About New Experiences
New Experiences is one independent site about trying things for the first time — what they actually cost, what it feels like to start from zero, and whether they're worth doing again. It's run by one person. It's not a magazine, and nothing here is sponsored.
Who writes this
My name is CC. I started this site in October 2026 for a specific and fairly boring reason: I kept saying I'd try new things and then didn't. Reading lists of "100 things to do before you die" made it worse, not better — a hundred unranked options is just another way to avoid picking one.
So the site works the other way around. Every experience is written up with the three things I actually wanted to know beforehand — what it really feels like, how to start, and what it costs — and scored on five dimensions. There are 12 written up in detail right now, plus a weekly card draw if you'd rather be told what to try than pick.
How the scoring works
The 12 first-hand experiences are scored 1–5 on five dimensions: enjoyment, engagement, achievement, ease, and whether I'd do it again. Scores come from how the experience actually went, written down within a day of doing it — not reconstructed later from memory.
One rule I hold myself to: I don't round up. The open mic scored 3.8 and it stays at 3.8 even though a more positive-looking site would convert better. If a page shows a score, that number is mine, and the experience behind it is one I did.
What isn't from first-hand experience
Two guides on this site are not written from personal experience:
- How much does skydiving cost? — built from public pricing published by 42 US dropzones. I have not jumped.
- How much does an escape room cost? — built from public pricing published by 55 escape room operators across the US. I have not booked one.
Both pages say so at the top, in the same words, and neither carries a score. If I do either one, I'll rewrite the page with first-hand notes and add my score — and I'll say when that happened.
This distinction is the whole reason this page exists. A pricing guide assembled from public data is useful; a pricing guide assembled from public data that pretends someone jumped out of a plane is a lie. You should be able to tell which is which from the page itself, in one line, without reading this page at all.
Where the pricing data comes from
For the two pricing guides, prices are collected from the operator's own booking page, not from a directory or a secondary article. Where a range is given, it's the spread of published rates across operators of the same type — a 9,000 ft tandem jump and a 14,000 ft tandem jump are not the same product and aren't averaged together.
Three rules apply to every number on this site:
- A price is only published if a specific operator publishes it. No "expect to pay around" numbers with nothing behind them.
- Ranges are stated as ranges. If half the operators charge $90 and the other half $60, the page says both instead of splitting the difference.
- Hidden costs get their own section. Firing fees, fuel surcharges, video packages, per-person minimums — the number on the booking page is almost never the number you pay.
Where a claim comes from someone else — a city magazine's best-of list, an aggregated review score, a forum thread where people describe what they paid — the page links to it directly rather than paraphrasing it as fact.
What this site isn't
- Not a booking site. We don't take reservations and don't get paid per booking.
- Not a review aggregator. Where we cite Yelp, Google, or a magazine, the rating is theirs and is attributed to them. We don't restate someone else's 4.8 as our own.
- Not a list of 100 things. Fewer entries, each with a real number and a real opinion attached.
How the site makes money
Right now it doesn't — there are no ads, no affiliate links, and no sponsored placements anywhere on the site. If that changes, this section changes first, and any page carrying an affiliate link will say so on the page. A recommendation that pays us is worth less to you than one that doesn't, and you deserve to know which kind you're reading.
Corrections
Prices go stale faster than anything else on the internet. If a number on this site is wrong — a class that now costs more, a dropzone that closed, a fee we missed — tell me and I'll fix it and note the change on the page. The fastest way to reach me is to reply in the thread where you found the site, or leave a comment on the page in question.
If you've seen early screenshots or referral data showing "25 Things to Try", that was the previous title of our homepage before we realized a shorter list with honest scores was more useful than a padded one.
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