We’re raising prices on all YCP tickets.

There are several reasons for this, but the “final straw” was our new credit card processing company.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount about swinger clubs and banks in the past three months. We were dropped by our old processor for violating their terms of services. After researching the issue, I learned that banks and credit card processors exclude businesses like ours, not because they are a credit risk but because we are “icky.” One staff member told me that it just doesn’t look good to their stock holders to have businesses like ours in their portfolio. Which is hilarious when you stop and remember how banks almost destroyed the entire developed world a few years back. But I digress….

We were forced to go with a “high risk” credit card processor, which took a couple of months to obtain and costs much more. This new company is going to cost us about $6500 more this year than our previous company.

I know that sounds outrageous, but trust me…we didn’t have any options left. PayPal, Stripe, etc., all have pretty clear “anti-swingers” policies.

Besides the new payment processor, these parties are also much more expensive to hold than people realize, and our attendees are paying much less than anyone else pays to attend any other event. 

For example, virtually everyone else charges $70 – $80 per couple, and then generate additional revenue by selling mandatory memberships or allowing single males in at up to $200 per person. Our tickets were starting at $40. No memberships, no upcharges. Which is just fucking insane.

When you take the first twenty tickets that we sell, those first 20 couples do not even pay for the pizza, front desk staff and the tips to the property owners. Much less covering rent and other expenses.

If you stop to think about it, even people paying $65 per couple are only paying $32 per-person to attend a six-hour event that includes food. You couldn’t buy three drinks at a vanilla bars for $32. It’s really dramatically underpriced.

We’ve always been purposely underpriced because we do not offer refunds, so people are taking a risk by punching their ticket in advance and possibly never getting to use that ticket. People buying a month out are buying a ticket at basically half-price to help offset that risk.

We are raising prices by $3.00 per ticket. Which will generate $200 to $240 per event. Over the course of the year, it will generate roughly half of the money the new bank is keeping.

As you can see, we haven’t even raised prices enough to cover our new bank fees. We may have to increase prices again later this year, we will just have to see how this goes.

I realize that many of our attendees are in their early 20’s and any price increases makes it more difficult for them to attend. I’m really trying not to sound like Bernie Sanders here, but I do want to keep YCP affordable for everyone.