I agree. It's not that I don't see $50 worth of value; it's that I can too easily imagine a substantial fraction of their market opting not to pay. Even at $30 I think they'd get a whole lot more action (and they could still have done $5 a month to try to encourage annual subscriptions).

I think the bigger problem has to do with other aspects of the model, though. (Link below for convenience.) The lack of content for non-subscribers sufficient to attract new customers seems like an dangerous maneuver.

Providing even just non-advanced search functionality and a tracker (with no stats) would keep so many people coming, many of whom—given the right pushes in contextually-relevant moments and interfaces—would surely do better for them.

I think it's a good idea to move to a paid model but $50 a year is too high. I'd pay $25 or $30, though.

Seems to be an online consensus somewhere near that price point. I wonder whether Duotrope did any market research here (or if so, how much…).

This is tough. I understand the move, but agree the price is a bit steep. Maybe a sliding scale? If people are forced to pay SOMETHING, I bet they put in their fair share. When I don't donate to places like this is often out of laziness or forgetfulness more than anything else.

I don't see the benefit to Duotrope's users at $50. Established writers don't need the info on the site - we know what journals have poor response times - so this is mostly on the back of the uninformed.

For me it's not just response times; I love seeing the other data—acceptance rates, most recent response, "Users accepted here blah blah", etc. Although as I type those things out, I'm less sure about my choice of the word "value." It's more icing than cake.

Also, as little as I care for their interface for tracking submissions, it is convenient to have time out and anticipated response times calculated and displayed for me. Supremely lazy, but it's one less thing for me to think about.

But as the days go by, I find myself thinking that this is just the excuse I needed to put together my own spreadsheet. I would gladly pay $50 if they had a great interface, an iPhone app, and a user base I thought would stick around and keep making data.