Previous Post with the price changes

Hello again everyone,

With the previous notification, I apologize I wasn’t able to get the notice out about the rest of the information as I had promised. This change has been quite a huge weight on my shoulders and not everyone has been so understanding so I greatly apologize.

Lifetime Licenses will have the following price change with the support fees:

Budget Lifetime License Renewal Support Fee will go from L$12 to L$40 a week

Lifetime License Standard Renewal Support Fee will go from L$80 = L$108 a week

Lifetime License 5GB Renewal Support Fee will go from L$60 to L$88 a week

Lifetime License 10GB Renewal Support Fee will go from L$110 = L$138 a week

Pricing will take affect on October 14th, 2019. We will continue to have licenses for sale at this time with the current prices set but that may change. We will keep you informed if we decide to no longer sell licenses. If you have a license, you will continue to have a license which will work the same as before the price changes. We can no longer keep grandfathered in pricing meaning all fees will be at the current rate. You WON’T lose the time on your account and will NOT have to back pay either for the time you have.

I’m very sorry to each and everyone that I have to increase prices at Hostcrate. I have no choice because the expenses to keep Hostcrate around in Second Life are not cheap as you can see just by the server payment alone. There are other expenses outside of those fees: Linden Lab Fees to process credits from L$ to US Dollars are 3.5% PLUS 5%. Land Tier at L$6400/week, Software to run streams & billing to take payments from SL customers out of world $15.40/month, Smartbots to automate our bot L$479/week, paying staff salary & commissions so on & so forth. Running a business inworld doesn’t make it any cheaper out of world though I wish that were the case.

I have NEVER, EVER shared such financial information but I must be 100000000% transparent in order to inform customers that the price increases are NOT to benefit me in any manner as I am not still in business because of money but because I absolutely LOVE what I do and I love our customers…if money were the case, we wouldn’t of been in SL a long time ago because I don’t, quite frankly, earn a lot of income on running Hostcrate and haven’t for a long time. I may be able to pay for a coffee or lunch with my husband ever so often but the point of Hostcrate from the beginning was to bring affordable prices for customers inworld to be able to focus more on what they do inworld which is bringing the joy of music and performances to people who may not be having such a great life outside of SL. That was the entire point of coming into Second Life and still is 11 years later.

I am grateful to those who read the first notice and were so understanding. I am grateful to everyone who has had nothing but nice things to say to me since the changes. You have no idea how much all of that meant and got me through the heartache of bringing such bad news and disappointing customers. Thank you very, very much!!! Your kindness is immensely appreciated!!

–Thank you,
LustyLexxi Larimore

Hello everyone,

This is going to be a very tough post. This is a post I didn’t want to ever have to make but I have no choice to be frank. Please note this post will be including full transparency to which I have NEVER, EVER shared with customers or to the open public.

This post may be a long one so I apologize in advance for that but it is very important so please read it in full.

Let’s start at the beginning…On May 29th, 2019, Linden Lab – The company behind Second Life – posted a blog post (link) which included, near the bottom, the news that they were raising the credit processing fees by double the percentage, a shock for a lot of inworld business all across the board. If you are unaware, Second Life charges a fee to sell your L$ then another fee to process them as a credit to US Dollars. Essentially, being charged twice. Once at 3.5% then another 5%. The amount you receive from selling changes basically daily and I decided to eat this fee increase at the end of the day. I did NOT want to raise my prices.

This brings us to October 1st, 2019 where I was sent the invoice as always from our datacenter for the servers payment. When I opened the email on October 2nd, I was quite shocked that the bill was over $70 higher than anticipated. I opened a ticket to find out why…and to fix it. They replied with the news that this was because the company behind the control panel we use, Cpanel, raised their pricing and that has been passed down to the customer. Here is the link to their new pricing posted on their website.

Screenshot of our former pricing
Screenshot of the new pricing (The Balance forward can be ignored, I owed a balance to which I had requested an extension and have paid)

We will be charged $42 base price per server plus $0.15 per an account over 100 accounts. This fee is quite a heavy fee to say the least and it will change each month based on the accounts we have. As most know, we create all of our accounts manually so now we will be charged for the accounts that sit on the server that have yet to be sold. We will be trying to cut that down by having a set amount up for sale to decrease that.

