Yesterday, MoviePass raised its rates from $9.95 to $14.95 per month per subscriber, just two weeks after running out of money and securing a $5 million emergency loan from a hedge fund. This is one of about a half dozen pricing changes – we’ve lost count – over the last year or so, causing concern that MoviePass doesn’t have a good handle on its business model. Running out of operating funds wasn’t MoviePass’s only recent mistake, however. The site experienced an outage the weekend Marvel’s Ant-man was released, frustrating moviegoing subscribers.

But that’s not their only misstep. Last Friday, MoviePass crashed, making moviegoers choose between Slender Man and Mission Impossible – Fallout, but the movies were only available at two different times, reports Digital Trends.

MoviePass has also announced that, starting next month, subscribers will be limited to three movies a month for $10. MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe apparently tried to explain it all away in an interviewing, saying the policy was temporary until it could launch its three-movies-a-month plan in an attempt to reach sustainability.

“Unfortunately, in order to stay financially stable, we’ve had to curtail the service,” the CEO said. “We had to right the ship as far as the amount of money we were burning.”

That’s not all though. According to Business Insider, subscribers who have canceled the service are finding out that MoviePass has re-enrolled them. The company has emailed some subscribers, saying the following:

Other MoviePass subscribers on Twitter have complained that they can’t cancel the service, despite multiple attempts.

In a surprising PR move, yesterday MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. published a “progress report” with a one-year anniversary of the company’s acquisition of MoviePass. The company boasts that they have partnerships with Costco, iHeart Radio, “major Hollywood studios” and more than 2,000 partner screens.

“We far exceeded our 2017 expectation for Helios and MoviePass,” said Ted Farnsworth , Helios chairman and CEO in a statement. “In our agreement to acquire MoviePass in August 2017, MoviePass had a performance milestone to achieve 100,000 subscribers in one year.  We were all surprised to see the subscriber growth surpass that milestone in one week.  It is rare to see surprises of this magnitude. We’ve reached an important point in our company where, after a year of research and analysis, we believe we have fine-tuned the MoviePass business model to fit our unique growth rate. Under the new plan, we believe we are creating a more sustainable path for MoviePass and its loyal subscribers.”

The list of MoviePass’ achievements drones on and on:

• 47 percent of subscribers are recommending more movies to friends.
• MoviePass is one of the most widely read business stories of 2018.
• 70 percent of subscribers somewhat or strong agree that they are more likely to see a film despite a low Rotten Tomatoes score.

Investors are not fooled. One month ago – July 16 – Helios and Matheson (NASDAQ: HMNY) stock was valued at $27.75 per share. As of 7:59 PM EDT yesterday, stock was valued at $0.048 per share. That won’t buy a lot of Junior Mints.

Insider Take:

If it weren’t so sad, MoviePass’ predicament would be laughable. Helios and Matheson brags that they’ve grown their subscriber base, but what good does a subscriber base do if they are abandoning ship? Helios and Matheson have owned the company for one year, and they’ve run it into the ground. They took something that had potential and destroyed it.

We are always talking about best practices, but MoviePass seems to be doing the opposite – they change pricing regularly, they don’t fulfill their promises, the service has repeated outages or restrictions and they are not transparent. With worthy competitors in the movie subscription marketplace now, I don’t know why someone would choose MoviePass. It seems doubtful they will be around for much longer.