These “tools” should be included in my opinion.
At Ancestry it seems you have to pay for tools that others provide/include in the cost of the DNA test. And they have removed things which used to be included, to force you to pay a sub for the DNA results to be of any use.
I think they’ll be divvying up more features and charging separately for them, likely additional costs if you manage more than one test etc etc.
I’m not impressed with Ancestry atm.
I used to be Ancestry's biggest affiliate. They moved middle-man twice and each time the commissions you earned dropped significantly. the first time they moved commissions dropped around 30%. Then they moved again in the last two years again. They decreased their commission rate from about 25% to 5%. And the commissions essentially went to zero.
So, any ability to make a side-income of full-time income via genealogy affiliates has essentially ended.
From my insight I can also see that genealogy companies have been doing poorly since about 2022, when the COviD money-pprinting inflation savaged disposable income and thus discretionary spending. The sale of DNA tests has also seemingly dropped in the last few years.
So it looks like Ancestry are resorting to gouging loyal customers to increase their margin.
I do think the ProTools pricing is very disingenuous. To make it worthwhile they really need to include something like:
- a chromosome browser
- find matches by shared segments via the browser
- show common ancestors in all your DNA matches trees (including extrapolations of those trees)
- a tool that will auto-group clusters of matches (including low cM matches)
- more advanced tools for cataloging the matches; at the moment I use a spreadsheet, but if you could use a system built in to the website it would be much more powerful, letting you more clearly see who in which clusters are DNA matches
I developed a script to do some of these jobs. But with all the data in their possession it would be much easier and accessible if they provided these tools, which are nothing too fancy. Being able to find shared matches who have common ancestors (and thus may be your ancestors/relatives) is extremely useful. That's the only one that is a bit more work, but they already have that system setup with through-lines, so it's not a major expansion.
Having worked though my tests very deeply I've found there are lots of hacks to breaking down brick walls. One is that I will compare full downloaded match lists of two or more related peoples. This can show that there are certain matches that are likely pointing to a common ancestry, but don't show up under their Shared Matches. As an example, you may have a 2nd cousin 1X removed who happened to inherit 72cM from 3X great-grandparents and you inherited 76cM them, but only share a small amount, say 6cM. Thus that 2nd cousin 1X removed may common matches from that line that are not DNA overlaps.
Particularly with multiple tests there are far more that can be extracted out of your matches, but the lack of tools means it's not accessible to people. And that they took about 9 months to roll out the "64 groups" as a paid feature, it doesn't seem likely they will deliver meaningful value to loyal customers.
As a programmer, I can say that the 64 groups could have been rolled out very quickly. It's a bit baffling it was on the shelf for months.