A Note on Membership Pricing

Over the last five years, as we’ve navigated a changing advertising landscape — not to mention the pandemic and a lockout — I’ve endeavored to be transparent about the state of the site, our business model, and our plans for the future. I’ve taken that approach because FanGraphs is a community, and I think our readers deserve to understand what we are doing and why. It’s been four years since we last increased the price of a FanGraphs Membership, and we’ve delayed this increase for as long as possible. We’ve not only seen considerable increases in our stat licensing fees and infrastructure costs, but this year we’ve also seen a steep decline in our advertising rates as well as our organic search traffic, as Google continues to push relevant websites further and further down the page in favor of new AI search results.

Beginning August 4, a yearly FanGraphs Membership will cost $80; a Monthly Membership will cost $15 a month, while a Three-Year Membership will cost $200. Since we won’t be introducing this change until August 4, you still have the opportunity to purchase a $60 Membership for the year, or upgrade your existing Membership to a $150 Three-Year Membership, allowing you to grandfather yourself into our existing pricing for the next three years.

Note: If you are switching an existing subscription to a Three-Year Membership, you may not be charged until your Membership actually renews. The current Three-Year price of $150 will be honored at the time of renewal.

The good news is that despite the challenges that necessitate this increase, your support has helped us grow. We’ve added so many new site features since our last price increase that they could take up this entire post and then some. We’ve added five new full-time staff members. We’ve incorporated Negro Leagues data into the site and revamped our leaderboards. We launched a mobile app, and added PitchingBot and Stuff+ pitch modeling. We redesigned our projection boards, and added weather data to our splits, as well as spring training data, postseason leaderboards and full historical postseason data.

In just the last year, we’ve added a bunch of new features to the site, including:

• The FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag (Member exclusive)
• Customizable player page dashboards and player cards, like heat maps, rolling averages, and more (Member exclusive)
• Fantasy player rater
• Division I college data
• NPB data
• New heat maps
• Pitch modeling game logs
• WAR-based Playoff Odds
• Steamer platoon, context neutral, and percentile projections (Member exclusive)
• Historical Steamer, ZiPS, and ATC projections (Member exclusive)
• OOPSY projections
• FanGraphs Walk-Off (Member exclusive)

We’ve also enhanced and improved a ton of our existing features, including:

• Revamping our player pages
• Upgrading our spray charts
• Improving player search
• Improving our live data feed
• Relaunching the community research blog

Membership comes with ad-free browsing, one-click data exports, and unlimited FanGraphs and RotoGraphs articles. It has also allowed us to bring you greater site customization; indeed, as I noted in my State of FanGraphs post in April, customization has become a key tenet of Membership. We don’t want to force you to see baseball or FanGraphs the way we do. We want to let you choose what you want to see and how you want to see it, from flipping the site into Dark or Classic mode, to removing photos from the home page, to setting up your own player page dashboards and custom reports and leaderboards.

We recognize that not everyone is in a position to pay for a FanGraphs Membership, especially students. If you are a student with a valid .edu e-mail address, please send us an e-mail at support@fangraphs.com and we will send you a coupon code that will discount your Membership by 50% for up to four years. Additionally, if you are a teacher teaching a class where FanGraphs might be a valuable resource, please let us know and we can make appropriate accommodations for your students.

We realize that there is intense competition for your subscription dollars, and that we’re all dealing with economic uncertainty, but we think that the depth and breadth of our coverage makes FanGraphs worth your hard-earned money and still presents a considerable value in the sports media subscription landscape. We don’t partner with sportsbooks. We don’t have corporate overlords or outside investors. Our articles aren’t written by AI. Our 15 full-time staff members and 17 contributing writers are supported by advertising revenue and your Membership dollars. Member support of the site has allowed us to grow over past four years, just as we have throughout our 20-year history. So if you’re in a position to do so, I hope you’ll become a Member, and help us continue to build a better FanGraphs.