Reflecting Day: Hot Dog Shakeup 🌭

Five years ago, we started 1-900-HOTDOG with a simple mission: Make enough money to buy a private island, Ron Perlman, and 30 feral baboons for an interactive remake of Primal Force. We’re not there yet, but we have come a long way. If we wanted to, right now, we could get a budget hotel room, Jake Busey, and 2 orangutans who used to smoke cigarettes in an Arizona dive bar. And that’s pretty close. And that’s because of you.

That was and remains our main priority, and it would be a betrayal of your trust to change that goal now. But there was a second, far less important goal: To build a space where the world’s best comedy writers could be paid very well to manufacture joy while insane robots ate the internet. Hot Dogs, I’m proud to say we did that. The writer thing. Not the robot thing. From the beginning we set our writer’s rates high, and with every other milestone we’ve hit, we’ve given them all raises. We just hit one of those milestones again, so it’s time to give everyone raises!

There’s one problem, and it rhymes with us being bad businessmen, and worse rappers. See, we set this ambitious goal of paying human beings what they’re worth way back when we only had a few humans writing for us once a month. 1-900-HOTDOG started with just Seanbaby and I, and the plan was to each write two 500 word articles doing some surface level riffing on weird media every week. Within days, we found ourselves writing 3,000 word deep dives into cursed artifacts that each required dozens of hours of research. We needed more time, and no matter how fast we ran counter to the spin of the Earth, we couldn’t seem to get more than a few seconds. So we brought those sporadic guest writers on to regular gigs, we paid them well, we gave them raises, we high fived. Job done, back to the Hot Dog archives, pictured below.

Over the years, you’ve helped us fill out our ranks with better writers than we ever dreamed, and that’s thanks in no small part to the total destruction of art as a career in this long slow apocalypse built on coprophiliac algorithms. And in large part to you, and your continued support. We started here:

Just two pixelated boys with moxie and a dream- oh, but we’ve already talked about Primal Force: The Resort.

We arrived here:

Now for that problem I mentioned: We never factored for success. Giving milestone pay raises to one or two guest writers was no problem. Doing it for eight regular writers plus two employees meant us taking paycuts. So we did that! We cut our own pay, we high fived again, and ran off giggling to dive into Scrooge McDuck vaults full of tidbits books. Somehow, despite not addressing it in any way, the problem persisted. We took paycut after paycut until we found ourselves here, not making enough to keep the orangutans in smokes.

That leaves us with two options: We could act like capitalists, cut our writer’s pay, overwork them, fire them, outsource their job to an AI that teaches children how to build bombs when they ask for Play-Doh recipes, then dress ourselves head to toe in money suits. It doesn’t seem to be working great for the world right now. Or we could simply raise prices for the first time since 1-900-HOTDOG began back in 2020, before COVID and runaway inflation. You know, like every single other business did five years ago, and then several more times after that.

Since our start in 2020, the site has changed dramatically. Instead of four, 500-word blurbs a week by just us two lunatics, we have a small fleet of lunatics delivering in-depth essays five days a week. We do bonus team up articles every month, we’ve launched two ad-free podcasts, and created a thriving community of amateur garbage archaeologists. We’ve slowly and quietly added immense value to the site while basically forgetting that money is required to live. They say the best motto in business is “underpromise and overdeliver.” The Hot Dog motto is “forget to promise, vastly overdeliver until you’re in trouble.”

So we’re raising prices, and that’s the bad news. The good news is we’re crippled by guilt over practicing even the most basic capitalism, so we’re also giving everyone more for their money. Here’s what the tiers look like now:

Our entry level tier was $3 a month, and increases to $5 a month. This tier originally got you four short articles a week from the two of us, but now gets you five longform essays from a diverse cast of lunatics. And as of this afternoon, it will also get you access to our community Discord, a thriving place with new events that pertain to your interests (wallowing in insane garbage) nearly every day.

