Ancestry Lite: A genealogy subscription for just $7.99 per month?

Every month, I check all major paid genealogy services to see if any discounts or new product offerings are available (see our genealogy price tracker here). This week, there was a surprise from Ancestry: A new low-cost service called Ancestry Lite. It’s the green option shown in the chart below, and it was only visible on certain browsers:

You may be able to see it yourself using this link.

What does Ancestry Lite include? For $9.99 per month (discounted to $7.99 in the promotion, $6.49 if prepaid for 6 months) subscribers can access Ancestry on a mobile device only, with 1 customizable tree, 10 hints and Global Vital Records (“basic census, birth, marriage, and death records from the US and 80+ countries.”)

Ancestry Lite leaves out a lot. Here’s what’s excluded:

• All U.S. Records (“billions of records such as birth, marriage, death, and more”)
• Free Record Collections (“free historical records including select census, marriage, and immigration collections”)
• All International Records (“international birth, marriage, and death records”)

In addition, Ancestry Lite is only accessible via the Ancestry mobile app. That means you can’t use the Lite subscription on Ancestry.com in a desktop browser, or easily navigate records and trees on a big screen.

Why is Ancestry offering a Lite option on mobile devices to some U.S. customers? I was unable to find any official announcement on the Ancestry blog or social media. No one else was talking about it, either. So I can only speculate that what I saw is a low-cost experimental subscription package aimed at new customers.

Ancestry subscriptions prices rising

Ancestry has become too expensive for many people after relentless price hikes (see Ancestry piles on more fees, including new "AncestryDNA Plus" for formerly free features). Ancestry Lite seems like a good deal relative to the standard Ancestry subscription prices, which run $300-$700 per year.

Is Ancestry Lite worth it? Maybe for people who are just getting started. I suspect “basic census, birth, marriage, and death records” means index entries as opposed to the original images, which is not sufficient for fact checking. Ancestry will also leverage Lite’s lack of full records access (such as international and census records) to upsell or convert users to more expensive subscription packages.

Let us know what you think about Ancestry Lite in the comments of the EasyGenie Facebook poll or YouTube video.