Yup….if pricing needs to change, just say why, apologize that you weren’t able to keep the promise but that it was made in good faith and lay hit how you handle the price increase for Legacy users vs. new subscribers.
No one doubts Nate’s intent when he made the promise….the word has changed significantly since then and TR has grown substantially and developed new visions / strategies.
Thanks. It was a no-brainer for me. In 2013 I started with an FTP in the low 200’s… and saw it go to over 300 within a year. TrainerRoad works! 
Not being US based (and not wanting to incite a political conversation) but how is the inflation rate looking over there currently and in the near term?
It looks scary here in the UK and it will mean consumers have less to spend and vendors see their costs rise which obviously leads to challenges…
Highest in 40 years, to keep it short.
Yeah they’ve not got any of their own plans and have only got a limited number of workouts… they do sync with TP though (works with a free TP account), so most users that want plans/workouts send them from TP.
I only ride indoors a couple of times a week so just create create my own plans… now I’ve got a decent number of custom workouts in RGT it’s really quick to do.
Personally I think TR is quite niche - solely focussing on cycling (yes I know they have Tri plans 
) and having a very basic looking app. I guess it is a hard sell in the current climate of Peloton, Zwift, RGT etc etc which is why they are asking for more cash from their current user base.
I guess the other issue is competition. I was watching this the other day and came across TrainerDay at a fraction of the cost of TR…
I know there are divided camps here. But I’m on the side of thinking that their very “basic” looking app is actually one of TR’s upsides. I don’t use zwift and every time I see someone’s screenshot on strava I think, “Holy crap! How can anyone focus with the riot of stuff on the screen!?”
The simplicity of the screen actually works for me… it focuses me, know exactly what to do and can focus on that, if I want to watch movies then I go and do that, what brought me to TR (and keeps me) is the focus, quality time on bike, maximum return for time spend.
G
Really wish this straw man argument went away in this thread.
@Nate_Pearson I personally love the candor, both in the roadmap and the willingness to discuss charged topics like pricing.
It’s highly subjective, but I’d much rather be a part of a community where you can interact with the CEO on topics like this vs corporate communications exclusively through surveys and PRs. These types of discussions are 100% happening at all the competitors, Nate is just willing to be open about it.
As to the actual pricing, it’s clear based on this thread that many of us use the product in different ways. I personally think the pricing is a good value if you are using the product to its full extent and letting AT essentially be your coach. I have a local coach in my neighborhood who I would love to be a client of and support because he’s a great guy, but I can’t get over that I think I actually get better quality workouts from TR for $20 vs his starting tier being $200.
IMO the creation of a basic and an advanced tier doesn’t sound like a bad option given how many of you keep saying you don’t want to pay for feature you don’t use. Nate’s suggestion that users are grandfathered into basic is reasonable to me. We don’t need to create endless tiers of feature sets that existed at the time each person signed up, just the 2.
I of course understand why people are upset about it but this is just the reality of business and inflation. Prices don’t stay the same forever.
Like many of the other posters I’m on a legacy rate ($99) and mostly use TR through the winter so even at that rate I have probably paid more over the years than if I had just paid 3 or 4 months per year. As a non-racer I’d question the value to me of some of the new features, I quite like the simply interface and run TR on my phone with a Kickr but not sure I’d pay 189 to do this. The key for TR is to expand its subscriber base, not just to increase the cost for its existing subscribers. If the new features are not attracting new subscribers then their value is questionable. Chasing additional features that only appeal to a limited number will take TR into a niche that may not be viable.
Worth it to look at was really mentioned and focus there vs wild bunny trails we see here, but that’s possibly just me.
Agreed. While I do think the promise is not keep-able indefinitely, I think the justification for when to break it should be more than ‘more income is better, we can do more if we had more money.’ That has been has likely been true for the entirety of TR’s existence. (It is possible to have so much money it can’t all productively be put to use on product development, but I doubt TR has ever been in that position.)
It may be the case now or soon that while the current rate makes good forward progress, it is not keeping up with the market/industry developments, and this needs to change now in order to not be in a big hole 3 years from now. I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but the time to fix that is when you recognize you are falling behind, not when you are so far behind that it is a crisis. From what little insight I have I don’t think that is the case right now, although Zwift’s recent training related announcement may indicate more competition. They certainly do have money to burn.
I’ve been a member since 2017 and what I get now is way beyond what I got back then. I feel TR is stunning value and would be very happy to pay a top up for additional features. I guess knowing the development pipeline would leave people feeling they are getting value. TR is my primary training tool, so I’m always up for new ways to get faster.
Can we also get rid of the straw man argument that TR needs the money to survive and people who don’t want to pay more aren’t accepting the reality that TR will die without it? He made it very clear that the $5 was to hire more teams to do more things faster.
I’m grandfathered at $99, so for me it is an excellent value. Over the years I’ve gone from triathlete to just running and cycling. TR helped me increase my FTP and I have used various plans over the years with good success. In the end Nate could raise my fee another $60 per year and I would keep paying. I enjoy TR for what it is, simple and easy to use. TR has a ton of workouts and ERG mode works, competitors are probably real similar, too. I don’t have to worry about is the program going to work while streaming a movie or listening to music, it does 100% of the time.