This comes to the news I never wanted to do…as you can see by it being now 9 days later…I have thought about and to be honest, I have cried about this situation everyday since because I didn’t want to have to raise our pricing but at this point, I have to because our current pricing for the budget streams is not sustainable with the price hikes we have endured from Linden Lab to now our datacenter. We cannot stay inworld in business with pricing at $0.37 a month (L$100). We cannot pay real world servers, software fees, our amazing staff, and expand etc at this rate.

We are considering launching a Patreon but for one, I am unsure if anyone would be interested in Hostcrate like that and two, outside of keeping your same price & a new Tshirt/Sticker/Merch each month as an exclusive benefit to becoming one of our Patreon’s, I have not a clue what to offer. Hostcrate has been my life since I was only 22 years old so this defeat is so heartbreaking to me personally because I love all of my customers, I love what I do so very much, and Hostcrate would NOT be around for this long without you.

I just hope everyone can take a moment to understand and not be upset with me about the price change I must make. Thank you all.

Pricing will be changed on October 10th, 2019.

Budget Streams: L$99/week
Intro Streams: L$150/week
Club Streams: Remaining the same as of now
Radio Streams: Remaining the same as of now

License changes have been posted at: https://news.hostcrate.stream/2019/10/update-to-important-changes-at-hostcrate/

L̶i̶f̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶L̶i̶c̶e̶n̶s̶e̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶r̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶y̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶t̶e̶r̶m̶i̶n̶e̶d̶.̶ ̶L̶i̶f̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶L̶i̶c̶e̶n̶s̶e̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶o̶v̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶y̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶t̶e̶r̶m̶i̶n̶e̶d̶.̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶i̶s̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶s̶e̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶F̶r̶i̶d̶a̶y̶,̶ ̶O̶c̶t̶o̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶1̶1̶t̶h̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶9̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶.̶

I am truly sorry to everyone that I may disappoint with this news. I hope that you’ll still keep us as your provider through this change but I understand if that won’t be the case.

Again, Thank you,
LustyLexxi Larimore

We are less than a week until October 1st. I decided to give a little update since as I stated before that the 1st of each month would be the day we process funds via Linden Lab then donate them directly to each charity once processed.

As of this writing, there is L$120 donated for each charity which translates to about $0.46 (screen shot: https://gyazo.com/a92649a603d173aa916209170d3d35d5.png)

As you may noticed, the minimum is $2.50 USD to process funds. We may have to roll this onto the next month.

Proof funds are in account still: https://gyazo.com/23e5df7145ea12ebd8bd86bba647e897.png

Thank you to Miau5estrellas Resident for being the first to donate! We greatly appreciate it!

SL URL to Donation Area: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lawton/138/142/48

Thank you!

Hey there!

We all have seen the devastation that has been happening in the world. We would like to build a community to help do our part to spread helping one another.

After a lot of my own research, I have come across 3 charities that give the majority of donations to the causes that are raising funds for rather than giving enormous amounts of funds for their top executives. I thought this was an important factor while finding reputable charities.

In No Order:

All Hands and Hearts
https://www.allhandsandhearts.org/

Midwest Food Bank
https://www.midwestfoodbank.org/

Toys for Tots
https://www.toysfortots.org/

I have set out donation boards for each charity:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lawton/138/142/48

On the 1st of each month, donations will be processed out of SL and donated to each charity. Screen shots and/or video will be taken and posted publicly for all to see.

ALL donations will be held in a completely separate account until it is time to process the donations to US. Dollars to be donated. Again, screen shots & videos WILL be posted publicly.. A link will be provided in the future once we have done our first processing & donating of funds to each charity.

You can follow the links given above and donate directly to the charity of your choosing if you wish to do so.

Thank you,

Today only: Contact Me Directly To Redeem! Renew a year, get a year free. Ends at 11:59PM SLT.

Merch Giveaway:

I’ll be giving away Hostcrate Merch which will include a Tshirt & sticker with possibly a few more surprise items. To enter just click on the fish bowl at the office with your Hostcrate group tag on.

Ends August 23rd. Winner will be chosen August 24th & completely random. Winner will have 24 hours to claim or another will be chosen.

Accurate address will be required to receive merch, obviously.

Customs/Taxes/Duties will NOT be my responsibility if winner is out of US, sorry. You won’t pay for shipping, that will be me.

Optional: You’ll get a free week of service if you tag us with your merch on our Instagram & Facebook accounts 🙂 @Hostcrate AND @ShopHostcrate

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Thank you,
LustyLexxi Larimore