As you all know, Parkjets was founded over 15 years ago as a resource for builders out there, a place where all the best parkjets plans were collected, organized, and made ready for you to download. All so you can get to building. Now, Parkjets is a membership site!
Over the last year, we have been working hard to improve Parkjets. We have added plans and have made the site run all on donations from folks that opened up their wallets to keep the site going. For those that donated, THANK YOU!!
To keep Parkjets online and improving, we just relaunched Parkjets as a membership site. Your membership gets you unlimited access to all the free plans and an ever growing catalog of goodies. For $24.99 a year, that's $2 a month, your membership keeps Parkjets running and lets you download away. We also have a weekly subscription plan for $5 a week, for those of you not wanting to commit to a year.
We know this is a big change, but we are committed to keeping Parkjets online and providing builders like you the opportunity to find and download the best plans out there.
Why Did Parkjets Become A Membership Site?
In January 2017, we launched Parkjets as a membership site. Many of you are wondering why? Well, several factors have led us to change the business model of Parkjets, we hope you understand.
First, Google Ads, which used to support the site, have become untenable. Revenue from Google Ads has fallen over 95% over the last two years. There are many factors for this drop, including ad blockers, mobile platform use, and generally less money in the market for Google Ads. These ads used to cover our expenses, they don't anymore, not even close. For example, of all the ads we have on the site, we typically earn about $0.30 a day. We used to earn about $12 a day.
Second, Parkjets operating costs have increased over the last two years. Parkjets performs over 100,000 file downloads a year, plus hosting, plus newsletter costs, and personnel costs mean we can't continue to operate at a deficit.
While we wanted and tried to keep Parkjets totally free for as long as possible, the fact is that Parkjets was costing us several thousand more dollars a year than what we were bringing in revenue.
What we have done is allow for two tiers of membership, one annually, at $24.99 that gives you unlimited access to all the plans. Or if you just want to download a few plans, we offer a $5 week pass as well that still gives you access to all the plans, but for a limited time.
It was a tough decision for us, we agonized over it for months, but we either had to shut the site down, or try something new. We hope we can earn your membership, and we hope you understand.
The Parkjets Team