Curious about cost to upgrade to platinum

I have been considering upgrading my account to platinum, more to support the site than anything else, and just had a question about the upgrade cost.  To go from gold to platinum is $54.99, add that to the $29.99 already paid for the gold membership, and the total is $84.94. 

I don't mean to split hairs over $5, and it's certainly not going to keep me from upgrading, I am just curious as to why it's more expensive to go from gold->platinum than it is to bypass gold altogether.  I'm sure there is an obvious explanation that I'm over-seeing, so I just figured I'd ask.

Thanks for an amazing site, keep up the great work!

I upgraded. The benefits are you can computer analyze more games and at a 2500 strength. Plus you get a t-shirt and you can give some friend a years membership. I am happy that I upgraded, because I really wanted that t-shirt. Seriously, I recommend it. As we talked before abot game analhysis and you helped me with Chessmaster, so I believe you will be pleased. You also gat more mentor time for study. But, like I said, that free t-shirt did for me..... Greg

My guess would be that it's to cover fees from whatever payment service you use. If you go platinum right away they only pay the fee once, but if you upgrade later they'd have to pay again on the second transaction.

Platinum is well worth the 1 year's! free membership to your friend, and the awesome chess.com T-shirt. 

there shouldn't be a cost difference. i'll look into this.

the way it works is this:

the new platinum membership would be a brand new 1 year membership (valued at $79.95). but we are taking $25.00 off as that is the refund on the unused portion of your gold membership (prorated for the year). so for you since you have already used $5 of your gold membership, you are able to upgrade for $79.95-$25.00 = $54.95.

makes sense?

If anyone should feel motivated to upgrade my account to Platinum for me, I'd be most appreciative!

Perfect sense.  Thanks for the explanation.