One of my favorite financial tools online recently sent an email out. This is what I received from Digit.co
We wanted to make sure you saw that the cost of a Digit membership is changing to $5/month. This goes into effect on May 12th, 2021 and is updated in our Terms.
Digit has been $5/month since 2019, but we’ve kept early members like you at a lower price ($2.99). This update will help us continue building powerful tools for your money.
They go on to justify the price with a list of stuff they’ve added to the service…
Over the last 2 years, we’ve added features that help you avoid overdrafts, pay back debt, save for retirement, and easily invest for the long term. We’ve got even bigger things planned in the months ahead, so stay tuned.
If you have any questions at all, please visit our help center or contact us. If you’d like to make a change to your membership, you can do that anytime here.
We’re excited to keep helping you achieve your money goals.
But I am not thrilled about this change. Let me explain. I first fell in love with Digit with their initial offering to make saving easier.
The way Digit works is that you can set up a savings goal, and over time they withdraw small incremental amounts from your account in order to fulfill that goal.
It’s actually quite good. Check it out, and if you use my link, you get $5.00 and I get $5.00.
I use it for discretionary spending, like buying a new gadget. I also use it to put money aside for vacations. But I primarily use it to put money aside for recurring yearly subscriptions or renewals. Like the DMV registration in my state, or the renewal of Grammarly, or Vimeo.
It’s great, when it’s time to pay for that stuff, I have the money (or most of it) put aside so my immediate, day to day cashflow feels unaffected.
But let’s just say I’m not happy about going from $2.99 to $5.00 per month. I’m not happy about it because obviously, it takes more money from me. Ok, so an extra $24/year isn’t that bad, right?
But then there are other services. And another one that is $0.99/month, and the other one that is $36/year and so on and so forth.
In fact, I really hate this monthly model that many companies are trying to exploit. Mark my words, it will be the death of them eventually.
At some point, the economics will break and many consumers will have to make hard choices about what systems and products they use.
But Back to Digit
What Digit should do in my opinion is this: grandfather loyal customers with their “old” pricing, and sign up new customers under the current pricing. Just like Elementor did for the WordPress community recently. — It’s worth mentioning that Elementor is a totally different beast and the price is completely different; I’m only drawing attention to how they cared for the community that has helped them grow to where they are now.
Then Digit should revamp their rewards program so more people are happy and willing to share how great the service is and they get rewarded.
Right now, it seems that you can only get rewarded for sharing the beauty and awesomeness of Digit with 5 people.
Something else that would be good I think also would be to tier their services.
The main reason they are doing a price hike, it seems to me, or at least they say so in the email is to enable them to continue adding features.
But I have to ask, who asked for those? I didn’t. Why do I care about all those things if I just wanted the ability to save automatically and incrementally? That idea, while it is not new, was masterfully executed.
It would be nice if they just tiered those new products.
I still like Digit and think you should get it. Even at $5/month, but I’m just torn about this price hike.
Update!
Just before I wrote this post, I replied to Digit’s email with a short note to let them know my dislike for their decision. This is what I said:
Not cool. 🙁
You should be grandfathering your oldest customers on their current rates.
I didn’t expect anything in return. I know I was just kind of griping at them, but shortly after I sent my email I received the usual response about how I had requested support and a ticket was created; someone would respond soon.
I thought “whatever” and forgot about it, but a few hours later they responded with the following:
Hi Oscar,
I appreciate you reaching out, and I know this news may be disappointing.
At this time, we do not have plans for grandfathering in members into their former price or offering discounts. But, I did pass this feedback along to the rest of the team to consider for the future!
As a way of saying thanks for your support this far, I’ve added 2 free months to your membership.
While we hope you’ll stick with us we understand if you do need to make a change to your account. You can do that here: https://digit.co/close-account.
I hope this clears things up a bit, but please don’t hesitate to reach back out if I can assist with anything else at all. Take care.
What a turn of events huh? I’m glad I sent that quick email out. I mean, the increase of 35 to 60 isn’t a huge deal.
But with the response to my gripe and the $10 they credited me, I’m definitely sticking around.
I mean, they have to make money. I get it, and the way they handled my complaint means they really do care.
So I changed the cover image for this post too, correcting their logo back to their happy wink face.
In Conclusion
I’m not happy about the price hike. But I do love their service. I think the $5/month price is fair.
Would I still recommend the service? Absolutely. Especially now after I saw how they handled my gripe. I love their SMS bot, I can do almost everything I want to do with my account via text messages. It’s brilliant. If you want to check it out, try it here, you’ll get $5.00 and I’ll get $5.00.