Announcing the FanGraphs Spring Membership Drive!
With Opening Day around the corner, I wanted to update our readers on the current state of the site and make a few Membership announcements. This time last year, we weren’t sure if FanGraphs was going to last another two months, let alone survive long enough to see the start of the 2021 season. The pandemic fast-tracked what was supposed to be a much slower shift in our business model from advertising to Membership, and because of this, we are more reliant on your support than ever. So first things first: thank you! I can say with complete certainty that we would not be here without you; our readers and members literally make FanGraphs possible.
And your support hasn’t just kept us afloat; it’s helped us build a better FanGraphs. Over the past year, we’ve added a lot of new content and features to the site. We’ve incorporated Statcast stats into our player pages and leaderboards and new game and season stat aggregation capabilities to our player page dashboards. We now have KBO stats on the site, an offering we plan to expand this season. We’ve updated our auction calculator and implemented new RosterResource features. We’ve invested in behind-the-scenes improvements to make site features better and easier to use. Today, we announced a number of new contributor voices at FanGraphs and will do so at RotoGraphs soon. And as an exclusive benefit for our Members, you can now view the site in Dark mode and Classic mode.
Tuesday is the start of what is now a very important month for the site. On March 30, 2020, we asked for your help in weathering the pandemic. As such, a significant portion of our Membership base is up for renewal in the coming weeks. If you’re an existing Member and have stuck with us through the last year, we hope that you will continue to support what we do here at FanGraphs. If you’re not a Member, we hope you’ll become one. It’s the best way to support all of the content and tools you rely on to help you enjoy the baseball season, and ensure we can keep improving the site.
To that end, we have two big announcements ahead of that anniversary. The first is that we’re launching a spring Membership drive with the goal of adding 2,000 new Members by the end of April. That might sound like a lot, but I’m optimistic we can meet that goal. Google Analytics shows that we had 1.3 million unique users in April 2019; 2,000 Members would be just 0.15% of our in-season user base. Already a Member but want to help us reach that goal? You can gift a Membership to anyone you’d like, or make a $30 donation to the site, which will count as a new Membership; more on that below.
The second bit of news is about our pricing. Starting June 1, we’re going to raise our prices from $50 to $60 for Ad Free Membership, from $20 to $25 for yearly Membership, and from $3 to $5 for monthly Membership. Please note: If you are an existing Member and maintain your Membership, your pricing will not change until at least 2023. Likewise, if you subscribe between now and June 1, you’ll be grandfathered in until at least 2023, just like our existing Members. This change will only go into effect starting on June 1 for new Members.
We wanted to give everyone plenty of notice before we raise prices so that people have the opportunity to subscribe at our current rates. We launched FanGraphs Membership in 2016, providing an ad-free option the year after. Until now, we haven’t raised the price for either option, but this is what we need to do to sustain and grow the site, and these are prices we believe are fair.
As always, you can support our site in the following ways:
Become a Member
You can become a Member or an Ad-Free Member. You’ll see all the same great content and have access to all of our tools. You’ll also have access to Dark mode and Classic mode. Ad-Free Members enjoy the site with faster loading times and no ads — the best way to experience FanGraphs.
Gift a Membership
You can send a coupon code for a one-year Ad-Free Membership to anyone you like. The code never expires, and no credit card or other form of payment is required when the recipient signs up. Their Membership begins when they use the coupon code.
Buy some Merch!
In addition to hoodies, t-shirts, and hats, our new FanGraphs Mugs are still available for pre-order. They begin shipping next Friday.
Donate to FanGraphs
We have a simple donation form you can use to donate to FanGraphs. Please note that donations to FanGraphs are not tax-deductible. For the purposes of this year’s Membership goal, we will treat every $30 donated as one new Membership towards our goal.
Thank you again for all your support over the last year and going forward! We can’t wait to watch baseball with you.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Appreciate all that you guys do here and the continued site improvements. You’re always tinkering and show a willingness to listen to your readership. As far as online communities go, I think the members/readers here are pretty fantastic. Glad you were able to weather the pandemic, although it still hasn’t completely left us; we’re all inching toward normalcy together.
Happy to continue to support the site. FanGraphs is an outstanding resource and I would be lost without it.
Dave A – long time… etc. You need to reach out to the baseballtradevalues.com guys. would be perfect add to FG. Just like Jason and roster resource. Eric and the Board etc. Good dudes too.
