Stealing Signals price change

An explanation of pricing going forward

A purely administrative post today. Effective today, pricing for subs here at Stealing Signals will rise, and considerably, as I mentioned at the beginning of the offseason. This change will impact all existing subscribers set to auto-renew, so let me start by saying that if you aren’t interested, make sure to log into Substack, go into your profile (in the top-right corner usually), and find “manage your subscriptions” to unsubscribe.

I’m also going to explain my thought process here. Through three NFL seasons and two offseasons, I’ve raised the price here at Stealing Signals one other time, and I refrained from doing so throughout 2022 despite the obvious ways inflation has impacted all of our lives. (If we’re tying the price of a monthly Signals sub to something like the price of a sub sandwich, we’re pretty obviously due.)

But more to the point, I’ve always said I’ve wanted to keep the content here widely accessible. I still do, but the reality is I just hadn’t considered the impact the growth of this thing would have. It’s tough being a solo shop, handling all the customer service aspects and everything else on the backend on your own. At the same time, I really do love it that way and wouldn’t trade it, because I don’t feel beholden to anybody.

As Signals has gotten bigger, I’ve had trouble managing the requests. One of the coolest parts of this setup is how I’ve been able to interact with my biggest supporters directly — through the message board on posts, through emails and DMs you send me, and through mailbag posts like the massive ones I did last August where I broke down how I’d attack a bunch of your unique leagues one by one (for the record, I doubt that feature will be making a comeback in 2023).

I really enjoy those interactions. Part of this price increase includes a deliberate understanding that my subscriber numbers will decline, which should help this father of two better manage everything around here. (To that point, if this price increase is too much and you’ll be moving on to any of the other great alternatives in the fantasy landscape — including a bunch of other newsletters popping up, many of which I’ve tried to mention/recommend in these pages recently — that’s totally understandable, and we’re cool. Thank you for any support you’ve ever given me. I say that because people sometimes apologize for unsubscribing, but I’ve never taken that personally, and all I ask is you don’t take the price increase personally either.)

As far as what I’m going to offer to offset this increase, I frankly don’t want to promise any major changes. I do have plans to try some things, but I don’t have it all in order here in May. What’s coming next is a bunch of projections content, including some team-by-team (and really player-by-player) stuff that I know you guys love, where I’ll get into the nitty gritty of a ton of different depth charts. I’m always going to lean heavily toward redraft, but I know a bunch of people are out here grinding best ball right now, and while I’m not the best strategy guy in the world, where I can help the best ball summer is the player analysis that might help highlight which ADPs could move by August, or simply who makes sense to be tacking onto stacks in the 18th round.

I’ve received feedback working both ways on pricing, but one common refrain has been that I don’t charge enough. And given we’ve been here a few years now and the full archives are available at bengretch.substack.com, you can cross-check what that means in terms of what I’ve offered in any given 12-month period. There was the whole “draft guide” thing last August where a reader created a PDF of like two weeks of my work, and it was over 100 pages (largely because that was the window with the team-by-team Offseason Stealing Signals posts that were quite lengthy, but there are always in-depth strategy articles, tiered rankings, conversations of other formats, and plenty of theory posts). I don’t usually feel too proud of my own work, to be honest, but I did think that was pretty cool, because while length doesn’t equal quality, I knew most of those 100-plus pages were things I’d individually heard great feedback on.

I actually want to expand on this draft guide thought for a minute. If I was solely in this to maximize my return, I think the pretty obvious solution would be to a la carte as many different offerings as I could. I already do that to some degree having my betting project with Dalton Kates cordoned off over at Stealing Lines (we crushed last year by the way, more on that later I’m sure), but I don’t want to be pre-writing a draft kit and charging $30 for that on the side, nor building a model for prospects or a best ball guide to sell when I don’t consider those my top focuses.

I want basically everything I do to be because I’m passionate about it, and not adding fluff to fill out enough pages on a specific “guide” if there’s nothing else on that topic where I can legitimately add value. I’m not hating on anyone who does package products, but I’m a flow state worker who needs to do something in a set moment and send it off. So part of this price increase was already set to happen due to inflation, and another part is me saying, “Think of it like the price of the ‘draft kit’ is baked in.” I mean, I’d argue the sheer volume of content I rip off every August — again, the archives at bengretch.substack.com support this — is more timely and thus probably more actionable than any draft kit in the industry. I’ve worked at the sites; I know how much of that is pre-written, because it has to be. But I work differently — part procrastination, part needing to be in the thick of it to really produce my best work — and I believe the reader benefits from that part of my process.

As part of that, I update my rankings document if not every day than every couple of days through August. I write a newsletter post almost daily as well. And my monthly subscription, until today, has been $8, such that many people have subscribed solely for that one month and sent $8 for the whole deal. And that’s awesome! I’ve encouraged that, and will continue to at the higher price point. But because I’ve done this long enough now to understand how it works for me, what my product really is, and also establish a proof of concept and build trust with you subscribers who know by now I’m going to bring it when I do send something, I need to price the product accordingly.

Now the common refrain I get from people who can’t justify the price being as high as it gets is there are cheaper alternatives, including stuff like Netflix and all that. And I get that! You’re definitely going to get more for your dollar through other subscriptions. The idea here is you’re subscribing for quality — I really only want people subscribed if they think my work is just that good that they can’t imagine not having access to it.

I definitely understand if I’m pricing some people out, though, and for that I do sincerely apologize. I don’t want that to be the case, but if it is, again, absolutely no hard feelings on my end.

The pull I constantly feel in this industry is to get into every topic, and do more content, always trying to grow. But there’s something to be said about being a consistent source of the same type of content for the people who are looking for that — which I think is why most of you are here — rather than trying to grow both the offerings and audience. I like where I’m at, and I want to hang out here. I’m going to charge more to try to make that viable for myself and my family, which is ultimately a major element here, obviously. As I’ve always said, if I can’t make that work, I’ll go put on a suit and tie and get to interviewing. I can’t imagine I’ll still be doing this in five or 10 years, but I do think the path to that possibility starts with the steps I’m taking today.

That said, I’ll be moving the pricing of Stealing Signals up to $15/month and $99/year. I’m also bringing the Founding Member tier back at $150/year, and I’m not yet sure what I’m going to do there, but the weekly Q&A sessions we had for the premium Discord members are probably going to move into that category in some way (I don’t think I’ll be bringing back the Discord conversations, as what I’d really like to do is make them streams where I can talk through your questions rather than write them all out, and there are some options for that here on Substack now).

Again, if the $99/year is out of your budget, I get that. One suggestion I’d offer is to subscribe monthly in August, a few weeks before your draft, and get one month for $15. That will grant you access to the full offseason archives as well, so kind of like the pre-written draft kits I mentioned where you can go back and read my thoughts from May, June, and July, if you want to (while also getting hammered with near-daily messages in August). You can also extend that into the season as you see fit, taking advantage of the early editions of the in-season weekly Stealing Signals column, and maybe you pay $30 or $45 by the end of it. That’s up to you, but my point is merely that there are still cheaper paths here, and because the bulk of my content is concentrated on the calendar, you aren’t exactly missing a ton by not being subscribed during the other months. (Of course, I do plan to have more content out this summer, and perhaps even more even earlier next offseason, as I continue to grapple with the realities of best ball’s massive explosion these past couple years.)

Alright, that’s all for today. If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments to this post. And be on the lookout for projections content coming your way soon!