Geneanet New Offer and Pricing Model!

On its 20th anniversary, Geneanet simplify its offer. The purpose of this note is to inform you about the upcoming change and to put it in perspective with the history of Geneanet.

What will change?

Today, the sources of revenue of Geneanet are :

– ads for visitors and non-Premium members,
– a 45.00 Euros/year Premium subscription,
– paying “Packs of points” from 9.00 Euros to access genealogy society indexes, via pay-per-view.

From January 2nd, 2017, Geneanet will remove all ads on its site and will stop selling “Packs of points”. Every Premium member will then be allowed to view the genealogy society indexes. The annual subscription will go from 45.00 Euros to 50.00 Euros (and the 2-year subscription will go from 82.00 Euros to 90.00 Euros).

Return to the origins

We’d like to explain this change by returning to the origins of Geneanet and of the Premium subscription!

When Geneanet was founded in 1996, the goal was to promote collaboration and sharing with a free service funded by advertising.

In 2001, Geneanet was offering highly appreciated services. Unfortunately, advertising revenues considerably decreased and Geneanet was threatened.

On October 2nd, 2001, we asked our members for help and we proposed a “Club Privilege” subscription (renamed “Premium” two years ago).

The main motivation of the first “Club Privilege” members was to support Geneanet for it remains a free service, for all, serving collaboration and sharing.

At the beginning of the “Club Privilege”, the only one option was an ad-free browsing. The promise was to keep all existing services free and to develop new features for the “Club Privilege” members.

We are proud that we have respected our commitments!

What is Geneanet today?

Geneanet still proposes a number of free services:

– unlimited family tree hosting,
– many search tools and options,
– access to many collections,
– support for collaborative projects which promote mutual assistance and sharing.

All material uploaed to Geneanet by genealogists is free for all: family trees, collaborative indexes, postcards, pictures of graves, archival records. Geneanet hosts more than 150 genealogy societies and projects on its servers – in their own names – free of charge.

All these services represents a significant cost for the hosting, the bandwidth, the software development and the maintenance.

Today, Geneanet is a team of 30 people, 50 servers, almost 700,000 family trees, 3 million visitors per month and 4 billion data entries!

It’s thank to the Premium susbcriptions that we can fund these services and continue to improve them.

Premium members take advantage of additional features: advanced search options (variant of names, spouse, nearby places), enhanced alerts to help going through brick walls, genealogy library, and a number of collections provided by our partners.

Why removing ads and the “Pack of points”?

We want to clarify and simplify our offer.

From January 2nd, 2017, there will be only one free and ad-free offer, and a Premium offer with a free access to all of the indexes, including indexes provided by genealogy societies.

Above all, Geneanet is a free collaborative site with a Premium offer. It’s what we call a Freemium model with free services and Premium ones.

Logically, we remove the “Pack of points” to simplify our offer. Many of you didn’t understand why there were two options to access the data: the Premium subscription and the “Pack of points”.

Removing ads also simplify our free offer and make it more attractive. This is a rightful giving-back for all the community of genealogists.

Now, only the revenues from the Premium subscription will enable us to continue giving a free quality service.

The future of Geneanet

This simplification will help us returning to our fundamental goal.

We will continue to improve Geneanet to provide more features and innovations, for both the free and the Premium offers.

All material from the collaborative projects are and will stay free. Material from partners and material which need financial resources will be available to Premium members. We will reinforce this dual approach in the following months.

How does the change will go?

Members who have remaining points (“Pack of points”) will be able to convert them to a Premium number of months.

This change will be transparent and automatic for all Premium members, without any extra payment, from January 2nd, 2017.

All subscriptions and renewals made until January 1st, 2017 will take advantage of the old price. You just need to subscribe or renew by advance. We would remind you that every renewal is automatically added to the actual subscription. For example, if your subscription will expire in April 2017, a 1-year renewal will extend your subscription until April 2018.

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