Offer a 'premium' membership which offers 'benefits' for 'price' per 'how_often'

[davesag]

We need to look into creating a premium service that offers various benefits for users, for a small monthly or annual payment.

benefits could include

• discounts
• samples
• celebrity chef recipes and dinners
• other (add to this list)

It's worth noting this might qualify as a 'virtual good' in terms of Facebook's t&cs which require payments for virtual goods to be only made using Facebook's own 'credits' system.

[dmontherun]

My natural inclination is for any premium user to get value by greater functionality/level of access that we can build in and make consistent with the rest of the model, not by add-ons we have to generate just in order to justify the premium price.

So discounts and samples I'm less keen on (just creates an entire new stream of work, for no guarantee of return); but 'free' access to celebrity recipes etc is better (as we'll probably do that for PR anyway and if it's part of the broader model it would make sense e.g. if we also make celebrity recipe previews available to standard users and allow them to purchase access on a recipe by recipe basis).

Other examples could be (just for example, but needs to be planned to tie in with whole business model):

• standard vs premium functionality for reviewing/annotating/rating other recipes
• standard vs premium functionality for creating or sharing lists/favourites/etc
• maybe need to be a premium user to do 'vanity' or 'fundraiser' etc publishing ie. sell book of own recipes for a margin
• mid term, differences in functionality to create aggregated ingredient/shopping lists
• later, differences in functionality/fees for ordering ingredients

Etc. A starting point on my thoughts, anyway.

[dmontherun]

I should have added, re Facebook credits and any impact on this:

• When you're not a game, the use of FB credits seems to be less clearly required (in fact, the focus seems more on making sure you DON'T use them for anything tangible or that may become or be used to acquire tangible goods)
• Regardless, the right response to any problems arising from money vs FB credits is likely to be to plan things so that we have exited from FB as a platform in time to implement what we think is the best model.