As usual a few pointers for future discussions about the planned feehikes:
1. Rising both the initial fee and the % cut together is a huge disadvantage for the systemvendors, who are Matt’s golden goose.
2. Matt said there are 700 systems on C2, but on the Show all list there are only 142 showing up. If a system has been inactive for a while it gets dropped from the list, which is fine, but would be subscribers can not see them, and anyway, who wants to subscribe to an inactive system, so let’s not count them.
3. Out of the 142 systems, only the first 80 are making money, and after a closer check, I only counted 26 in the first 40, that has a decent chance to get subscribers. So the real choice of C2 right now is about 26-30 systems. Keep in mind that systemvendors compete with each other, and the subscription fee can be a big deal between 2 similar sytems.
4. Matt said 1000s of users, but that doesn’t translate to subscribers. My guess is that there are no more than 500 subscribers at this time. I might be wrong, I hope so, but knowing a few vendors, I think 500 is an educated guess.
5. So if we have 30 subscribable systems (realistic, consistent winning trades with cheap fee) competing for 500 subscribers, but they are spread out unevenly among the vendors (my bet that 10 vendors get 90% of the subscribers), that means that even good systems won’t make much money but just break even with the hiked fees, and the rest of the systems won’t (well, they don’t) even make their money back.
6. If my assumption is right in point #5, most sytemvendors will figure after 6 months that C2 is not an easy place to make money, and they will leave. That would make C2 a very lonely place and even less income for Matt.
7. If the cost gets much higher for vendors, the competition among them will get so strong, that a few cheap and good vendors will take away most of the subscribers from others, which can be good for them and for the subscribers, but most vendors will leave eventually, although Matt is counting on the growing number of systemvendors. So Matt is going to end up with less initial fees.
8. Let’s suppose I am a good trader but I don’t have money for trading, so I use C2. If I let Matt having a 30% cut out of my fees, I might be just better off by asking my relatives for trading money and giving them a 10-20% cut out of my realtrades and wins. At least that stays in the family. 
Since I like C2 and I would love to see it in business 5 years from now, I advised Matt a modest initial fee hike (let’s say $100-120) and might be a max. 15-20% cut. Or as somebody else proposed, charging users, although I don’t see them as a source of income with only 2 dozens subscribable systems…
Well, feel free to share your thoughts…
I too would like to see C2 alive and kickin’, hell, THRIVING for that matter, a decade from now. I hope and pray that these exorbitant charges to system vendors (and therefore, to subscribers) are reconsidered, reassesed, reevaluated and abandoned for a more moderate and sustainable course of action.
By the way, excellent analysis Peter!
