The announcement that Ecency's Boost feature was being retired came as a bit of a surprise. This was allegedly due to complaints about it being a vote buying scheme. This was quickly followed by the announcement of a new feature: Boost+. We all know the complaints about the Boost feature are crap, because having a post boosted was never guaranteed. They were all manually curated, so low-effort and spam posts weren't given the time of day.
Boost+
The solution was to announce a different feature, called Boost+. For 1500 Ecency points, you can boost your own HP with a delegation of "200+ HP" for 7 days. I still have a bunch of points left, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
I paid my 1500 points.
As promised, I got my delegation.
I didn't have much free HP prior to the delegation. Even so, you can see with the vote value estimate it's not even a blip on the radar.
The Cost of Boost+ for 7 Days
Numbers don't lie, so I did the math.
You can buy 1200 Ecency points for $1.99, which equates to $0.0016583333 per point. So for 1500 points, you're paying $2.48749995. Now let's convert this to Hive. When I did the calculations for all of this, according to CoinGecko, Hive cost $0.3263 for 1 Hive.
So $2.4874995 ÷ $0.3263 = 7.6233525896 Hive for ~200 HP delegation for 7 days.
The Cost of Leasing 200 HP
Now let's look at the alternative option, which is to go to Hive Engine or DLease and submit a request to lease 200 HP from someone else. I went with 15% simply because right now leases on DLease are unfilled at a little over 10% APR. Considering many can curate for themselves or delegate to curation accounts and make that without having to bother with a middleman, I would need to sweeten the deal to make it worth their while.
So 15% APR ÷ 365 days × 200 HP × 7 days = 0.57534246 Hive for 7 days.
If you simply powered up 7 Hive every day for 29 days, you'd have a little over 200 HP to keep forever.
Sure, if you're getting Ecency points simply for posting, commenting, etc., then no biggie. If you're gifting points to a newbie so they can play around with a small amount of HP until they can build their own, I suppose it's okay. If you're looking at doing that, you could just delegate 200 HP of your own to them.
Final Thoughts
If you're actually paying for points or delegating with Ecency points as your primary motivation, you may want to look elsewhere. Other than promoting your post, the points have now become mostly useless due to the Boost feature being eliminated. Maybe I'll be proven wrong and they'll roll out some additional features that will make them worthwhile again. If they don't, all it would take is PeakD or someone else making an eye-appealing app with a similar Boost feature and you'd likely see a large exodus.