We know that everything has continued to get more and more expensive these days. This applies to everything from streaming subscriptions to groceries to sneakers—nothing feels unaffected. And while the world around us has gotten more challenging to keep up with, Baseball Prospectus has tried to be an outlier. While our competitors raised prices to keep up with growing costs, we tried to leverage our subscription growth into keeping us afloat, and our work accessible, during a rising economic tide. And this worked well enough for a couple of years.
Our preference would be to operate at a larger scale with a lower subscription cost—this is not a business built on extracting every possible dollar. However, starting in 2023, our growth began to plateau and it has not improved since. This leaves us no choice but to raise our prices in order to continue giving you the breadth of baseball analysis that you’ve come to expect at Baseball Prospectus. We will not settle for providing you with any less. When the site started, a subscription cost $40 per year. On the purchasing power of a dollar alone, that $40 from 2003 works out to around $71 these days, not accounting for other cost increases. While other baseball sites have, understandably, seen their prices go up by over 100% just in the last decade, we kept our prices as low as possible for as long as we reasonably could.
We have not taken this exercise lightly and our senior management team has spent the last six months determining how we can keep the business both operational and healthy. Our budget for personnel has gone up nearly 50%, web-hosting costs increased almost 80%, and insurance, accounting, and software costs have also steadily risen. In spite of that, we didn’t touch our subscription price, because our preference is to reach the most people with the best publicly available baseball research. Unfortunately, the inflection point is here.
So, starting January 1, we are updating prices and changing our subscription model slightly to give you even more value for your subscription. Our plan is to raise the price once, to avoid a trickle of increases that we’ve frustratingly seen from other service providers. The two-tier structure will remain in place, and while the Premium version will include all of the things you have already come to expect from BP, the Super Premium tier will have additions we think you will enjoy. The details are below:
Premium: $74.95/year. This tier includes everything your current Premium subscription does—all of our written content, statistical tools, and PECOTA.
Super-Premium: $99.95/year. This tier includes everything you get with Premium plus our Bat Signal fantasy answering service and two new offerings. First is early access to PECOTA, including within our online tools (the AX, leaderboards, SSDA, etc). The second is online and searchable access to the entire current year’s BP Annual, which will continue to be updated during the pre-season with the most current playing time projections.
We will continue to offer a monthly subscription, and that new price will be $19.95/month. Additionally, starting next year, we will offer our BP360 promotion all year, which will include everything that Super-Premium includes and also comes with a physical book and a t-shirt. For this year, we will continue the BP360 promotion unchanged, separately (available now).
We continue to believe it’s an extremely good deal. Your subscription supports dozens of award-winning authors and analysts, who combine to produce more than a hundred articles each month, on a breadth of subjects, so there’s sure to be something you’ll enjoy on the site each morning. You get prospect coverage, both on a day-to-day basis through the Minor League Update, as well as the top prospect lists by Jeffrey Paternostro and the prospect crew, which are already underway. You get advice and reflections by expert league-winning fantasy writers, with the 2026 positional previews coming once the calendar turns over.
On the features side, we’ll continue to provide the combination of deep statistical analysis and whimsy that have defined BP since its very inception. Your support allows us to give our authors the ability to go long on series such as Rob Mains’ Around the League in 90 Days, Patrick Dubuque’s retrospective transaction analysis series TA06, and Matt Trueblood’s detailed and incisive Game Day breakdowns. You’ll still get insightful statistical analysis from Trueblood, Tim Jackson, Daniel R. Epstein, Bradley Woodrum, and Mario Delgado Genzor, the thoughtful historical perspective of Steve Goldman, the latest on the league’s corporate behavior and labor situation from Marc Normandin, the league-wide trend-watching of Mains, the sharp wit of Justin Klugh, transaction analysis by Andrew Mearns, and the daily recap series Box Score Banter, among other featured writers and topics. All of this is powered by the research and development team that undergirds so much of what we do, providing proprietary and envelope-pushing statistics, including our flagship Deserved Run metrics, as well as our more recent StuffPro and arsenal metrics. Our editorial team of Dubuque, Craig Goldstein, and Ginny Searle will continue to provide commentary and criticism on the latest news.
And it’s that last line item that deserves underscoring. Baseball Prospectus is, as it began, a worker-owned enterprise, independent in finances and independent in spirit. In a world where the fate of the media looks even grimmer than the fate of the economy, where newspapers and critics are vanishing, or being bought out by the powers they’re meant to cover, we want to fight the tide. We began as baseball outsiders, and we want to stay baseball outsiders, to be able to provide you objective analysis, driven by neither mandate nor clicks. In an era where ad-driven revenue is dying and the concept of everything being free on the internet is fading away, our model is the only path forward for creating a quality product at a fair price, and that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do. (OK, maybe one other thing.)
As a current subscriber, we truly hope you see the value in Baseball Prospectus. Even at this new price (which only takes effect once your subscription ends, as of 1/1/2026), we are still less expensive than comparable publications, while providing high-quality daily content from the authors you know and love. With a sustainable business model, we will continue to not only provide that platform for years to come, but be able to actively work on improvements to the site.
Thank you for your continued support of Baseball Prospectus.
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