Officially Gave Up On Keen

 So, I had been doing tarot readings via Keen since '07 on a sporadic basis. I made a little money, met a bunch of people, and had an opportunity to indulge in my hobby of doing tarot readings. Then Keen started bumping up their platform fees. At first I said, "Well, it's the cost of doing business, right?" and let it slide by. Life happened and I drifted away from Keen for a while.

Then I came back to Keen and tried to make it work in earnest. My kids were old enough to go to school. I had more time free and I was healthier, which meant I had more energy to invest in this hobby/business. Somewhere along the way, Keen had changed. They went from a fairly low key and easy to work with platform to pushy. I at first tried to ignore it. After all, I was charging the lowest rate per minute out of the group. Then it got to where they were taking 80 cents on each dollar I made. That is when I said, "I can't do this as a hobby. It's costing me money to go there and read."

I'm upset. I don't have much for social outlets. I can't just do like I did at college and whip out a pack of cards and do random readings for random people over coffee. I am good at tarot reading. I kinda pride myself on it. Even wrote a book on it (published under a pseudonym). Now, I feel like I have had my hobby ripped away by Keen's greed. It wasn't Covid-19 that made my business take a dirt nap. I had actually seen an uptick in business during the lockdown phase of things because people were lonely and wanted a friendly ear to listen. Nope, it was Keen deciding that they could screw the advisors.

Sure, their website looks pretty. Now they have a whole bank of numbers they can send calls out from. They even have it set up so that you can do readings via chat. But that doesn't make up for the fact that they've moved from ethically questionable to down right predatory in their business practices towards people like me, who are their 'product'. I don't know what it is like on the 'consumer' end of the transaction. If their treatment of the advisors is any indicator, the clients are getting screwed too.

I'm debating setting up a website and doing readings via email. That chat server process was nice and I found the interface mostly reliable. But, I don't know how to make that work via chat on something like Tumblr and still get paid. Because, I was seriously thinking about doing tarot reading part time while I worked on my writing. I was working to build up an account of seed money that I could invest into my books.

Then Keen screwed me. I sent an email out to my 200+ clients that I was leaving Keen. I explained that it was due to changes in the platform. I couldn't tack on something like my personal email address because I knew that Keen would have automatically deleted the email before it hit their inboxes. So, I don't know what I am going to do.