleeding money for SmugMug, why risk losing Pro customers before ditching the free accounts? Why not first announce paid limited accounts (basically the same benefits that free accounts are getting now) for almost as much as a Pro account and then gradually transition to a bigger spread in features between limited and Pro, at which time you can increase the price of Pro and position it as a mid-point between the "social-oriented" limited accounts and the "business-oriented" SmugMug accounts.

Flickr probably feels it needs a free gateway to compete with Facebook/Instagram.

[aoeu]

This is a price I'm willing to pay and I'm cheap. I like the service. Pencil this one into next month's budget and forget it for a few years.

[fwwidall]

I just extended my Flickr membership for an extra two years for CA$123 (US$94). Seemed a reasonable price.

[ramseybuckeye]

I also extended two years to get it in before the latest price increase. I expected price increases when Smugmug bought Flickr, I didn't really expect this second increase so quickly. I'm very skeptical of the pleading letters they have sent out, I do think they bought Flickr for a cash cow. But, they haven't messed it up and I still think it's the best platform for me.

[aslyfox]

moi aussi

[bobmaxja]

I just extended my Flickr membership for an extra two years for CA$123 (US$94). Seemed a reasonable price.

Same for me.

[Just1MoreDave]

This is a price I'm willing to pay and I'm cheap. I like the service. Pencil this one into next month's budget and forget it for a few years.

There, saved me some typing, that's what I did.

My guess about the logic behind this is that the price is now expressed in cost per month. So now it looks like a subscription model, like Adobe. People complained a lot about Adobe's subscription model but just look at the stock price. Before subscription, below $100, now $350. Internet complaints don't mean anything when they get results like that.

[RGlasel]

Flickr probably feels it needs a free gateway to compete with Facebook/Instagram.

I was going to write "why would a photo hosting service aimed at real photographers want to compete with the Facebook/Instagram freakshow?" but it's a moot point, anyway. Facebook is like the Google Search Engine, it is its own planetary system in cyberspace and attempts to do anything other than wait for its inevitable demise from self-inflicted wounds is only going to end in failure.

I have a free Flickr account, but I have looked at other alternatives and Flickr is still the best service out there, for what I want, an attractive, flexible, responsive service that provides an easy way to embed my photos on this site and to share a bunch of photos with whoever else I want to, whenever I want to. I don't need unlimited storage, visitor stats or sales aids for marketing my photographs, but I would pay a modest sum to get the benefits of the free-for-now accounts without the ad blanks (even on my computers without AdBlock, I almost never see an ad when looking at my photos on Flickr, just a black space and a brief message to nag me every fourth photo). I have also looked at open source photo galleries that I could install on my own web hosting service (for which I pay less than what a Flickr Pro account would cost), but I haven't found anything that checks as many boxes for me as Flickr does.

Obviously, sprinkling ads in the free Flickr accounts isn't paying for what it costs SmugMug to host those accounts, so why doesn't SmugMug can the free accounts and offer a paid account with the same limited features of the free-for-now accounts at a price point slightly below what Pro accounts cost when SmugMug bought Flickr? Everyone who thought upgrading to a Pro account at the old price was a good deal for them, has already paid for a Pro account. Raising the price of a Pro account might lose some paying customers for SmugMug and won't help one bit to convince cheapskates like me to upgrade to a Pro account now when I wouldn't do it 12 months ago.

[stevebrot]

They are getting greedy

$10 increase == greed?


Steve

[i_trax]

I started this few weeks ago
Flickr PRO 2 years went up from 44.95 to 99.98 - PentaxForums.com
I was charged AU$ 144.32 for two years, why the price vary so much between users?