TR Price Increase to $189.95/year ($19.95/month)

I have paid annually and intend to continue, as a current user do I keep the old rates too

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I think TR competes with both in person coaching and software based cycling platforms. Quite frankly, I struggle to make a terrific argument for why I’m worth 10x more than TrainerRoad for a strict cyclist. For a runner or triathlete, yeah… but if you don’t think coaches are competing with apps like Zwift and TR, well… I think they’re eventually going to put all but the very best of us or elite level coaches out of business.

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I wish TR had fitness, fatigue and form.

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Well Zwift just got 10% more expensive for Australians due to them starting to collect the local sales tax (gst).

saw this from @gpl

I don’t think that’s a reasonable question. This isn’t a strata, this isn’t a government, this isn’t a public company. If you’re giving them money out of goodwill, then say so… That said, the pricing increase does make it hard for me to even suggest to others to get onto this training program. Like, let me try to sell this to you, you have to get a bike, trainer and a pm to make this all work, for the potential to seeing gains, depending on your nutrition and overall stress. Yeah, hard sell, but I hope TRs calculations are all in order.

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All Jokesm, I get it, but a sauna, 2k, just one engineer, 60k-80k usd?

As a year-round user I sure appreciate it.

Nonetheless, the price increases for new or non-continuous users over the last 9 months have been very substantial. You can argue that $99/year was a total bargain of course, but I wonder how this will work out commercially. Are you trying to discourage existing users from temporarily dropping Trainerroad (say, for the summer) so that your revenue is less seasonal? Aren’t you concerned about growth?

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Given all the negativity here, let me say that I appreciate how @Nate_Pearson handled the topic on the podcast. I think he took the community’s criticism the right way, and it shows why we love TrainerRoad.

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Just locked in my annual subscription having now realised that I make use of the platform year round. Maybe less so in summer, but there is a time and place for an early morning session where the convenience of a structured session without getting kitted up is excellent. I’m also impressed by how quickly they’ve coded and released the fix for the annual increase so that it is the right grandfathered price.

I totally understand the conflict for @Nate_Pearson and the company but development is often financed by being able to demonstrate good consistent income. Having people drop in and out is not sustainable with their ambitions.

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Depending on how you calculate insurance and other benefits into the fully loaded cost of an employee I’d expect a reasonably experienced mid-level software engineer (5ish years experience) to cost somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 a year

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As many others have pointed out TR should consider to implement different tiers of subscription plans and make people pay for new features such as analysis tools and others to come. My suggestion would be

  • Silver 9.99$/month or 49.95$ for 6 months (for the shop around / try out customer)
    to include 3 plans (2 base plans volume low and mid and 1 speciality plan) and let the customer add one more plan for an additional 1$/month

  • Gold 129$/year no monthly subscription (for the loyal customer)
    to include all the plans and to include the presently available futures TR offers

  • Platinum 189$/year no monthly subscription (for the loyal customer and supporter)
    to include all the plans and all the to be developed new futures

I’m sure you’ll find enough supporters who are willing to pay for and to fund future plans to expand and enhance the TR platform. For all of us weekend warriors who want to stay fit during winter, you’re outpricing some of us and make us look stupid against those with “grandfathered in” plans paying double of what those enthusiasts pay. I know @Nate_Pearson has already said that as long as he’s the CEO, this won’t change. Maybe reconsider and don’t build your future plans for the platform on the back of potential new customers. Just a thought.

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Any link between the cost of a product/service and its market price is purely coincidental. The company staff can be living in a campground or going around in chauffered Rolls Royces, that changes nada to the value of the product/service.

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TR pays $100k. Their job postings say if you ask for more they will throw away your application, lol.

110k, plus up to $4.4k into your 401(k) account, plus healthcare ($10k a year?), plus whatever the employer has to spend extra.

By the way, sorry for going off topic, but I love the ad. Almost wish I was in software development and living in the U.S.
https://trainerroad.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0f772/

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Again, it depends on your methodology of calculating benefits, but a general formula you can use is anywhere between 50-75% of salary for benefits and other support costs.

Health insurance, computers, travel, everything adds up. So if I’m paying someone $100,000 I’d expect the total cost to the company to be in the $150,000-175,000 range

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No, there are two inside secrets about owning a business and being in the bike industry.

  1. Charge everything on a miles credit card. Server hosting costs, computers and software are the big ones. If you do this you can fly for free by using points.

  2. If you’re in the industry you can get “pro deal” from other industry companies or straight up free equipment. With pro deals you can sell the bike 10 months later and basically end up even or make a bit.

So when you travel you just have to get an Airbnb and sometimes (but not always) pay for race entry. Sometimes users are nice to us too. In Leadville a user let me stay at his house the entire week.

So if you do it smart you can make your travel and bike dollars really stretch.

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If Nate is looking for an exit from his start up, he’s doing it in such a completely terrible way that I would question why anyone would want him making any strategic or financial decisions. :wink: If he were looking for an exit from the company, then he would not need to raise prices in order to hire more staff: he’d approach investors with a proposal to get them to fund the new hires, in exchange for the expectation of an “exit event” later where he, and the investors, would make a ton of money when they sold their interest in the now more valuable company.

The price is going up to fund more work is pretty much the clearest signal in the world that he wants to keep doing this. This is in direct contrast to Zwift that raised $120M in order to grow. That’s a huge amount of money, and everyone who participated in that investment was betting some variation of the idea that there’s at least a 10% chance that they get 10+ times what they invested (so one successful investment pays for the others that weren’t, plus some measure of profit).

Of course, does that mean they’ll never sell the company? Everyone has their price. :wink: But the actions being taken don’t set the stage for an acquisition that makes Nate or Chad fabulously wealthy and progressively less involved in the company.

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Of course, you also get to pick which 90 hours/week you work.

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image

Still going strong I see…

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