Editor Rating:
| Project Listing Pricing | Price | View Site |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Project Listing | $199 | Visit Club |
| Extra Emails Fees | Not Offered | |
| Social Sharing | Not Offered | |
| Discounts | 50% Offered (see below) |
PROs
Reported 78,666 members on email list. Free membership site. Anyone can join by entering their email address (without verification).
CONs
No social media sharing. Lack of information, public image, and branding. No email verification. This means they might have 78,666 emails on a list, but haven't verified if they are real or active email addresses. Free membership with no member commitment.
BackerCity is very similar to BackerLand. Check out our case study analysis here:
Are BackerCity and BackLand the Same?
BOTTOM LINE
BackerCity is not a club we would recommend. We feel their project listing fee at $199 is too much to pay for the services offered. You get one email to their list of 78,666 supposed users for that price (did we mention they don't verify any of them?), posting on their website, and no social sharing that we are aware of.
BackerCity Review
BackerCity offers project promotional services for crowdfunding projects including Kickstarter and Indiegogo. They do not provide a lot of information up front besides a short FAQ questions page, so you are pretty much on your own when decided to use their services. We found that BackerCity is run by a company called BackerEmpire Inc based out of Ontario, Canada. They have a registered business listing with an individual named Gang Li listed as the director. BackerCity also has many similarities with BackerLand. We documented them for you here. In this review, we will walk you through the BackerCity site, project submission process, payments and project fees, and the emails they send you after you submit your crowdfunding project.
The BackerCity Site
The BackerCity site is pretty simple and consists of just a few pages. The front page hosts all of the projects on the site with the earliest one dating back to September, 2015 (date based on Indiegogo completion date). It's pretty long as you can see in this horizontal screen capture. It's almost the exact same layout as BackerLand's home page. Next, they have an about us, login, FAQ, and project submission pages as well.
BackerCity Members
They report they have "78,666 Super-Backer Members" (see the submission screenshot in the gallery above). However, we found this hard to believe just like BackersHub and BackerLand. They have a club member signup form, but there is no verification process for email confirmation or reCaptcha. We were able to make multiple accounts just by entering random names, emails, and passwords, so we just added about ten more users to BackerCity! It seems silly to say you have that many members when the majority of them (if not all) are bot created without any member commitment.
A small number of dedicated club members will provide more support than 100,000 bot accounts any day.
Submitting a Project to BackerCity
For submitting projects to BackerCity, they provide a Submit Project link in the top menu bar. That will bring up the submission form. Once you enter your information, the submission process is complete. They followup with emails and links to have to you pay via PayPal.
They gave us two payment links in the same email. One for $199 and one for $100, and said that we could get a 50% discount if we placed their banner in our project listing (see below). It felt like they didn't even think their club was worth $199 since they immediately offered us a discount.
They also don't sign any emails except for "BackerCity," so we still had no idea who we are talking to or dealing with. We declined to pursue this club any further because we feel that giving a lot of money away to strangers is not a wise choice.
BackerCity's List And Switch Trick
BackerCity tried pulling a listing first pay later trick on us. We submitted a project and did not pay for a project listing. Then after a few days, they listed it for free and kept emailing us payment links over and over again asking us to pay and threatening they would delist our project from their site if we didn't pay in two days. You can take advantage of this by simply submitting your project and not paying.
Our Backer Club Rating for BackerCity:
We gave BackerCity two stars as a backer club. This was because they charge $199 as a standard fee for hosting your crowdfunding project and don't have much to show for it. Like BackerLand, there is a serious lack of information about who they are, where they are located, and what they do for your marketing. Whenever there is a lack of transparency with a business, it raises red flags. This usually means that they intentionally do not provide identifying information as to avoid litigation or other legal trouble if they are identified. Most of the users they report are likely inactive, fake, or bot generated. They also don't have any BackerCity twitter accounts for project tweeting and sharing. We think you can get a better return for your money elsewhere with other backer clubs if you are serious about marketing your crowdfunding project.