Is anyone else incredibly frustrated with the 1-listing limit for free accounts? It feels like MorphMarket has completely forgotten about the small-scale hobbyists who helped build this site. Being forced to wait for one item to sell before listing another—while also having a 3-per-month cap—is a total bottleneck. It’s a shame to see such a great platform become so restrictive for the average person.
It is honestly ridiculous how much the spirit of this platform has changed. It’s hard not to see these new restrictions as anything other than a blatant corporate money grab. Since the change in ownership, the site has moved away from supporting the grassroots hobbyists who built this community and toward a ‘pay-to-play’ model that feels greedy and exclusionary. Forcing us down to a single listing—while simultaneously capping how many we can even post in a month—is a bottleneck designed specifically to squeeze $36–$60 a year out of people who aren’t even running a full-scale business. It’s a shame to see another great community resource get ‘corporatized’ to the point where the average enthusiast is essentially priced out of participating.
The hobby has grown exponentially in the past 6 years. That means a lot of web traffic and moderation for the site. That is not cheap. So I can understand why the need to rearrange subscriptions exists.
The current free level is not much different from when I started looking into it in 2018 and my actual store verification (as a free shop) in 2021. The limit did drop to 500$ from a 750$ iirc so if that was the issue I can see that. The 3 ads limit has always been a thing for me when I was running free.
It exists as it states. “Trying it out”
If you are actually looking at breeding and selling as a hobbyist then you shouldn’t just be ‘trying it out’.
The way I see it is I am paying for the access to the site to market my animals to a larger audience than I can hope to by myself. The new discounts to shipping are a great bonus that more than pays for the cost of the membership. And I feel much better about speaking with customers and selling through MorphMarket than any other sites currently. Although I do know another site is going through a huge change at the moment so who knows what happens with that.
It’s a bit odd for me to see complaints about the free accounts. If it’s that much of an issue there’s always the local try selling to exotic shops or Craigslist options?
Basically the way I see it is that with how many perks there are to a membership, I’d say its well worth the money.
I’m not going to complain about paying a monthly/annual fee on MM when my shipping costs are reduced from over $200 to less than $60 with MorphMarket
The memberships MorphMarket have gained is what allows them to be able to offer shipping at such a huge discount, its also what funds them to be able to put back into the community. (Not to mention all of the other perks and features currently in development).
They did also recently add a new tier for Hobbyists that was specifically made to be more cost effective while giving a taste of what perks are available.
Edit: Lets also not forget Buyer Protection as well, the memberships also allow MorphMarket to make that a thing!
I think it’s totally fair that the payment plans essentially follow how much you’re potentially making off the platform - the more you make, the more you pay, and you get perks like a wider reach etc as well. That being said, as someone who mainly uses the store for research - since it isn’t used in my country, and im unable to export - i find it incredibly unfortunate that they’ve restricted the availability filter for non-paying members to only show animals sold in the last few days. I can’t really see the reasoning behind that tbh.
Seems like most features of the free account are about what they were when I started here, too. I did try a few ads and upgraded very quickly. I am certainly not a large volume seller. This is a passion for me and a true labor of love. That’s a clichéd expression, but I can’t think of a more accurate phrasing for all that goes into it. I very much appreciate all I get from my MorphMarket membership, quite apart from sales. And golly, the savings on shipping is terrific. I make full use of the Collection and Husbandry features, including bloodlines. That’s super useful for me and for potential customers, too. The MorphMarket Support people are consistently prompt and helpful. I love the Community side for all kinds of reasons.
I agree that there is a different feel to things now versus a few years ago. But then that’s true of everything, everywhere, for all sorts of reasons.
This does seem odd. The community and the hobby benefit greatly by incorporating intelligent decisions about breeding plans. Being able to look at availability and sales across past months and years is a solid part of making sound and feasible choices. There’s more to those choices than pricing, of course. Still, limiting access to information which can only help individuals and assist the hobby writ large doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe there’s a technical reason? I no speakush techs.
Exactly. I havent bred yet but ive spent about 10,000 to get started breeding with the understanding that i had these tools and now its gone and i have to pay for pro to get a portion of that back??? I was counting on that resource to help id and buy and educate myself. Now i wish i never did all that. I wish i could get all my time and energy and money back. And whats worse is that i think this is gonna be very bad for future and first time buyers. They wont know what all these morphs are, what combos do, what costs what it does and why. This is going to kill alot of the future potential and validity of mm.
