Since 11thFrame.com became a subscription site in 2015, the price has been $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year.

My goals when I started charging included paying my technical guru Brian Burkhardt for the countless hours he puts in to make the site function smoothly and his continuous upgrades, helping me travel to cover more events, and helping me sponsor events.

All that has happened, although the pandemic put a crimp in traveling for a time, and last year my skin cancer and plastic surgery and then hand surgery, plus family care challenges for my girlfriend Susie, kept us home most of the year.

I’m looking forward to being able to travel more for coverage and simply do a better and more timely job covering things once I retire from my full-time newspaper job, which will happen somewhere between January 2026 and July 2027.

Coverage also may benefit from our potential retirement to Las Vegas, where many big tournaments are held, with plans to return to Wisconsin in the summer. However, we won’t be leaving Wisconsin while we have parents alive here. (Needless to say, we hope they stay alive and we don’t make it to Vegas any time soon.)

Another thing that has crimped my 11thFrame.com travel a bit is the huge increases in credit card processing fees with Cayan/Global Payments in the past few years, which has left me with substantially less income while travel costs have soared. It stuns me when I look at the numbers and see that the fees have more than doubled since 2019: fees were 23.7% of income in September, 31.7% in October (which included a special infrastructure fee), and 26.3% in November. (Update: My annual Cayan/Global Payments fees ranged from $2,026.16 to $2,877.72 in 2017-22, but were $3,587.66 in 2023 and $4,899.82 in 2024. And my income was almost the same in 2022 and 2023 as other non-pandemic years since 2017, with just a slight uptick in 2024.)

And I literally have had one person do a chargeback in almost 10 years, and that was simply because they didn’t realize what the charge was on their card after it was made by a family member. Many businesses would give such problem-free customers a discount, rather than continually hiking fees.

Part of the problem is that each transaction carries a flat fee, along with a percentage, and that flat fee on a small $1.99 charge each month means a high percentage.

Our answer is a switch to Stripe, which has much lower fees than Cayan/Global Payments. For example, for new subscribers being handled by Stripe in the last few months of 2024, my fees were 6.3%, 6.3% and 7% of income in September, October and November, respectively. That represents hundreds of dollars in savings per month when Stripe handles everything. (No one should notice any difference, as all of this is internal to 11thFrame.com.)

In addition, I will be instituting my first price increase, with the rate going to $4 per month or $36 per year. Existing subscribers will be offered the chance to continue for another year for $20 through the end of September, which will be 10 years as a subscription site.

With a smaller increase in the annual price, the spread increases from 33 cents per month to a dollar per month between monthly and annual. While I will make more money when subscribers choose monthly, I’d rather give less to any credit card processor and have people choose annual, which also will save them money.

And if $3 per month or $4 per month is too much for what I provide, I will say the same thing I said at my original price: Don’t subscribe — I still will provide the same daily professional journalistic coverage of bowling that is found nowhere else whether I have 60 or 600 or 6,000 or my current 1,600 or so subscribers — I did it when 11thFrame.com was free.

New subscribers starting today (Jan. 1, 2025) will pay $4 per month or $36 per year.

Also starting today, existing subscribers (in both the Cayan/Global Payments and Stripe systems) will not automatically renew the next time their monthly or annual term ends. They will get a notice when their subscription ends and will have 14 days to renew for one year for $20 — there will be no monthly option — while agreeing to switch to $4 per month or $36 per year on their next renewal after Sept. 30. Those who go beyond 14 days will have to pay the new $4 per month or $36 per year.

An Oct. 1 date for full implementation for the new prices stems from late September 2025 being the 10-year anniversary of 11thFrame.com becoming a subscription service. That means those who signed on from the beginning will have enjoyed 10 years at the same price.

If you have questions, send an email to help@11thFrame.com.

Once I retire and no longer have a 3 a.m. alarm and 4:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. job, I will be able to be much more timely with tournament reports and will have more time for coverage, meaning people will get more their money. My tentative plan is to keep 11thFrame.com going until I am 70 at least, obviously dependent on my health.