I like the idea of what they’re doing over there but the actual inputs they use are weird.
Thanks for reminding me to update stuff so that it will auto-renew correctly. Glad to support Fangraphs; I have always loved baseball but this place makes me love it even more.
Does it help if I just renew now? As opposed to June (when my membership is up)?
There’s no way to renew early so renewing at your renewal date works best. 🙂
I’m trying to pre-order some FanGraphs swag but can’t figure it out. Can you help me out here? I am specifically looking at t-shirts but I can’t add them to the cart because they are ‘out of stock’. How do I pre-order? Thanks!
Just the mugs are available for pre-order, but we should have new t-shirts and such in the store soon!
Summer is coming: any chance at tanks? The world needs to see my decidedly unimpressive arms.
“i am fangraph” would be a heck of a t-shirt
I would also love something along the lines of “fang-raphs” with a bat (the mammal not the hitting equipment) on the back.
Finally pulled the trigger. Guess you folks should get something back for the sheer amount of time I’ve spent on this site. Love yinz.
would like to continue the support by purchasing some merch.
most the Large options are out of stock.
We’re going to be doing another merch pre-order soon, and maybe even have some new stuff!
I was a late member (right after World Series to celebrate my Dodgers!) and I love finally feeling like not a mooch. I just love the writing on this site.
One feature request/suggestion: a members-only filter for the comments section. I’m not at all sure if this is technologically possible, but I would love to just toggle show/hide all the non member comments because sometimes it can get a little testy and depressing in the threads.
Thanks for everything!
Long live FanGraphs! Thank you for all you do…
Been a member for a minute, I think since Carson was advertising it on the pod. Wanted to let you know that I’m extraordinarily impressed with what your team’s been able to do over the past year.
Super smart business strategy – hopefully the industry-standard aggregation of baseball-related resources (RR, The Board, stat leaderboards, Statcast, PitchInfo data, many different projection systems, etc.) helps you combat the inevitable brain drain that smart baseball sites face.
It’s been awesome, I use FG every single day. It’s, IMO, the single-best resource for both regular baseball news/analysis as well as fantasy. Really really really love the site and think the work that you, Meg, and the team does is awesome. Makes me feel like the membership is more than worth the cost.
I am so impressed with FG not only staying open, but adding new features (and a TON of new writers today!). Definitely gonna find someone to give a subscription to; thanks Apples, Meg, and the rest on the SS FanGraphs!
Can members pay an extra premium for exclusive NotGraphs content?
Actually, the most NotGraphs thing we can do is pay nothing and lose FanGraphs! That would be punk!
Dave, thanks so much for everything you’ve done, particularly over the past year. I also think it’s a really stand-up move to grandfather in current members to the current pricing scheme for a couple years. That’s actually way more generous than I would expect, honestly.
I hope we can get to that 2000 goal by the end of next month!
Sorry for being annoying, but I still hate auto renewing subscriptions. Please consider removing automatically resetting me to auto-renew when I do renew. You might also want to consider emailing existing members who are not set to auto renew that their subscription is ending.
Oh, I didn’t know if you did a manual renewal that it would set things back to auto-renew. I’ll take a look and see if there’s a setting for that. This is a pretty rare thing though because it’s sort of confusing if your subscription is on hold and it’s not very intuitive how to reactivate it.
Typically I’ll cancel unrenewed subscriptions if they aren’t auto-cancelled and put in this weird manual renewal state. It’s just easier to sign up for a new membership under the same account and it doesn’t make a difference either way.
We do send an email out on cancelled subscriptions, but I agree it might be a good idea to send out that e-mail beforehand.
Thank you for considering my whining requests for special treatment! I really do feel membership is an amazing value, I’d happily pay double if you could convince Dave and Jeff to come back.
I’d also purchase a 5 year (or lifetime) membership if you ever to decide to offer it.
I’m happy to support this site, which has given me so much for free since I first stumbled across it six years ago. Not to be that guy, but I can’t find another way to ask: I purchased the ad-free yearly membership and applied the coupon code, but I’m still seeing ads and prompts to donate. I’m sure it’s something I’m doing wrong, but maybe someone can help me figure out what it is?
Nevermind! It’s working now! Glad I could contribute to the conversation…
I don’t like anything but I do like Fangraphs! Hope this keeps working for another year or ten.
