Purchase Strategy
If I want to buy Anglican Starter, Reformed Gold and Platinum, which one package should I buy first?
PCA Church
L4 Platinum, L5 Reformed Platinum, L6 Reformed Diamond, Reformed Studies XL, Platinum, Logos Now
Comments
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If you're not on Logos Now, and are buying a Feature Set with your Library, you should buy the most expensive one first (because you'll get a discount for the Feature Set).
Otherwise, buy the one with the greatest discount over regular pricing first. You have to work that out yourself. See here: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/129353/840823.aspx#840823
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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The hard way to figure this out is to look at all of the overlapping books between the packages vs the ones that are added between each package and hope that you're aiming for the best mixture of discounts at each tier.
The easiest way is to call sales, tell them your plan and let them run it for you.
Sarcasm is my love language. Obviously I love you. 0 -
The best discounts relative to individual prices are almost always on the highest levels so if you are interested in Standard Platinum I would go with that first. That will give you a lot of content that overlaps what is offered in the Reformed and Anglican packages so you may find you could then easily afford higher levels of other packages at much better prices that you first thought. [H]
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Thank you guys!
PCA Church
L4 Platinum, L5 Reformed Platinum, L6 Reformed Diamond, Reformed Studies XL, Platinum, Logos Now0 -
Mark,
I've heard from some on the forums that it is better to buy your way up rather than start at the top... do you know if that is true? e.g. Buy bronze, then, silver, then gold vs going straight for Gold
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TCBlack said:
The hard way to figure this out is to look at all of the overlapping books between the packages vs the ones that are added between each package and hope that you're aiming for the best mixture of discounts at each tier.
The easiest way is to call sales, tell them your plan and let them run it for you.
That's the way I did it; faster than purchasing one at time and waiting for the adjustments to your dynamic pricing for the next purchase; of course, there is the wait time on the phone to factor in.
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Hmmm 🤔 may be an interesting way to try. I was thinking of standard Platinum, Wesleyan Gold and Penecostal Bronze
Keith Pang, PhD Check out my blog @ https://keithkpang.wixsite.com/magnifyingjesus
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Mattillo said:
I've heard from some on the forums that it is better to buy your way up rather than start at the top... do you know if that is true? e.g. Buy bronze, then, silver, then gold vs going straight for Gold
That is generally true (see the theory below), but at the moment it's not true if you are NOT a Logos Now member and you are buying a base package with a library. If you are in that group, you should buy your most expensive base package first, because non-members currently get a discount when buying a library and feature set together. That discount outweighs any other savings you might get.
EVERYTHING BELOW IS SPECULATIVE. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. BUT POST YOUR RESULTS HERE, SO OTHERS CAN BENEFIT.
The first thing we need to do is calculate the discount rates for each library, according to the principles I explained earlier. These figures are just for the library, and assume no Logos Now membership. These are the discount levels:
- Starter: 90.03%
- Bronze: 92.52%
- Silver: 89.70%
- Gold: 87.93%
- Platinum: 86.98%
- Diamond: 86.75%
- Portfolio: 87.00%
- Collectors: 85.49%
The theory is that you should save money if you buy the higher discounts first. So if you were buying Collectors, you'd buy in this order:
(These prices are the standard prices. Knock 10% off because of the current sale — 21% if you're buying the feature set too)
- Bronze for $200 should give approx. $275.61 dynamic pricing discount on Silver
- Silver for $335.50 (total so far = $535.50) should give approx. $715.86 dynamic pricing discount on Gold
- Gold for $506.36 (total so far = $1,041.86) should give approx. $1,317.08 dynamic pricing discount on Portfolio
- Skip Platinum and Diamond because they have a lower discount than Portfolio.
- Portfolio for $3,716.30 (total so far = $4,758.16) should give approx. $5,619.16 dynamic pricing discount on Portfolio
- Collectors should cost $5,880.84
If you followed this you would have spent a total of $10,639, which would save you $861, or 7.5%.
Having said that,
REMEMBER: This is all theoretical. Faithlife have adjusted the dynamic pricing formula, and we don't know what that is. We think they've tweaked the formula to minimise these gains, but it's possible they've tweaked it to PREVENT the gains.
If you want to do this yourself across different denominational package, read the theory and example here.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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So in my case it would be better to do Penecostal Bronze then Wesleyan Gold, and then Standard Platinum?
Keith Pang, PhD Check out my blog @ https://keithkpang.wixsite.com/magnifyingjesus
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I am a Logos Now member
Keith Pang, PhD Check out my blog @ https://keithkpang.wixsite.com/magnifyingjesus
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Keith Pang said:
So in my case it would be better to do Penecostal Bronze then Wesleyan Gold, and then Standard Platinum?
