August and Black Friday (day after USA Thanksgiving; through the end of the calendar year) have been, historically the deepest sale times of the year for DNA test kits. Last year, Dante Labs pushed it to the weekend before as did a few other vendors. This year, with the general announcement of many starting online sales for the holidays early, Ancestry and FamilyTreeDNA are at Deep Discount.

Additionally, FamilyTreeDNA has introduced a new change; which appears may be permanent and outlast the sale. Announcing to their group administrators that it takes a lot of resources to provide the BAM files from the BigY Sequencing test. And that few ever request the files. As a result they are no longer including the BAM file download in the standard product. Instead, as announced on to group administrators like us, they will require a separate $100 fee for such delivery. Which can only be known and ordered after the initial order is in. So the matching cheapest ever $399 price for a BigY test is really that plus the $100 fee for the BAM. Most project admins really need the BAM and ask you to upload to third party sites like yFull, Full Sequence and others. We have usually seen more like 50% of the kits transferred to third party sites like yTree and yFull; so are a bit skeptical about the cost trade-off. And feel this more reflects a desire to cut out the path off their system. But hey, we just need to be more proactive in explaining yet another step and cost into doing deep yDNA analysis.

A clarification made in a FamilyTreeDNA group is that upgrades from BigY-500 to BigY-700, which are only costing $189 during this sale period, will still get BAM delivery because they are part of the grandfathered in BogY orders from before 1 Nov 2019. Not sure this reasoning makes sense to us but will take the savings and benefit. And wait to see if it proves true; as nothing is being so indicated on the website anywhere.

Ancestry has lowered their price to $59 again. Their standard sale price. Ancestry is not as comprehensive a test as 23andMe in covering all the DNA. But it has changed enough over the past 2 years to be more of an equal match. And the mtDNA covered by 23andMe is now "weak" enough compared to full-sequence generally available and needed (from FamilyTreeDNA, Dante and others). So given all this, and that Ancestry's match / test database is well over 15 million now — thus making their match database the most comprehensive by far — that we will be shortly shifting our base recommendation over to Ancestry as a first choice. Thus, time to stockpile some kits for when you have those distant-relative get together or genealogy trips.

23andMe has dropped their basic autosomal test to $79. And MyHeritage is at $49 and likely a good second buy after Ancestry. While you can transfer your results from Ancestry to MyHeritage, you likely will get more authentic matches with native testers in their site by ordering their kit. MyHeritage tends to have the most European, North African, Middle Eastern and similar non-USA testers represented; and growing fast.