Been using the site for a while but I just became a member today because I thought I should support a site that has been getting better and better. Keep up the good work!
I upgraded (or at least thought I did) to an ad-free subscription about 45 minutes ago, but I am still being served ads. Did I not upgrade properly? I was charged for it.
I think your account should be good now. Just so other people know, the best way to ask about any account or Membership issues is by e-mailing support@fangraphs.com.
Thanks David, the ads are gone. I appreciate you working your magic!
I renewed my subscription after a lapse. Really appreciate everything this site provides!
Happy to make a donation on top of my membership for the best baseball information you can find.
Just signed up. Count me as 1 of your 2,000 new members!
I am begging you to please make this site more fantasy baseball friendly. You produce so much great content, but it’s so hard to find. There has to be someone on this site who notices this and has an idea on how to fix it. For example: to find Justin Mason’s 2B rankings I end up either searching all of his posts and just scrolling back in time or just clicking on random 2B names until the linked articles shows Mason’s rankings article.
If you build an easy way to find your fantasy comment, they will come.
“You’ll say, “It’s only [thirty] dollars per person.” And they’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it.”
Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this, but I see a lot of merch chat here. Can anybody tell me what type of fit the t-shirts are? More like american apparel style? boxy gildan? gildan soft? next level? I’m in between sizes so the style/fit matter for me big time. Thanks for any help!
The term “price raise” is itself a bit of a misnomer. Due to inflation, price “increases” are keeping pace with value. It’s a weird part of money. Would be interesting to look at real dollar prices for this. When prices don’t increase, membership now costs less than ever in one sense
All the subscription options I see are auto-renew, so this post doesn’t make sense to me. And that’s exactly why I’ve never subscribed.
If you don’t want to auto renew you have 2 options:
1. Sign up and cancel right away or uncheck the auto renew box on your subscription page.
2. Gift a membership to yourself.
The new pricing kicks in June 1st. If you become a member before that date and you continue to auto-renew, you’ll be at the old price until at least 2023.
Also one thing about the gift memberships is they work like forever stamps, so even if the price increases they’ll still pay for an entire gift membership anytime in the future.
I’m torn about this. I discovered this site working on a personal passion project. It’s a hip hop musical about Dracula set during his teenage years, sort of a hybrid between Hamilton and Twilight. I was going to title it Fang Rap High School, but then I saw that the URL for FangRapHS.com was already taken. Fortunately I’m also a huge baseball nerd, and the writing here is top notch. So I want the site to succeed, but I also want the URL. Hmm.
Is this you Grey? Seems like you..
I wish it wasn’t $15 extra shipping to ship the mug to Canada 🙁
I think it actually costs us closer to $20 extra now. 🙁
Good LORD. Our two countries are so close, and yet so far away — in so many ways.
Thanks for the context, David!
I know we have members in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Maine, Montana, Washington…they’ll be more than happy to run it across!
It’s hard to make the argument that “delivering a Fangraphs mug” is an essential reason to cross the border, but I’ll try!
Friendly suggestion: the desktop front page currently has a link to the October update post above the membership widget, instead of this post. Might want to switch it up!
U GOT ME — Love this place — keep up the good work!
I know you probably will not listen stop, and this may get -158 downvotes, but PLEASE stop putting such a massive left-slant to all of your content here. I am not asking into put ANY stories or writers or articles that disagree even slightly from the Democrat story about the prevailing issues (like the Georgia bill, Atlanta ASG situation, etc). I’m not, I do not want that.
I’m just saying leave it out of baseball, or don’t act surprised when people do not want to re-up. Its literally the only thing making me not want to re-subscribe to help, and I’m certain that I’m not alone. Its really, for lack of a better word, offensive and inappropriate. I love Kevin Goldstein, hearing his views on Covid in the chats strains the bounds of decency to me. At least respect and remember that there even IS differing views, and diversity in the way people look at things, and maybe you might get more people if you leave that shit out of this thing we enjoy. We can and will have our battles in other places, but please?
Couldn’t agree more
Ditto
It’s why I canceled my membership.
I upvoted you just to show support….can’t imagine why you would get downvoted for having a non-ball washing viewpoint of the site. Some can’t handle criticism I guess.
I’ll buy another membership if you bring back the sabersim leaderboard for daily projections.
I made a $20 donation, happy to help out. Not sure if that counts as a membership or not.
