Package & Pricing Changes For The 2014 Football Season

In our ongoing effort to simplify our business, we’ve made several changes to our premium subscription packages in advance of the 2014-15 football season. In short, we’ve:

  • Eliminated pricing tiers (e.g. “Lite” and “Pro”) from our office pool picks packages
  • Combined our NFL Pick’em and College Football Pick’em products
  • Lowered prices on longer-term premium subscriptions (Quarterly and Yearly)
  • Moved to consistent $49 pricing for all office pool picks packages

Below is the reasoning behind each decision in case you are curious.

No More “Lite” And “Pro” Packages

We now have a single premium package associated with each type of office pool we cover. In addition, we still offer an awesome bundle deal on our yearly Pool Picks Subscription, which includes access to all four of our pool picks products. You can see all our current office pool packages on our sales page.

In the past, we offered multiple price points and feature levels for office pool packages. Last year, for example, you could buy a “Lite” version of our NFL Pick’em Pools product for $29 and a “Pro” version for $49. In the more distant past, we’ve had as many as four or five different pricing tiers for our March Madness bracket picks.

Based on the amount of customer support email we received, having multiple access levels confused a lot of people. We got frequent questions asking us to clarify what was included at each level. Many customers also bought a Lite package, then realized that it didn’t include a feature they needed, and then had to upgrade to Pro — which often frustrated them.

Our office pool picks products are unique, and it’s hard enough to explain the basics of what they do in a way that everyone can easily understand. We don’t need to have even more complexity on top of that. So we’ve ditched pricing tiers for individual office pool picks products.

NOTE: We still have two basic categories of premium packages for the site in general:

  • Pool Picks packages, which are cheaper because they only include our office pool picks and features
  • Betting + Pool Picks packages, which also include all of our betting picks and predictions for all sports).

Combined NFL Pick’em & CFB Pick’em Product

Last year we had two different products for NFL and college football office pool picks:

  • NFL Pick’em Pools
  • CFB Pick’em Pools

(We actually had four premium packages in all, since each of those products had a $29 Lite and a $49 Pro pricing tier.)

It was our first year selling these products and we learned a lot from watching customer behavior and gathering feedback. One thing that stood out was the number of people who needed picks for pools in which they had to pick both NFL and college games each week. Our two separate products could only address that need in a clunky, sub-optimal way.

From a technology standpoint, both of the pick’em products also shared many features. So beyond customer needs, combining the two products also made sense. It will save us time on code maintenance, and make it easier to roll out improvements and new features.

So we now have just one product for pick’em-style football office pools, Football Pool Picks. It supports NFL pools, college football pools, and (new this year) “combo pools” where you need to pick both NFL and college games. We’re very excited about that last part.

Lower Prices On Yearly & Quarterly Subscriptions

We always want to encourage our subscribers to join us for the long haul. We also wanted to put in place a more attractive pricing structure for our Betting + Pools Picks packages, which offer access to all premium content on the site.

Here is where we ended up:

  • $29/month (40% off monthly rate) if you pay Yearly
  • $39/month (20% off monthly rate) if you pay Quarterly
  • $49/month if you pay Monthly

NOTE: Existing customers of our Yearly and Quarterly packages will receive a rebate after each future renewal charge, that will bring them down to these new lower price points.

Our motivation here primarily relates to the potential impact of variance, a nerdy term that basically means, “even sports bettors that do very well in the long term are bound to run hot and cold along the way.”

If you sign up to use our betting predictions for just a month to test the waters, timing is very likely to impact your results. By random bad luck, you may just happen to begin your service when our picks start running cold for a spell. 99% of handicappers who sell picks would never dare to tell you that, although to be fair, most of them are clueless about variance. It is an unavoidable reality of betting sports, even for the best of the best.

We understand that some people only want to make a short term commitment to a service like ours, especially at first. So we are keeping the Monthly subscription as an option.

However, just be aware that forces outside of our control are likely to impact your experience if you give it a month. The worst case is always when a monthly subscriber signs up, then our picks for the sport they care most run cold for a week or two, so they cancel their subscription, and then reversion to the mean kicks in and we start running hot shortly after they leave.

If you subscribe for a year (or ideally multiple years, since in some sports like NFL the sample size of games each year is still small), your results should be a much better reflection of the long term value of our service.

Since we can’t control short term variance, our goal is to maximize our long term accuracy. We don’t make knee-jerk reactions to our predictive methods based on how our picks do from week to week, which is almost always a terrible strategy. However, we are constantly testing model refinements that we roll out on an ongoing basis, and the impact of which will be measured across years, not days.

Especially compared to competing services, $29/month for all the premium content on our site, including betting predictions for all sports plus all our office pool picks, feels like a more than fair price that keeps our interests aligned with those of our customers.

(If you’d like to lock in that $29/month price, by the way, you can sign up here.)

$49 Pricing On All Office Pool Packages

Finally, we’ve moved to a consistent $49 price point for all four of our office pool packages:

  • Football Pick’em Pools
  • NFL Survivor Pools
  • College Bowl Pools
  • March Madness Pools

Previously, we charged slightly different amounts for our various office pool packages, ranging from $29 to $59. The more we thought about that, the less it made sense to us.

First, it felt misleading to signal with our pricing that some of our office pool packages were “worth” more or less than others. Depending on the format and rules of your pools, the theoretical edge you get from using our pool picks varies a fair amount within each of these products, and the ranges overlap quite a bit across products.

Second, when we looked at the long term edge we’ve been delivering in office pools, and ran the math on customer value, we felt a $49 price point was more than justified for the types of customers that we target with a service like ours.

At the end of the day, we know that some of our customers are willing to pay us more than $49 for these packages, so we’re leaving some money on the table with them. We also know that customers who bought $29 packages in the past probably won’t be thrilled about a price increase. On balance, though, we feel this is the best move for our business in the long term.

Our best deal on office pool picks will always be our yearly Pool Picks Subscription, which gives you all four of our office pool packages for half price. It’s just $98 a year, compared to a list price of $196. If you want to grab that deal, here is the signup page.