The $5 tier, which originally got you access to one additional article a month, is going up to $7. It still gets you the bonus teamworking days, but you might have noticed those already expanding to incorporate new and dangerous tagteams like Merrittbaby, Schmitdybugg, and Sissynard. Over time, this tier would also get access to hundreds of bonus episodes from our free podcast, The Dogg Zzone 9000. As of this afternoon, it will now get you into the biweekly Discord Meat Parties, where Seanbaby and I make jokes about bizarre videos with you guys, or just stare in mute shock at what we’ve unleashed, like that movie where big baby Mickey Rooney developed a milk fetish.

That’s the end of the price increases, but not the bonuses! The $10 tier isn’t going up, but now you get access to our revamped Behind the Scenes Discord channel. Every single article will feature cut material, bonus facts, and extra research we loved but couldn’t use for whatever reason. As ever, it still holds the behind scenes banter from our weekly podcast, and anytime we’re really impressed with ourselves in the company Slack.

The $20 tier also sees no price change, and still gets you access to Untubed Sausage, the VIP chatroom full of its own cursed artifacts. It’s just like the British Empire proved: you can have too many artifacts, but never enough curses! As of this afternoon, this tier will also get an exclusive at-cost store, the PoxCo Vaults. All of our retired designs, our limited run shirts, our milestone celebration art - it all lives here forever, for you, at the cheapest price we can list. We make no money off of these sales, and therefore take no liability for what happens to you when you wear these things in public. This store will also update monthly with new designs too insider, too weird, or too vile for mass market appeal. Just like you!

Here’s some of the shirts you’ll find there at launch:

Finally, you can own a shirt celebrating the time a reality show murderer wore a red flag that should’ve saved a life, if anyone had listened. And you can proudly say you supported the fundraising campaign to buy aging pickup artist Don Diebel’s grave!

You’ll also find all the limited-run designs formerly available to Hot Dog Appreciators.

Yes, that’s including both versions of the Punches shirt! Finally, there can be peace between the tribes.

You’ll also get all our milestone celebration designs, including two new ones never before available in shirt form:

Celebrate the many crimes of Mascot and Puppet Week!

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE SECRETS OF PUPPET WEEK TO CURIOUS SHIRT-GAZERS.

And of course, our latest milestone must be celebrated as well. We’re going to party the only way we know how - shirtless, with lots of hunks. The upcoming Hunk Week (3/3/25) art will also be available in the at-cost store for a frankly ridiculous bun-to-dollar ratio.

Finally, this tier will get a new Discord channel for merch requests - if we have a design that you want on a different cut, a different color, or even a different item entirely (so long as the store will legally let us sell it, no, just for example, Hot Dog branded feral baboons), let us know and we’ll do our best to accommodate it.

The $50 tier also doesn’t see an increase - you people already qualify for a conservatorship just for doing this. You’ll still get a custom title to live forever on the About page, you’ll sponsor our articles with hand-joked dedications every day of the week, you’ll get cute roll calls from our cutest Hot Dogger at the end of every Dogg Zzone, and you’ll be thanked at the end of both The Dogg Zzone and Bigfeets video podcasts. As of this afternoon, you will also have an exclusive Discord channel to suggest topics for and vote on our next Teamworking Day - that’s right, you decide the direction of the site. That basically makes you our bosses, complete with all the resentment that brings.

We know times are tough, and they will only get tougher until we learn to appreciate the taste of roasted billionaire. So if you can’t stay with us after this, we understand. If you’re part of the Discord already and don’t want to lose access, shoot us a message and we’ll keep you in there - we don’t want to take away anyone’s community right now. And remember, you can use the free tag to see our new free articles every single week, plus our substantial free archives.

Browsing from the free tag will never bug you with pop-ups about pledging, or show you what you’re missing. You can just pretend we became a free weekly comedy site turning out carefully researched long form essays from some of the best writers around, which would still put us way above our remaining competition of AI pun sites and Twitter recaps.

For those of you sticking around, thank you so much, we couldn’t have done any of this without you, we definitely shouldn’t have but you made us, it’s your fault, we accept no responsibility, somebody tell Jake Busey that one of the orangutan’s safe word is BANANAS and the other does a trick where it tears a human face off every time you say BANANAS.

See you in Hunk Week!