Over the past five years, as we navigate through the ever-changing advertising landscape (not to mention the pandemic and lockdown), I have been working to be transparent about the status of the website, our business model, and our plans for the future. I’m taking this approach because Fangraphs is a community and I think our readers should understand what we are doing and why. It has been four years since the last time the price of Fanggraphs membership was raised, and we have delayed this increase as much as possible. Not only are we seeing a significant increase in our statistical licensing fees and infrastructure costs, but we are also seeing a sharp drop in advertising speed and organic search traffic this year as Google continues to push relevant sites increasingly toward pages to support new AI search results.
Starting August 4, annual Fanggraphs membership will cost $80; monthly membership costs $15 per month, while three-year membership costs $200. Since we won’t introduce this change until August 4, you still have the opportunity to purchase a $60 membership for that year, or upgrade your existing membership to a $150 three-year membership, allowing you to enter our existing pricing by yourself over the next three years.
The good news is that despite the need to add this increased challenge, your support will help us grow. Since the last price rise, we have added so many new website features that they can take up the entire post and then take up some posts. We have added five new full-time employees. We have included Black League data on the website and modified the rankings. We launched a mobile app and added PitchingBot and Quitt+ Pitch modeling. We redesigned the projector and added weather data to our split, as well as spring training data, playoff rankings and full historical season data.
Last year, we added a number of new features to the site, including:
We have also enhanced and improved a large number of features we have available, including:
Membership comes with ad-free browsing, one-click data export, and unlimited Fangraphs and Rotographs articles. It also allows us to bring you greater website customization; indeed, as I pointed out in my April Fangraphs post, customization has become a key principle for membership. We don’t want to force you to watch baseball or Van Graff the way we do. We want to let you choose what you want to see and how you want to see it, from flipping your site to dark or classic mode, to removing photos from your homepage, to setting up your own player page dashboard and customizing reports and rankings.
We recognize that not everyone can pay for Fanggraphs members, especially students. If you are a student with a valid .EDU email address, please email us at support@fangraphs.com and we will send you a coupon code that will reduce your membership by 50% within four years. Additionally, if you are a teacher in a teaching class, it may be a valuable resource, please let us know that we can provide appropriate accommodation for your students.
We realize that there is fierce competition for your subscription funds and we are all dealing with economic uncertainty, but we think the depth and breadth of our coverage make Fangraphs worthy of your hard-earned money and still has considerable value in the sports media subscription environment. We do not work with sports books. We have no corporate overlords or external investors. Our articles are not written by AI. Advertising revenue and your membership funding support our 15 full-time staff and 17 contributors. The website’s membership support has allowed us to grow over the past four years, just like we have been in 20 years of history. So if you have the ability to do this, I hope you will become a member and help us continue to build better fangraphs.