I don’t really use any of the features, AT or breaking down rides, PRs on power, etc. I don’t race and while I enjoy numbers the only number that matters to me is my FTP. I can do workouts and I know if my FTP is too high or low, so doing deep dives into workouts inside or outside doesn’t do anything for me. While I think AT is a good thing at this point in my life I don’t want someone telling me what workout to do.
I only use the calendar feature to put in workouts I want to do on certain days. In the end I am using TR because it works, simple graphical interface and the workouts.
I think Nate needs to look at his expenses while also considering price increases. I am willing to bet TR’s biggest line item expense is salaries. I get the fact software engineers are expensive and probably difficult to retain (since they can get a job anywhere). I could be way off base because I know zero about what goes on at TR and what kind of perks are provided to the employees. Maybe Nate could cut back on certain company contributions and or perks. TR probably picked up the entire South Africa trip, good estimate 20K+ to send everyone over there, hotels, meals, etc. I understand employees like generous 401K matches, insurance, etc, but sometimes a company needs to make hard decisions to move forward.
Running your own company is tough, you want to retain the best people by providing them with awesome benefits, but that comes at a cost that chips away at your bottom line thus you can’t hire more people to bring new ideas to market.
Does TR really need a weekly podcast, blogs, forums, etc. Just throwing a different perspective out there. Is having a bunch of employees work remotely really the best idea? How much is does extra does a remote employee cost? Is the podcast producer vital, etc?
I think TR can still hold on to the community it has created by providing less in order to bring more features to the software.
I think Nate’s “stream of consciousness” roll, and specifically the pricing portion, was a clear mistake at this time (note the timing qualifier). It’s the type for thought process and question I’d expect in a formal TR meeting or after hours BS session between TR employees. After the initial discussion and presumed refinement is when I think that would make more sense to open to the community, but that’s just me.
It was too brief and undeveloped to such a point that it’s leading to the total mess with thoughts and theories all over the map. Maybe that is exactly what Nate wanted, and if so, that’s great. But there seems to be more work to find the gems hiding in here than a different approach might have offered. Yup, speculation about speculation… irony is alive and well within me 
To top it all off, this pricing discussion practically buried what might have been a half dozen or so new features, hints and direction indicators which is WAY more than anything we’ve had from TR in a LOOONG. long time. He mentioned stealing marketing’s thunder, and I firmly believe that’s happened here which is doubly disappointing.
Some really good points being made here.
I don’t think discussing the complete end of legacy pricing is a strawman, even though that is not what Nate suggested/floated in the podcast. Nate’s goal is to increase revenue, that is the entire point of the discussion, and changing how legacy pricing works was brought up in this context. Unless these changes actually cause people to move from legacy pricing to ‘full’ price, there is no increase in revenue, and the whole exercise has been pointless. In the context of the discussion regarding ‘more money for more development’, the goal of Nate’s idea is clearly to get people on legacy pricing to change to current pricing and to pay more. I think this is part of what makes this language-lawyering way of ‘keeping the promise’ so dissatisfying for me - the entire point is to make people not like the legacy option so they pay more. This makes it seem much less genuine than it could have otherwise been.
Also, since the goal is to increase overall revenue, rather than prices, the number of people who would cancel their subscriptions does need to be considered. I know that if I was facing a change to full price, I would look at what the options where - right now I have no idea because what I have works well and I am happy with the price. Given the discussion of the competitive landscape and costs of other platforms, I think the current price seems about as high as it could ‘reasonably’ be. I don’t think revenue can be increased by raising the price for new subscribers.
A point that I meant to have in my first post that I forgot is that while the legacy pricing benefits me, it does raise some ‘fairness’ questions, and these increase the longer it goes on. Is paying $99/year for TR in 2030 while others are paying $279 (or whatever) for the same thing? I won’t attempt to define fairness, and yes the terms are/were the same for everyone, but at some point it just doesn’t ‘feel’ fair.
Also, to all the statements of ‘It’s so much more than what it was when I started’ - well of course it is, that’s what we all are paying monthly for. We have always been paying for improvements. How much would TR cost if they only had a skeleton crew that just kept the servers running and updated the apps for new OS releases? If that is what was being sold for $99/year, there would have been a lot fewer buyers, and a lot fewer people sticking with it. Continued improvements are generally part of the subscription model, and explicitly have been part of TR’s subscription model.
This. Based on past postings their salaries for software engineers were not, in my experience, that competitive at the time and the market for experienced remote software engineers in the US is completely out of control right now.
That said, the team they have has made tremendous improvements to the product that make me feel like the $99 a year price I’m paying is a steal compared to what the product was when I signed up.
I do feel like what Nate said in the past was fairly definitive that the only way the price would go up was if he wasn’t in charge anymore (not because they came up with new features), but I certainly don’t begrudge them for trying. It is a business after all.
I give up 