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Free membership vs. upgraded membership info

Free membership vs. upgraded membership info

Three membership plans to choose from

wikiloops currently offers three membership plans, starting with the "free limited" plan and followed by the "basic collaborator" and the "premium supporter" plans, which are referred to as "upgraded" member accounts.

An overview of the included features and applied use limits in the free plan can be found in the membership plans comparison table, where you may also find the links to the service agreement details of each plan at the bottom of the table.

What we would like to cover in this help article are a few statements concerning the nature of membership upgrades and the philosophy behind them.

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Why is the best thing about upgraded membership not listed in the plan comparison table?

We felt the best thing about wikiloops membership upgrades is a little too abstract to look good on a summary plan.
A "feature" named "Keeps wikiloops online" which is only checked as available in upgraded memberships would look a little odd, right?
But that's what upgraded membership is all about at the very core.
The additional features and the much smoother browsing experience in ad-free mode are nice to have for sure, but once you realize that wikiloops actually needs people who help cover the cost of keeping wikiloops around (offered publicly in the annual financial transparency reports), upgrading your member account or purchasing a membership upgrade for someone else may have a slightly different feel to it.

Membership upgrades background
We are not offering upgrades because that seemed like a nice way to get really rich when starting wikiloops,
but we are offering these upgrades as a somewhat organized form of motivating people to support wikiloops financially.
wikiloops exists since 2011,
and after simply asking for donations from 2011 to 2015,
we started rewarding our supporters with a "supporting membership" upgrade in 2015, and are introducing the current 3-plan-setup in 2017.
More information on wikiloops project history and the team can be found on the "History & Events"-page.

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Understanding the "free & limited" membership plans limitations and setup

We have taken great care and applied a lot of thinking and user feedback when setting up the limitations in the free account.
We hope you will agree we managed to find a good balance between allowing all aspects of collaboration participation (at a slightly throttled rate) and reserving some nice-to-have functions as an incentive to eventually upgrade your membership.

The most annoying things about the free account are: It does requires some patience at first (for example: downloading tracks is not immediately available when starting a new free member account),
and the fact that you may only upload a limited amount of 5 tracks per month.
On the other hand, the total of 60 included uploads per year is a lot more than the average active wikiloops user will produce, and the included 365 free track downloads per year should be more than enough to keep you busy.

Bottom line:
You can have a lot of fun for free on wikiloops,
because we like to keep it the way we started it,
because we have the backup of those who can afford to support our "global jam"-mission,
and because we are aware that not everyone on this planet is in a position to be able to afford even a small monthly amount.

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