Behind Thurrott.com: Membership Changes!

A few weeks ago, we teased some big changes coming to the memberships we offer here at Thurrott.com, and this week we’ve finally started to roll them out.

Here’s what’s happening.

New memberships

To date, we’ve offered a free account and the Thurrott Premium membership, with the latter available as a monthly or annual subscription. Going forward, we are offering the following accounts and memberships:

Free account. Anyone can read the non-Premium articles on Thurrott.com, of course. But if you sign-up for a free account on Thurrott.com, you can comment on articles and forum posts.

Thurrott Lite. This $9.99 per year subscription provides access to three Premium articles each month, a Dark mode toggle, and an advertising-free experience.

Thurrott Premium. This $69.99 per year subscription provides everything in Thurrott Lite but with unlimited access to Premium articles and the Premium Forums. And while this isn’t quite ready, anyone with an active Thurrott Premium account will also get a free copy of Paul’s upcoming e-book, the Windows 11 Field Guide, 25H2 Edition, a $9.99+ value.

Membership upgrades and downgrades

In addition to the new Thurrott Lite membership, we also offer the ability to upgrade or downgrade a membership at any time on a prorated basis. For example, if you pay for Thurrott Lite and decide you want to upgrade to Thurrott Premium in a month or two, the price you see will take into account the value of your remaining Thurrott Lite membership.

A price increase?

You may have also noted that Thurrott Premium is a bit pricier. I resisted this for a long time, but this is the first price hike in several years, and I hope that you can see the value. And making the latest version of the Windows 11 Field Guide a permanent perk for members will hopefully lessen the blow.

This is a big change and it will require a transition period

Behind the scenes, we’re replacing the WooCommerce-based membership and subscription infrastructure that I inherited when I took over Thurrott.com. These systems were created many years ago by people who are long gone, and they were always overly-complicated to use and troubleshoot.

But as we’ve updated the site internally over the past few years, these systems became even more problematic, leading to an escalating series of billing issues and customer support requests. This finally became problematic enough that we were forced to resolve the problems by replacing the old infrastructure completely.

This will be good for everyone. For me and Laurent, it will lead to few customer support requests. And for you, billing is becoming a transparent, self-service experience that actually works.

Unfortunately, it can’t happen overnight. And so, we will keep both systems in place side-by-side for now. And we will transition users from the old to the new over time.

If you create a new membership, you will see the new experience immediately.

If you are an existing Thurrott Premium member, I recommend waiting to move to the new system for now, especially if you’re going to renew in the next month or two. The most obvious reason is the cost: The old system is still on the old price.

If you’re an Alpha member, you may have seen a banner on the site about the new membership system. And you may have even upgraded, only to discover that you were downgraded instead, to Thurrott Lite. I tried to email everyone who did this with instructions on setting that right. But if you didn’t get that email or the instructions didn’t work as described, please email me and we’ll get it fixed.

In short, our goal is transition to this new system as soon as possible. But for the next few months at least, we’ll be using both membership systems in parallel and fixing bugs as they come up, and then we’ll make the switch.

And again, if you experience any issues, please email me.

Changes to PayPal and monthly subscriptions

Tied to the issues we’ve had with our backend membership and subscription infrastructure, we are ending support for PayPal, which has been repeatedly problematic. And we’re ending the monthly subscription option. We realize that either or both of these changes might be problematic, but PayPal has been horrible for us this past year, and the source of several double-billing issues. This gives us a single, simple system that accepts credit cards, handles taxes and whatever else, and will allow readers to manage their accounts as needed.

We haven’t forgotten Thurrott Alpha members

If you’re a Thurrott Alpha member who has maintained their Thurrott Premium subscription since the beginning, you will of course continue to get the cheapest available price as always. This was the source of the banner you may have seen. We wanted to thank those who tested Thurrott Premium before it was first released one more time, and we added a feature at the last minute yesterday that triggered that banner: Anyone who is an Alpha member will get free Thurrott Lite for life, with no ads and the Dark mode switch. So if you choose to end your Premium subscription, that will always be there for you.

Site navigation changes

These changes are now rolling out on the site’s backend, and there’s more coming, including a membership panel for new subscriptions. But we’re also updating related parts of the Thurrott.com website to reflect that.

We will more prominently promote these new memberships through the site header, foot, and main menu, but we will not be adding annoying pop-ups or anything else that will get in your way. There’s now a dedicated page for newsletters, though I need to work on the design a bit.

And while this was possibly the worst time to do this, I started working on a major layout change to the site menu that I assume few people actually use. I have more work to do on that, especially on the right side, where the site-focused entries are. So I suppose that will be ongoing.

Please let me know what you think

I’m interested in any feedback, and I’ll be engaging with Premium members soon to see if there’s more we should be doing. The past few days have been especially hectic with all this work, and I believe that will continue as we iron out whatever issues. But this was maybe overdue, and I’m glad we went to the time, effort, and expense to finally make these changes. Hopefully you agree, but either way, please let me know.

Thanks!

Paul