I don't know, sorry. I haven't done the calculations for the denominational packages.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark, that's okay, in your educated guess what would you say?
Keith Pang, PhD Check out my blog @ https://keithkpang.wixsite.com/magnifyingjesus
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Keith Pang said:
Mark, that's okay, in your educated guess what would you say?
My guess would say work up from Bronze, but it's only a guess. The Logos version of extreme couponing might look something like this:
- Standard Bronze
- Pentecostal Bronze
- Wesleyan Bronze
- Standard Silver
- Pentecostal Silver
- Wesleyan Silver
- Standard Gold
- Wesleyan Gold
- Standard Platinum
Whether that's worth the hassle (or will even work), is anyone's guess.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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EX said:
If I want to buy Anglican Starter, Reformed Gold and Platinum, which one package should I buy first?
Since you're thinking of buying a starter package plus some higher ones, you can have two bites of the cherry on getting the higher discount for including a feature set with a library. That is, you could buy the Anglican Starter, which includes base feature set and gives you an extra discount off the library, and then buy whichever of the other two has the higher cost to you (so that you get the highest discount for buying a package with the full feature set). Then buy the third one, which will not get the higher discount, but may get some extra dynamic pricing if there is overlap of resources.
I just did an approach like this with Reformed Starter, then Standard Diamond, then Methodist Bronze. After purchasing the Starter set, my price for the full feature set went down by dynamic pricing so that it only cost me about 50 cents more to buy the full features in two steps, which was more than outweighed by the extra 10% or so discount on the Starter library as well as the higher one. Also, I was able to use one of the partner referral codes (see another thread about those) on the Starter purchase, which gave me a resource from the higher package for free, reducing the dynamic purchase for the second package a bit. The Methodist Bronze was purchased last and got dynamic pricing because there was some overlap with diamond.
This only applies if you don't have Logos Now. I considered whether subscribing to Now for a year just to make the purchase would be cheaper, but it would be about $10 more.
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Mark Barnes said:
That is generally true (see the theory below), but at the moment it's not true if you are NOT a Logos Now member and you are buying a base package with a library. If you are in that group, you should buy your most expensive base package first, because non-members currently get a discount when buying a library and feature set together. That discount outweighs any other savings you might get.
EVERYTHING BELOW IS SPECULATIVE. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. BUT POST YOUR RESULTS HERE, SO OTHERS CAN BENEFIT.
The first thing we need to do is calculate the discount rates for each library, according to the principles I explained earlier. These figures are just for the library, and assume no Logos Now membership. These are the discount levels:
- Starter: 90.03%
- Bronze: 92.52%
- Silver: 89.70%
- Gold: 87.93%
- Platinum: 86.98%
- Diamond: 86.75%
- Portfolio: 87.00%
- Collectors: 85.49%
The theory is that you should save money if you buy the higher discounts first. So if you were buying Collectors, you'd buy in this order:
(These prices are the standard prices. Knock 10% off because of the current sale — 21% if you're buying the feature set too)
- Bronze for $200 should give approx. $275.61 dynamic pricing discount on Silver
- Silver for $335.50 (total so far = $535.50) should give approx. $715.86 dynamic pricing discount on Gold
- Gold for $506.36 (total so far = $1,041.86) should give approx. $1,317.08 dynamic pricing discount on Portfolio
- Skip Platinum and Diamond because they have a lower discount than Portfolio.
- Portfolio for $3,716.30 (total so far = $4,758.16) should give approx. $5,619.16 dynamic pricing discount on Portfolio
- Collectors should cost $5,880.84
If you followed this you would have spent a total of $10,639, which would save you $861, or 7.5%.
I just followed Mark's approach. In my case, Bronze also had the highest discount. However, after purchasing Bronze, I noticed that the order of discounts changed. This means that the discounts have to be recalculated after every purchase.
If I still buy Collectors, I saved $32 by purchasing Bronze first. That's a saving of 1.2%.
Armin
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Armin said:
If I still buy Collectors, I saved $32 by purchasing Bronze first. That's a saving of 1.2%.
That's good to now. According to my figures, buying Bronze then Collectors' (with no purchases in between) would have saved $75, a saving of 0.66%. So in percentage terms, you seemed to do better than expected.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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I did some more work on further upgrade paths but due to errors on the Logos website, the strategy does not work. Please see the following screenshot:
Even though I only own 3 of the Lexham Bible Guides, no price is displayed. As these guides are fairly expensive, it really breaks the purchase strategy suggested here.
