When Buying More Cam Tokens Saves You Nothing

Buy CAM4’s 150-token pack and you pay 12.7¢ a token. Buy the 300, the 550 or the 1,050 and you pay more per token than that. The small one is the best price on the ladder, which is not a promotion and not a mistake anybody is going to correct. It has been the shape of CAM4’s card ladder for as long as this site has recorded it, and “buy the biggest you can afford” is straightforwardly the wrong answer there.

Only one ladder shape behaves

Every cam site sells its currency in tiers and every one of them implies the same thing: spend more, pay less per unit. Across the twenty ladders I hold, that turns out to be true on seventeen, and the other three fail in two different directions.

It goes backwards. CAM4, on the card rail. The 150-token tier at 12.7¢ beats the three tiers above it. At any given budget the right answer is often several of the small pack rather than one of the large.

It goes nowhere. MyDirtyHobby prices every tier at exactly €0.0125 a DirtyCent. Buying €50 in one go gets you precisely what buying €10 five times gets you. It is the only genuinely flat ladder in the dataset and, in its way, the most honest one on this page: it does not pretend the big pack is a favour.

It barely moves. SecretFriends prices five consecutive tiers at exactly one dollar a credit, so the first hundred dollars you spend there buys no discount at all, and even at the top of the ladder the saving is 12%, the shallowest ladder here.

What the spread is worth when it does work

On the seventeen that behave, the difference between the best and worst tier is the money most people leave on the table, and much larger than the difference between platforms.

CooMeet’s worst tier costs 80% more per minute than its best, the widest spread here and the one priced against its own category rather than against a cam site. CAM4’s card rail spans 57% counting all four rungs. CamSoda and Babestation both run 50%. Chaturbate and MyFreeCams both run 39%. Stripchat runs 30%.

Eighty per cent is not a rounding decision. On CooMeet it is the difference between paying $0.278 a minute and paying about half as much again, decided by which button you press on a page you will spend nine seconds on.

Every one of those ladders is priced out tier by tier on the package page, with the cheapest rung on each named, and the same figures drive the tier table on the cost per minute page, which orders them by the spread rather than by price because the spread is the part that is comparable across currencies.

Why the welcome offer usually beats all of it

On the one platform where I have confirmed both the ladder and the offer at a checkout, the first-purchase discount is worth more than the entire volume ladder.

200 Stripchat tokens on the welcome offer come out at 8.00¢ each. Stripchat’s largest tier, 2,350 tokens, is 8.51¢ at list price. The smallest purchase on the offer beats the biggest purchase without it.

So the order of operations for a first purchase is the reverse of the intuition: take the offer, buy small, and worry about the ladder on the second purchase. What each offer actually is is a page of its own, because two of the ones this site used to advertise turned out never to have existed.

The tiers I am reading from somebody else’s screenshot

Most of these ladders. Stripchat’s is the only one read off its own logged-in checkout, and confirming it deleted three tiers that seven other sites publish and that do not exist at any price. An unconfirmed ladder is worth exactly that.

Whether CAM4’s inversion still holds. It is recorded from CAM4’s own pages and has not been re-read at a basket, and an inversion is exactly the kind of thing a site fixes quietly.

And the tiers above Stripchat’s 2,350. The checkout links to them, I did not follow the link, so what is published here is the default ladder every buyer sees rather than the whole menu.

The rule that survives all of this

Look at the ladder before you buy anything, once, on the platform you have chosen. It takes ten seconds, and no other optimisation in this industry is both free and reliable.

Do not carry a rule between platforms. “Biggest is cheapest” is right seventeen times out of twenty here, and on the three where it is wrong it is wrong by up to 57%, far more than the rule saves you when it is right.

And do not buy a pack larger than you intend to spend. A tier ladder strands money in a wallet by design, and a discount on currency you never spend is not a discount. The session tool prices that in: what an evening costs including the balance left behind.