We brought back the monthly subscription

On August 25th, 2021 we moved CG Cookie to an annual subscription only site.

I wanted to step out of the monthly-race. How could we every repeat the euphoric feeling of a new monthly subscriber on month two? Meaning when you sign up for CG Cookie on day one you get access to our entire library, so when month two rolls around members would begin thinking, "What are you guys doing for me this month?"

In reality the value of CG Cookie is the 100's of Blender tutorials, downloads and experience. But it's also the access to our instructors, and team of instructor assistants who are here to help you along the way. It's one of the differences between choosing us vs Youtube.

So removing our monthly subscription made sense: communicating we're looking for a year commitment from our members, less focus on quantity but on quality, and better communicated the value of the platform. We were still producing around 4-6 new courses a year.

Initially it seemed to be working really well. Our customer base was atrophying, but our net revenue was increasing and we never felt more in our skin. It was a warm and fuzzy six months.

This past spring the floor fell out and our annual subscriptions declined significantly. We still don't know really why: Energy crisis, related sanctions from the war, we migrated platforms, and toss in a negative SEO attack. 🤷‍♂️

But we held on to the model. Waiting until August 25th, 2022 to hopefully see renewals of annuals begin to trickle in. This never really happened.

During September we noticed only a few annuals would renew, some would be blocked by sanctions, expired card details or simply not ready to commit to another year. Additionally new annuals were also still on a decline.

In November, 2022 we decided to bring the monthly subscription back. It's been our best decision of the year for us and our customers.

Since then we've been growing (read: recovering) at about a 3% rate, but we've got months to go before we get back to our early 2021 numbers.

The lesson learned is while the annual subscription may work for some, it doesn't work for us, our community and our mission.

We want more people to learn and become successful with Blender. By closing our "gates" with an annual subscription, our brand awareness fell and we became less accessible by the people we're trying to help.

Yes, we'd still prefer somebody to signup annually, but instead of that being the FIRST decision, it can be approached after 2-3 months of being with us.

#onward