My card was charged $10 on March 1st and on March 5th my tier was eliminated without warning and I suddenly had the same access as someone who was paying $5/mo.
This studio has been this way for years. The customer support and communication is miserable. They've come out and announced a store grand opening like 5 times and each time it ended up being a bluff. For awhile the C4L Instagram made it sound like it was being run by one of the models, but that changed overnight so now you have no idea who runs it (not that it matters). As a customer all I want is to be able to go to an automated store front and pick and choose the products I want, not have to go through a shady middleman, not subscribe to a nonsensical tiered service and cross my fingers and hope the clips I want show up in my tier, not have the terms of the agreement change mid-subscription. You'd think these are simple things for an entrepreneur in this industry to understand (and it is for the 99% of the other studios), but I just don't want to be screwed with anymore.
I understand that the studio wants to protect its investment and stave off piracy, which is a known and understandable issue in our industry, and they're doing an excellent job considering how difficult it is for even legitimate, paying customers to get a hold of the studio's clips.
I believe that the studio isn't purposely malicious in the way it does business, but by disallowing customers the ability to pick and choose which clips to purchase and failing to communicate major changes (no excuse for not communicating tier charges to customers prior), they're going to drive a lot of people (like myself) away. If the studio had a storefront with all its clips alongside a patreon it would be a different story. There are many studios I like, but I don't necessarily like all their clips and would not want to sub to a time-gated service. I (and I suspect the majority) prefer a customer experience where they can pick a la carte what they want rather than taking a step back and subscribing to a time-gated service, especially when there is an established library of clips that are getting fed piece meal to subs with the presumed intent of drawing out the length of subscription.
