How to judge a membership before you pay for it
These are the questions we are holding ourselves to while Regal Club is being formed. They are more useful to you applied to somebody else's membership, so they are written that way.
1. What does this give me that money alone cannot?
If every benefit is available to a non-member who is willing to pay the normal price, the membership is a prepayment plan. The question is whether there is anything on the list that is genuinely rationed — capacity, timing, access to a person — rather than merely discounted.
2. What happens the month I use it least?
Memberships are priced on average usage and experienced on actual usage. A good one still feels reasonable in a quiet month. A bad one depends on you using it enough to justify it, which means it is quietly charging you for your own inconsistency.
3. Who decides what the benefits are worth, and can they change it?
Points, credits and internal currencies all share a property: the issuer sets the exchange rate and can move it. Read what the terms say about changing benefits, and note whether changes require notice. A programme that can be devalued unilaterally will be, eventually, because the incentive is permanent and the restraint is not.
4. How hard is it to leave?
The cancellation path is the most honest page on any membership site. Count the clicks. Note whether it can be done in the same place it was bought, or whether it requires an email, a phone call, or a retention conversation. The friction is deliberate, and its amount is a measurement of how much the business expects you to want to leave.
5. What does the list of benefits tell me about the price?
A long list usually means no single benefit could carry the fee. That is not automatically bad, but it means the value is diffuse, and diffuse value is the kind that quietly stops being worth it without any particular moment where you notice.
6. Would I recommend it before I had paid for it?
Membership creates a mild commitment to having been right. Ask the question in the other tense: knowing what you know now, would you have joined? It is a better test than whether you intend to renew, because renewal is often just the absence of a decision.
Applying these to us
We cannot pass most of these yet, because there is nothing to pass them with. That is the point of publishing them before we have a product rather than after: when there is a membership here, these are the questions it should be held to, and we will have written them down while it was still cheap to be strict.