The Suffolk transcriptions on FindMyPast are from the Suffolk FHS.
I fully understand your point, Smudwhisk. In the past, if I had a simple (one look up) enquiry, several archives/record offices have looked it up for me at no cost. This has changed, and I am now usually pointed towards their research costs.
The issue with more emphasis on customer's paying research costs rather than allowing free quick lookups will be down unfortunately to Council budget limitations. They just don't have the staffing numbers now to do such lookups, although some perhaps are more helpful than others.
It is interesting the range of charges. Admittedly I haven't ordered anything from any of them for a while, but in the past Surrey and Gloucestershire were quite reasonable. There are some that want to charge for absolutely everything.
Its funny but I've always found Gloucestershire to be somewhat expensive. Their microform printouts costs for those done by the customer in the Archive were £1 per copy whether A4 or A3 for some years prior to the records going online at Ancestry. Yet other Archives weren't charging anywhere near as much. I'd not had any experience of purchasing copies from them remotely because I only live an hours drive from Gloucester. Similarly, apart from a couple of years when they halved the price, they'd charged £5 per copy fiche for parish registers for at least 13 years and when I challenged the Archivists about the fact their charges were about twice as much as other Archives, she claimed they were the average for the country. Had to somewhat disagree since we've purchased copy fiche from a number of Archives over the years and they had always been at the top end of the price bracket.
As for how much Suffolk RO will charge pay per view for their Wills when they make them online, only time will tell. I appreciate they need to cover their costs and the service can't be subsidised by the council tax payer, but if they kept the prices more reasonable lets face it most people would purchase more than less and in the long term they'd cover their costs more easily and probably make more of a profit for the Service. Their current £5 Admin charge for all copies, paper or microform, has always put me off ordering only a few copies because it pushed the price up so much. We've tended to either user a local researcher we know for copies or waited to visit the RO itself. I suspect going forward they won't be allowing photocopies of the original Wills so we'll end up incuring higher charges anyway whether purchased online or at the Archives. I believe that is the case with Wiltshire for the Wills they have digitised. Even if you visit the Archives you get charged a £1 per page for a copy from their digitised collection. With Wiltshire, if a Will is the 5 or more pages, it tends to work out cheaper to purchase a copy online. Lets just hope that Suffolk don't set the prices too higher.
As for their parish register digitisation programme, fingers crossed they perhaps use one of the two main genealogy websites as that would mean no extra subscription.
I know when my parents were at one of the SROs about 18 months ago and were talking to one of the staff, she did say that they would be digitising the original registers but, of course, depending on what agreement they do finally sign with a commercial company, that could always change. Fingers crossed it didn't. We know from experience, as we have numerous copy fiche, that quite a number of the fiche are completely unreadable in places. I think the reasoning behind SRO getting the original registers digitised and not using the fiche/films was because the intention I think was to remove access to them. If they only digitise the fiche/films, people will still need access to the originals where the images are unreadable. Again, only time will tell.
