Money

[Charles Platt]

During a recent visit to SBP in Salem OR I talked to Andy McKenzie about fees. From our discussion I got the impression that two opposing viewpoints exist:

(a) Make all fees (including membership, procedure, and maintenance) as low as possible, to encourage membership growth.

(b) Accept that if something doesn't cost much, many people will assume that its quality is inferior.

Option (a) presumably requires the organization to subsist on donations in the long term. Saul Kent, whom I knew very well, spent most of his life trying to obtain donations or investments for cryonics or cryonics research. He was almost totally unsuccessful. I think it would be unwise to depend on donations. Also, I pointed out to Andy that the Omni "immortality contest," which I organized in 1993 for Omni magazine, literally offered to give a cryopreservation away to the winner of a very undemanding essay contest. Even though Omni had a circulation exceeding 500,000 at that time, and the contest received exposure on numerous radio stations, plus half an hour on a nationwide TV show, we received fewer than 500 entries. It was really quite difficult to give cryonics away, even to a magazine readership who had a generally positive, uncritical attitude toward science.

Now, brain preservation isn't the same thing as cryonics, and 2025 isn't the same as 1993, but still I doubt that a low membership fee is a significant incentive to get people to sign up. If your research results are provably superior in terms of fidelity of preservation, then I think it makes sense to charge more.

[jordansparks]

We made the membership fee reasonable at $150/yr. It's affordable by most as a single yearly payment instead of monthly. It's designed to be a number that works for young and old alike. Since we charge separately for the actual services, we will never run into all the drama that Alcor has gone through over the years. They've grandfathered in some people, only to be forced to renege later. High membership fees have problems like that. Young people rightly don't feel it's fair to pay for years to get the same benefits as a new elderly member. We solved that fairness issue by having the annual membership fee apply to later services. And we do now charge actual cost for preservation services. We didn't lowball that.

[Mati_Roy]

500 is more than the total number of people who had SST membership in the world at the time. for a small chance to win cryo in exchange for an essay. from personal experience I do think membership fee can be a factor, and I like SBP's pricing structure