I think the new price is fair, although the surprise increase is poor form, specially when you made such a big deal out of the last (modest) increase. I express this opinion as a ‘grandfathered’ subscriber.
I don’t expect anyone to share the following sentiment - I’m going alone here: I am a regular podcast listener, and more and more the podcasts seem repetitive and irrelevant to my situation. Simply, the guys don’t represent me anymore. Their constant thirst for new and better gear (who is paying for that?) seems un quench able due to limitless resources. Are my subscriber fees paying for TR staff to travel to remote locations and support other TR staff who are racing, fiscally justified because they come on the podcast to describe what they have learned from the ordeal? Maybe not, I don’t know, but the skepticism grows more and more to the point I am tuning out of the pods and seriously contemplating where I want to spend my money.
I’ll finish by saying I think the gang have done a great job - I really like TR (I feel like I’ve been with them almost from the start), but now I sense they are in “selling” mode - trying to cater to a prospective buyer. Hope I am wrong. But hey: those Tesla’s don’t charge themselves!
I would bet all of this is classified as a business expense of some form - probably marketing + advertising. Which I think is legit, as that’s part of running any business.
Interesting thread with some very interesting viewpoints like “Is my subscription paying for X” and “How do you justify charging for Y”.
At the basest form TR is a service, and everybody who uses the service needs to decide what value it is to them and what that is worth. If the value is worth more than you pay, no problem. If the value isn’t then you have a choice to make, the same as the TR people have business choices to make very day. At the end of the day this is very much a 1st world problem.
What is interesting, and perhaps what the TR people have under-estimated, is the sense of connection and “family” a lot of people feel towards them and the TR, and that clearly is leading to a sense of “betrayal”. Humans are complicated in that respect and there are too many different views to please everyone all of the time. Time will tell whether this is a mistake or not
In my opinion it’s just managing expectations. With the previous price increase they gave a warning about an upcoming price increase. So people had the choice to change there subscription accordingly. This time they didn’t gave an heads-up. I understand the frustration because we (the customer) maybe expected an heads-up again. But it’s their good right as @Nate_Pearson explained not to give any information in advance about an price hike.
For now I’m interested to see what they develop for TR to improve the experience which will justify the price increase. And if they don’t meet your expectations you can still vote with your wallet.
question for the people upset about the lack of announcement, if you had received an email a week ago telling you the price would be increasing, what would you have done differently?
TrainerRoad is a business. I think many people are missing this point.
What we need to do is decide whether or not we feel the product is worth the price. If it is, we pay up and continue. If it’s felt not to be worth the price, we take our custom elsewhere. It’s nit really rocket science.
Yes it is TR’s right of course to choose not to announce the increase like the other companies Nate gave examples of, but the reality is that was not TR’s past practice. Quite the contrary in fact.
I think the right thing to do would have been to tell the subscribers sometime between the last increase and now that they had done their homework and wouldn’t be in a position to notify us of an increase in advance next time as it doesn’t work for them. I think that would have been consistent with the open and upfront communication TR have had with us previously, but set the expectations going forward to deliver the business outcomes they wanted.
I’d of signed up for an annual plan at $130. I took a break to try other platforms even though I was grandfathered in at $99, I decided that I could accept the extra $30 if I wanted to come back. I’m pretty sure now that I’ll stick to sufferfest and maybe the of month or two with zwift over the winter
Well, that was a mistake and clearly acknowledged by Nate. They are actively working to solve the programming issue, and will fix the problem immediately if you contact support directly (as they did for other posters in this thread with the same issue).
