A Pricing & Sign-Up Update

Separating the online and physical sides

Starting Friday, I am going to make some changes towards separating the online and physical benefits of Saturday Hoops.

Users that were grandfathered in before will still be given access to view all highlights — a smaller thank-you than I would like for your support over the years, but it's yours.

If you want early access to signing up — or to keep the $15/game member rate — you'll need to subscribe to our $5.99/month Supporter plan. Otherwise per-game prices are $17 with a credit pack or $19 one-off, the same as the current public rates. For now the rates themselves aren't changing, just who qualifies for the $15 member rate. Down the road I'm considering moving to a flat gym rental fee, which would fully separate the online (subscription) and physical (per-game) sides.

How sign-ups work after Friday

Supporters can sign up for any game in advance.

Non-members will be able to sign up for the next game starting one day after the previous game completes.

There is also a new pre-register option: save a card with Stripe (we store no credit card data — Stripe handles all of it), and you will be automatically charged for the next game six days beforehand if a spot is available. If the game fills up before that, no charge.

Why I'm making this change

The reason I am making this change is that despite demand being at an all-time high, when I ran the numbers I was losing a small margin on each game. For full transparency, here's a breakdown of the revenue and costs since we moved to the UES.

Across six games played so far, players paid in $1,566 in cash (after promo codes), credit-pack signups added an amortized $132, and Stripe took $74 in processing fees. The gym costs $300 a night, which works out to $1,800 total across those six games. That leaves us $176 underwater — roughly $29 of loss per game on average. Only one of the six games (May 18) ended in the black at +$42; every other game lost somewhere between $15 and $85.

That breakdown also doesn't include hosting costs (Amazon S3 for videos, CloudFront for delivery), video editing for social sharing, team plans to collaborate with those willing to help with this project, or jersey costs. My goal has never been to make renting gyms a profitable business, and I want this to keep feeling more like a community than a business despite our more polished appearances.

What I'm thinking about next

Again, in full transparency — we might consider down the road licensing the software for other organizers to run their own communities, plus the highlight-editing software we've built. As we track costs more closely, we might adjust our fees accordingly.

I am also very much interested in using a little money from both the online subscriptions and gym rentals to fund some free community games. There are a number of gyms outside Manhattan that are very affordable — it would be amazing for Saturday Hoops NYC to provide access to other communities that can't afford programs like this one.