This may seem counterintuitive, but buying gold is actually a cheaper form of getting membership in Old School RuneScape. As you may know, there are two ways to get membership:
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Paying with real currency directly towards Jagex, currently, the price is $11.99
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Using a bond in exchange for 14 days of membership. Bonds can either be bought using real currency or from the Grand Exchange.
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The only permanent charges that can be looked at is the price of a bond or membership from Jagex. Jagex allows you to pay using multiple currencies and adjusts for local rates in some currencies. However, it doesn’t cover absolutely every country and isn’t really wide sweeping. For this article, we’ll only be looking at USD rates. Even if you live in England and use GBP, it roughly converts to the same regardless. As such, the USD rates paint a pretty much uniform picture, speaking in statistical terms.
Bonds are something that have no set fee. They vary highly, as an item that’s based on supply vs demand. As you can imagine, they self-adjust for inflation. Thus, they are pretty uniform with the state of the economy. If players have less gold, bonds will have to come down in price, else they won’t sell. Bonds only have value because they provide membership, they aren’t some gear that can go down in value in future updates. Or some gear that can devalue if a certain money making method becomes less popular (due to better methods being available), or if some method becomes saturated. As such, bond prices can be depicted in an almost uniform manner, similar to the currencies intricacies that were mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Bonds don’t necessarily only provide 14 days of membership. You can maximise the value of bonds by understanding the following chart:
The important thing to understand is that you can have a maximum of 20 bonds at any one point. The bottom three options are also only available if Jagex decides to offer the Premier Club promotion. This is typically done every summer. However, you don’t really need to concern yourself with that. The reason being is that the argument we’re presenting is that even buying 1 bond is better than purchasing membership directly from Jagex.
If we assume a bond is going for 5 million OSRS gold, which is when it is on the high spike (low spikes go down towards 2.1 million), we can prove why buying gold allows cheaper membership. Taking the current rate of gold being sold as $1 (which is again a very high rate, the current rate is actually close to $0.50/m), you can easily connect the dots.
Bonds aren’t the cheaper way of buying membership, actually buying membership directly is the cheaper way. Bonds are sold by Jagex for people to buy with real currency to convert to gold through the Grand Exchange. So, from the aforementioned figures and facts, we can compare buying gold for membership to actually buying it directly.
Another thing to remember is that we’d have to buy 2 bonds rather than just 1, as membership lasts a month, not 14 days. Buying gold would allow you to buy a membership for $8, whereas Jagex would sell it to you for $11.99. There you have it: buying OSRS gold is a cheaper way to get a membership! The final consideration is that extreme figures were used to derive to this conclusion, just to prove to you that buying gold is always the better option. You’re practically guaranteed an equivalent or better deal!
