Life In 19x19

I paid the $12 a few weeks ago. At first, I was annoyed having to pay for a site that used to be free, but I do think the cost is well worth it. I use it literally every day on my laptop at work and I like the variety of problems it offers, including the Segoe tesuji dictionary. I've solved nearly 5000 problems since I signed up, so I'm probably getting my money's worth

If you solve problems well enough, you can also win challenges that extend your membership (I think the norm is 20 extra days for most of the challenges). A skilled player could probably extend their membership indefinitely if they wanted.

I've been trying out WBaduk's Test room (more comments about it here), and GoChild is looking more attractive by the moment. The comparison reveals some of GoChild's features that might help justify the price.

First of all, it works fine. Hardly a bug in sight.

Second, it is run by one person who listens to and responds to criticism on a public forum. When he decided to make it a pay-for site for example, apparently there was initially some irritating battery-type icon that ran down indicating your time left to do free problems. Some people didn't like it, and he re-thought and re-designed his concept. Now there is a (still fairly large) set of problems you can do for free without constrictions, as well as a way to win some free access to the other problems.

Another feature I like is that you can custom-label problems, and then filter a set in order to do ones that you like for a particular reason.

On the downside of the comparison, if I recall, there are not many whole board problems on GoChild and the categories can be a bit odd (dong-dong groupings?), and the reward system simply encourages you to do lots of problems instead of helping you discover and focus on particular weaknesses. Notwithstanding, there is a lot of bang for the buck.