There’s an economic principle called “third degree price discrimination.” It sounds nasty because of the negative connotations of these words, but is actually a smart pricing strategy that lots of companies use, and I think you guys should consider it.
TDPD is particularly applicable when you have a product that costs the same to produce (your content) and have potential buyers of very different means and motivations.
Basically, TDPD means tiered pricing- you are already doing some of this with ad-free versus not ad-free subscriptions. However, my guess is that you have a population of readers paying $0 and a population of readers for whom $20-50 is about right, and a population of readers willing to pay more (either bc they have the $ to spend freely, or they are power-users of your advanced content).
For comparison:
Baseball Prospectus, a peer website (though not nearly as good at FG) starts subscriptions at $45 and 90+% of the site is accessible only to subscribers
The Joe Sheehan newsletter- just one writer- is $50, and
Defector starts at $80 and goes up from there for things like commenting privileges, access to podcasts, birthday emails, etc.)
IMO, FG is making a mistake by keeping prices uniformly low ($0 for far too many, $20-$50 for the rest) you are essentially using something close to a single pricing model.
I presume you do this to try to convert the $0 FG readers into paid readers, at a low attractive rate. But by doing this, you are almost certainly undercharging those who would pay more because of their income or their level of interest in your various stats and services.
I’m a pretty basic but frequent user- I read the articles most days, but almost never use your advanced statistical database, listen to podcasts, participate in chats, or pay much attention to your prospect coverage. $50 sounds about right.
Others may want in-depth fantasy analysis, or access to your excellent database, or your excellent prospect coverage, or to participate in chats, etc. They would probably pay more (like Defector’s upper tiers).
And, as much as you seem to not want to keep some of your site behind a paywall, I don’t see a problem in making your advanced stat database, or chats, or commenting privileges, for example, accessible only to subscribers.
TLDR- the site is free, and you are charging very little to convert some readers to become “voluntary” members. You can make some features accessible only to paid subscribers, and charge different tiers for different levels of access/features. You’d be more financially stable.
I agree. $20 a year to have access to all of this advanced data, high-quality articles and more is laughable value. The site would be far better-off by having tiered memberships to capitalize on the power-users. Restricting access for those non-paying users. Offering a 14 day trial with unrestricted access. Baseball America charges $7 a month. I pay $20 for a whole year here. That’s one movie admission and a bag of candy for 365 days of all of this content. Love the site and want it to succeed which is why I want this change to happen.
Thanks, Birdman, and I completely agree: “Love the site and want it to succeed which is why I want this change to happen.”
Do you really need the giant yellow beg for money banner on an article that is begging for money? Just write better articles, and post them more often. Stay away from the cutesy stuff. No one wants to pay for sparkling analysis like “because Dodgers”.
This site has provided an incredible volume of very well done content covering many dozens of angles of the sport, with the vast majority of the content 100% free for more than a decade.
Tough to understand what would compel you to be so mad that they’re taking this approach vs. one of the alternatives, such as close down, create a paywall for everything, raise prices uniformly, increase the number of ads, etc.
I just joined as an ad-free member and am still getting as many ads as ever. Help?
Y’all need to get verified via Brave browsers so those of us who use them can send you some more $$$.
The membership graph is trending the wrong way. With baseball season underway now, shouldn’t that line be moving sharply up?
Who knows for sure? But my guess is Fangraphs memberships are declining because Jay Jaffe is so vocal in his Alt-Left politics, and so harsh and hateful toward anybody who disagrees with his opinions.
As long as Fangraphs is so Alt-Left, you will keep turning off half of your potential members.
What killed it for me was last year, when instead of taking sides between owners and players during the disputes, I said fans shouldn’t take a side, neither has your best interests in mind….millionaires fighting with billionaires. Predictably, I got downvoted to fangraphs hell for speaking common sense. You can love the sport of baseball and love sabermetrics and still criticize people like Blake Snell and his immaturity. I’m not a player ball-washer, nor am I with the owners. I’m expected to pay an arm and a leg to go to a game, I’m not about to shed a tear over labor disputes.
I agree that an alt-left mentality these days is very toxic and not good for business. It’s okay to have differing opinions, don’t even mind a good argument. But many on the left have this self-righteousness that’s just impossible to stomach these days….can’t have a proper convo without them essentially calling you Hitler. They know better than everyone else in this room.