Its not just that. Im a buyer. Not a seller. And these changes for the search make the entirw shopping experience so blan and boring and not educatiinal so make informed purchases that i dont even want to do it anymore. And additionally if i wanted to continue and i oayed it still wouldnt be good enough. 2 years? No. Ive bought adult snakes that i was able to track back to the original breeder, see the baby pictures, see the sire and dam, realize they were pos hets and everything. That was fun and exciting. Now its no different than buying snakes from facebook groups.
Ive been using it to look at trait expressions, like if i hatch an, based on my experience, unusual crestie id see if i could find something similar that someone had hatched in the past, and if i found something, look at parents, siblings, progression etc. It’s been incredibly useful in IDing stuff, and figuring out if my hunches were possibly correct; or if a gene expression is simply uncommon here, but common in the US, as well as how a trait has evolved since first being introduced to the market. Now it’s pretty useless, especially for the more uncommon genes, since they dont sell as much, so only being able to view the sales in the past few days means that im not able to view any sold geckos at all
I need to point out before I start that the following is my personal opinion. Ignore the staff badge, it has no bearing on what I’m going to say.
First off, I’m going to bring up the fact that Darien has since addressed the search function issues, and they were corrected:
So that at least negates a lot of the worries about that as a resource, I will highlight, however…
It needs saying, both buyers and breeders (especially the latter) should know what they’re looking for ahead of time. If someone doesn’t know what a morph is, or what a combo does, then they need to figure that out before purchasing or breeding. There has been an increase in people starting out without the necessary knowledge base and it causes problems access to historical ads can’t easily fix. Depending on the animal, we also now have access to an ever expanding number of morph testing options for some of the more popular species, to make identification easier without relying on the subjectivity that comes from looking at a bunch of photos.
Second, MorphMarket doesn’t have an obligation to offer a free tier, it’s not really financially viable, but they do it anyways. The upper tiers support the free experience. If you’re doing enough business that one ad at a time and three ads a month isn’t enough, you’re doing enough to justify the price of a higher tier, especially considering that the lowest tiers cost less than a single expo table fee. If you find $36/year unreasonable, that’s pretty worrying.
The site itself has changed and expanded massively from the time I made my account in 2020. More than half of the features we have now didn’t exist, and while the selling aspect of free accounts has changed slightly, you also still have access to more features at that level than previously. I’m going to link to this newsletter from when prices increased in 2021 because it really emphasizes what goes into this site and what it costs to run it. Remember, this is a post from five years ago and the site has grown exponentially since. You can look back through the blog history to see everything that has been added. I remember before we even had real time messaging, when you were still judged on your response times.
Do I believe that the site has put hobbyists on the back burner in favor of catering more towards the larger volume sellers? Sure, but the larger names are also the ones who tend to spend the most money and having them on the platform is beneficial to everyone. The hobby is, by definition, pay to play. Money is invested before ever getting to the point of selling, and it has always been known that you will need to invest to be competitive no matter the size of your operation. You wouldn’t expect an expo to give you a free table to try it out. MM is essentially one big expo in an online platform with a large vendor pool. I do think there should be additional features that offer a more level playing field for those on the smaller scale, but they could always be added in time. There’s also feature requests for anything you think may be beneficial.
All of that said, you don’t have to use the site, and plenty of folks don’t. There are sellers whose main platforms are on social media or other forums and even some of those with MorphMarket stores still do larger volumes of sales offsite. The thing is, with that you have to invest more of your personal time and effort, which has its own value, versus using something that already comes with built in marketing and tools to expand your reach with minimal input. In my opinion, I find a membership worth the relatively low price for the tier I’d need and the value I get out of it.
Thanks for this, Jess. While I have been on the outside scratching my head for the decisions of some large organizations, I have also seen enough of the inside of large organizations to know that there are ALWAYS considerations and reasons for those decisions above and beyond what people on the outside can possibly understand.
While I can sympathize with the temptation to call it a corporate grab for money, as mentioned above, I was guessing there was more going on behind the scenes. I figured they must have good reasons (or at least perfectly logical reasons) for making the changes. Thanks so much for making them plain.
It is so hard to please everyone, and also maintain financial viability to stay afloat. Kudos to MM for keeping and making so much data available, even if they can only do it for sellers. I think I’ll continue my seller account indefinitely even if the only thing I can see is full history. It is a very helpful tool, and the scores of servers they must have to support all that data (and the traffic accessing it) must certainly not be cheap.
I sure do appreciate and love all of MM’s features. It’s definitely been worth the cost to me, both personally AND as a seller. It’s even less than a Netflix subscription if you take the lower tiers, and surfing morphs is a far better use of time than watching movies, IMO.