I asked Sales if they could develop an upgrade strategy for me but was told that this is too complex to do and has too many variables.
Armin
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Mark Barnes said:
The theory is that you should save money if you buy the higher discounts first.
Thank you for this. To add some data to the discussion, I recently bought Anglican Bronze which was $121 with dynamic pricing. It reduced Anglican Gold from $677 to $504 (-$173) and Anglican Portfolio from $3024 to $2839 (-$185). I also bought SDA Bronze separately for $74. That reduced SDA Gold from $384 to $296 (-$88) and SDA Platinum from $766 to $676 (-$90)
The significant additional reduction and larger savings on higher packages suggests the strategy is viable to save some at least a little money, although I didn't calculate the implied percentage discounts at the time.
More recently, I bought a single title that is also in several high-end packages. Interestingly, in a collection of 7 books by the author it reduced the total by exactly 1/7th instead of the % of total the price made up. In a (fairly cheap) "library expansion," the savings was more than I would have guessed. The total resources discount appeared to be 89% (although I didn't know it is not always correct, so made no attempt to calculate it myself). The price reduction discounted the book only 82% though. Put another way, the book was 1.57% of the package "value," but buying it reduced the package 2.62%.
The effect on a high end base package was the opposite. The base package pricing appeared to be 89%, but the book was priced at 93.5% off. Or, the book was 0.177% of the base package but buying it reduced the package only 0.105%.
I should point out I have academic pricing which probably distorts the numbers unevenly. That said, I believe that there are probably different forumlas on different products, but in general both price and number of resources and/or number of volumes have an effect. That is, a cheap (at full price) 1 volume item will count a bit more than cheap expensive 1 volume item, relative to price. So the formula is something like:
base cost = x * (# of items) + price of items
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A bit more data for the analysis:
Today's daily deal was https://www.logos.com/product/51935/complementarianism List price $2.99, academic price $2.60. For fun, I priced out a few of the package resources it is included in to see what would happen.
Logos Theological Library Expansion S - I didn't own any of these resources, so it is straight forward to compare:
Full price total 187.82, academic price total 179.43, stated value in header 212.95
Package Price 44.99 (either way)
Savings 76.05% full, 74.93%academic, 78.87% stated
Actual reduction: -$0.63 = ~21% of $2.99, consistent with stated; or ~24% of $2.60, consistent with full
Logos Theological Library Expansion M - I didn't own any of these either
Full price total 461.68, academic price total 406.18, stated value in header 536.90
Package Price 89.99
Savings 80.52% full, 77.85% academic, 83.25% stated
Actual reduction: -$0.53 = ~18% of $2.99, not identical to any but closest to stated; or ~20% of $2.60, closest to full
Logos Master Library Expansion M - I won a small percentage (around 9% according the dynamic pricing)
Full price total for all resources 8227.19, dynamic academic price 6244.91, stated value 9273.33
Package price 1389.99 full / 1261.80 dynamic
Savings 83.10% full, 79.79% dynamic+academic, 86.40% stated
Actual reduction: -$0.42 = ~14% of $2.99, not identical to any but closest to stated; or ~16% of $2.60, closest to full
It looks like, at least for library expansions, the closest (but not exact) estimate is a simple "list price/stated value". I'm not quite sure why the stated value doesn't match up with the actual cost. If it is due to partial sets ("only some resources from this collection are included"), as has been suggested, then possibly buying the one included resource from the set could have an abnormally large impact if doing so fixes the stated value.
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Thaddeus Billman said:
I should point out I have academic pricing which probably distorts the numbers unevenly. That said, I believe that there are probably different forumlas on different products...
Just a cautionary tale to endorse the complications here. I've been working my way through the Academic family as I purchase more of the resources available there. (As with Thaddeus, this example could well be complicated by my academic pricing and by the many resources I already own.)
- The different levels in Academic are all nested, so it's much less complicated than jumping between different levels in different denominational packages. But dynamic pricing isn't always simply nested as we might expect.
- Once I'd purchased Academic Essentials, the prices for subsequent levels were marginally cheaper than direct purchase (savings ranging 1–8%).
- But when I'd purchased Academic Standard, the next two levels increased in price. Two levels up, Academic Professional would now cost me 3.5% more than if I'd bought it after Standard. And Academic Premium would now be a whopping 32.4% more than if I'd bought it earlier in the chain.
None of this takes into account some of Mark's other observations about overall value, percentage savings, and so on. Nor do I begrudge the complexity at work here. I'm just confirming that even the most obvious upgrade pathways may not end up being linear and intuitive.
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