Fitness has been a growing market in the tech industry for years now, with major brands like Garmin, Apple, and Samsung all investing heavily into devices and services designed to help you stay in shape.
Nowadays it seems the trend is to help your wallet lose some weight as well. Just about every service has subscription tiers and there’s even devices that don’t function without a membership.
Pay Once, Pay Twice
Many fitness trackers cost $500 and up, and yet brands like Garmin, Oura, Apple, and Samsung expect users to be comfortable with paying a subscription on top of that for a wider feature set.
Garmin’s subscription service, Connect+ launched a year ago and has continued to face significant backlash. The subscription adds AI-powered insights called Active Intelligence, advanced nutrition tracking, and additional coaching content.
Those are all great features, but the concern is that any future expansions to the service will fall behind the $12 monthly paywall instead of being added as baseline features.
Paying $12 a month on top of trackers that cost up to four figures just to get full access to the data that tracker already records feels like an extra sting in the wallet we don’t need.
Other trackers like Whoop and Oura are almost completely built around subscription-first models. Oura only offers limited data access like sleep, activity, and rest scores, while Whoop literally doesn’t function without a subscription.
The biggest companies in this market, Apple and Samsung, haven’t yet locked data access behind a paywall, but rumour has it that both are working on health-focused subscription services that provide AI-driven health coaching and nutrition insights.
Why fitness tracker subscriptions?
In short, the reason is the sheer effectiveness of subscriptions at growing revenue.
Garmin’s fitness segment has grown 33 percent for the full year to $2.36 billion USD. The company president and CEO Cliff Pemble says that subscriptions will be a big focus for Garmin going forward as it chases growth.
New features cost money to build and run, but many of them are in-house developments that would otherwise have been built into the product.
Apple’s Health+ service would build upon its Fitness+ service, but instead of tailored content like workout routines, Health+ is expected to lock data driven insights and wider health services behind its subscription.
In general, there seems to be an idea in the industry that customers should pay to have access to the full feature set of the products they’ve already bought. This is a business model shift designed to extend the tail of profits companies can receive from a device sale.
Are fitness tracker subscriptions worth it?
For most users, fitness tracker subscription features are a bit overkill. Some feel like better value than others, but for the average person a fitness tracker subscription provides more data than you need.
If you’re the type of person that gets motivated by seeing your health metrics improve, or if you’re seriously engaged in training and want to optimise your routine, they may be worth a trial at least.
The sentiment around Garmin and Connect+ is that the hardware is great, but the software is half-baked. Features like Active Intelligence reportedly just give you a summary of your most recent training session that you could see by digging into the statistics yourself.
Whoop’s subscription is transparent, but the band provides more data than you need if you’re just looking to stay healthy or gain a bit of fitness. Its data-driven insight is only worthwhile if you’re determined to stick to its routine and recommendations.
Oura membership provides a range of insights, but on top of the already expensive Oura Ring that starts at over $500, you’re paying an extra $10 per month for stats you’d also get from a more fully featured tracker.
As for Samsung and Apple’s upcoming health subscriptions, both seem to be leaning into AI-driven data insights and nutritional plans. It’s hard to say whether they’ll be worth it without seeing the full feature set, but putting your fitness behind a paywall is not an easy sell.
Fitness platform services like Apple Fitness+, iFiT and Wahoo SYSTM sell content and coaching instead of data access. These can be pretty motivating and offer easy access to a wide range of workout routines you can follow.
That’s less icky than selling access to data your device already recorded.
Check what you’re buying
Fitness trackers provide a great way to keep an eye on your training and overall health, and if a subscription comes with genuinely original content it’s a reasonable ask to pay for that.
Increasingly, though, it’s becoming important to check what your fitness tracker actually gives you for free and what’s behind a paywall. Before you buy any tracker this year, be sure to check what you’re getting, as the sticker price is no longer the whole story.
Comments