Although late in formally announcing, FTDNA has been throwing in a free upgrade to the y111 STR marker test if you order BigY SNP testing (since Thanksgiving). If you ordered BigY and did not see that added to your processed order yet, send them a request and they will add it. BigY is being offered at a $100 discount with $50 further-off coupons regularly available. (This is a big way of operating for Kohl's — multi discount paths that can be combined — that FTDNA seems to be following.)

Just this week, FTDNA announced that older BigY customers can get a dramatically cheaper discount on an upgrade to y111 - just $40 to $60. But only good if you had y37 or y67 already. Not valid if you only had y12 or y25.

It is not clear if you are getting the accurate lab panel test form of these STR results or if FTDNA is simply using their new BAM file analysis to extract them like yFull has been doing for many of us. It has been announced they will start doing extraction of the 450+ STR values from BAM files sometime in the future. yFull had not been able to succesfully extract many values in those y111 test kits; mostly the compound ones. So this will be interesting to see going forward. No matter which process used by FTDNA, key is your results will be in the FTDNA database for matching and comparison there. With yFull, we can only do member-submitted manual analysis of the STR results.

You still have to order a y12 kit (at minimum) before you order the BigY. The y111 upgrade does not seem to apply to these new orders. You cannot upgrade y12 to y37 and then, if you already have BigY, get the deep discount to upgrade to y111. So there is the perverbial "donut hole" (ala Medicare prescription medications) if you already have a BigY and only y12.