Carragee Consulting

Pricing psychology

The cheapest college meal plan was 987 points per 16 week semester. It cost $987 dollars and you could buy individual items or pay $9 for an all you can eat meal at one of the dining halls.

When I came back from a 2 hour Sat am practice with my rowing team I used head straight to eat omelettes and waffles with soft serve ice cream until I could barely move.

On regular days I got free hot water to refill my tea, ate the giant macaroni meals for a few bucks and otherwise looked for ways to ekk out the points per item purchases last through the end of finals.

Some students struggled to use up their whole bulk meal plan which cost ~$2000 for three meals a day and some ate as much as they could stand getting a great deal per meal but packing on the freshman 15lbs or more.

There’s some psychological power to pricing things in points rather than dollars to disassociate cost at the time of sale and encourage overspending.

My Audible.com subscription is for 12 credits a year for a price I can’t remember (say $200). When I use my credits (buy books) I almost never convert the deal to see if the price of buying the book is less than the average cost of one of my annual plans credits.

I’m much less price sensitive now than when I was a college rower, but I’m also still susceptible to the dollars to tokens conversion pricing, up to a point.

I’m still not gonna waste a roughly $15-20 credit on something priced at $1, even if I really like the author Jon Krakauer.

Looks like the plan pricing has changed since my renewal and now for $14.95 you get a bunch of unlimited access content (Al la Netflix) and you can add a keep +1 title in your personal library per month.

This new pricing structure makes it so much more explicit that I shouldn’t “waste” credits in anything less than the monthly fee.

Whatever they do with the pricing structure its still a ton cheaper than my college courses and I enjoy building the library which I don’t have to physically heft from house to house, even if I could check them out of the library for free.