"negative" Discount for machine usage

Hi,

we are currently redefining our memberships and one main requirement would be a new membership, that has no monthly costs - but a higher price for machine usage. I know, that there is a discount option for machine usage, but unfortunately it can’t be used to raise the costs. Would it be possible to add something like a “negative discount” or “additional %-fee” for our new membership? It would really help us a lot, a workaround would be hard to achieve.

And there is another question:
If there is a usage discount given, will the credits also take these into account? We would like to only use the discount, if the credits are fully consumed as a default machine price if you are in a specific membership.

Thanks in advance for your support!
Sebastian (Grand Garage)

Hey Sebastian,

Yes. If a member has a usage discount and credits for a machine, the discount will reduce the amount they would get charged and then that amount is subtracted from their available credits.

Example: A member has a 50% usage discount on all machines and a €2 credit for usage fees. If they use a €10/hr machine for an hour, that session would cost them €5 (= 50% of €10).
But since they have a €2 credit, that credit would get used up and the final charge would be €3.

I’m not sure I fully understand what you want to do. Can you give me a concrete example?

Thanks for answering!
Our business plan contains different machine costs for different memberships. The monthly credits should be worth the same in any membership, so in our case it would be ideally, if the discount was only used after credits are used.

Example: Machine Costs 50€ and 25€ Credits left and the member got 50% discount:
50€ - 25€ = 25€ left - now use 50% discount - 12,5€ open.

Regarding a “negative” discount - we would need an option, to increase the machine costs up to 150% for a new membership type. Is it possible, that you could add this option for us? It really would help us a lot in creating our new memberships, could you help us here?

it would be ideally, if the discount was only used after credits are used.

You can instead reduce their credits by the discount they would get to achieve the same result.

Using your example, you can give these members € 12,50 credits (€ 25 - 50%). Then they will still pay € 12,50 for a nominal machine fee of € 50:

  • The price of € 50 gets reduced to € 25 by their 50% discount.
  • Then the € 12,50 credits apply, reducing the charge to € 12,50.

we would need an option, to increase the machine costs up to 150% for a new membership type.

I’ll have to check whether we can easily provide this option without causing other issues somewhere in the system.

Hi there! Thanks for fast answering and the suggested workaround. It is probably the easiest way to get what we want to achieve. Is it possible to put a “use discount on credits” checkbox field on the list of upcoming updates?

We consider to use the workaround for 3/4 of our memberships and calculate “the credits without discount” for overview in the member page of our website. Also for marketing purposes we can’t reduce the credits in the pricing overview - so we have to do some additional math, unfortunately.

This and the 150% would help us a lot in the upcoming changes of our makerspace - Thanks for your support!

Hi Raphael,

I’ll have to check whether we can easily provide this option without causing other issues somewhere in the system.

We are planning our GO-Live of our new Memberships in the first week of november. Have you checked already, if this is possible?

Otherwise, we would have to increase prices and set discounts for every existing membership in the roll-out. If there was a 150% option, we could leave many corporate membership like they are.

Thanks for your great support,
Sebastian (Grand Garage)

Hey Sebastian,

thank you for the reminder. I have looked into this and I’m sorry to say that we won’t be adding negative discounts.
One of the primary reasons is that it causes usability issues where people won’t know whether “50%” or “-50%” is the right value if you want to people to pay half price. There are ways around that, but they involve more complications that I don’t want to introduce at the moment.

Understandable - i had to ask as it would make our specific case more easy. Thanks for looking into it - we appreciate it.