I’m sure glad I’m grandfathered in @99 per year, if I had to pay the current prices I’d have to drop Zwift.
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Just my 2c:
Had TR been 189 when I started indoor cycling last year, I might well have ended up with Sufferfest or another platform without ever knowing about TR’s strengths.
Also, not announcing the biggest price hike in TR history (afaik) is a rather disappointing, I expect more transparency from TR because this is one of the reasons I like and respect TR - their (usually) fantastic interaction with their community… please keep it real!
Edit: Also, a grace period for failed renewals (e.g. 14 days) would be much appreciated. My credit card info changes every 3 years… 14 days would be enough time to realize the problem and act accordingly. And this whole thread would not exist.
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I’m in two minds about this:
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I’ve been a subscriber since Beta and before Nate gave up his day job. I believed (and still do) that TR have a great product and wanted to support development. I just checked my account and I’m still on $99 which is great for me as regular user.
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My girlfriend is not currently TR user, and would likely be a 1 or 2 times a week user. Maybe this makes TR not for her, but at $190 ($270AUD) for an account for her would be expensive. Perhaps month-by-month for her for winter only is the way to go.
Maybe there is space for a TrainerRoad Lite without the calendar, analytics, outside rides etc. Like it was at launch - a bunch of workouts in the app and a webpage with the workouts for each plan.
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Same.
Having scrolled through this thread, I’m mostly struck by a dynamic that is so balled up in the Trainer Road experience that nobody is talking about it – the massive intimacy between the user base and the management. How many companies do any of us do business with where we refer to the CEO by first name as if he’s a riding buddy and then expect him to answer to us, specifically, when we have a question?
No doubt in my mind that this is the real discussion happening here – some people are feeling betrayed that a business they trust, a business they feel a personal relationship with, has done something that will affect them without checking in first. This isn’t about $80 a year or whatever. Any serious person in cycling spends $80 many times over in the pursuit of marginal gains, replacement parts, reg fees, tools and all manner of other stuff. For my Trainer Road subscription this year, I went from 3.0 watts/kg last year to 3.6 this year. No other investment I have made has ever come close in terms of cycling value for dollar spent. Not my beautiful new Wilier (which cost 10 years of TR subscriptions) or my mid-market used wheel set (two years of of TR subscriptions) or a single set of latex tubes (2 months of TR).
If I were Trainer Road’s chief marketing officer (this is my job in life for another organization…so I’m not out of place giving advice on this), I would have given more weight to the community intimacy part of this announcement. TR has trained its customers to expect a say and to expect fair warning when big changes are going to come. I think they dramatically underestimated the power of that here and maybe have some making up to do because the community and the sense of transparency that TR cultivates about its decision making and its relationship to customers is a big part of TR’s value proposition.
@Nate_Pearson You are running a hell of a good company and you have a hell of a good product. Worth every penny. This is a growing pain and one that I hope you are able to navigate successfully.
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People are upset that we didn’t announce the price increase.
To be fair to us, I can’t think of another company that pre-announces price increases and grandfathers people in for life. When Netflix did it they were actually announcing that they were raising prices on everyone in the future.
I’m sure there’s some but the bigger companies/industries that come to mind (Disney, Hotels, Google, Airlines, Restaurants, Clothing, Specialized, Shimano, Giant, SRAM, Our Competitors, etc) don’t announce ahead of time.
We can look at our numbers and pre-announcing price increases is not a good financial move for us. I understand that it’s made a lot of people upset and we’ve spent some of our good will. I don’t like that.
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Any idea (roughly) how long triathletes will have to wait to see their swims and runs in the calender? My wife is a triathlete and as such we have to have a training peaks account to keep an eye on her none biking activities. As the various apps get more expensive it will soon become time that we are realistically forced to choose due to the financial costs. It makes little sense to choose an app that you can’t view your swim/run data in if you can only have one.
She really likes the interface and the simplicity of following the bike workouts, but a TP account with a purchased plan with structured workouts (which you can use again and again for a one off charge) is starting to look like the way we might have to go unfortunately.
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It’s all a resource issue. Hopefully the price raise works and we can get a team to just build out swim/run fully.
Right now we have a few higher priorities that we think everyone will like. But the bigger we are the more quickly we can execute on features like this.
So I don’t have an ETA at the moment.
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The complaints about this can’t be the actuall amount of increase $60 / yr.
What else could you purchase for the $60 to make you faster? (genuine question as I won’t it 
). Actually think about, there’s very little I purchase for my cycling hobby under $60…
I guess people don’t like any increases, however the question then becomes do you think it’s good value for your individual situation or not.
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Two quick points:
(1) Netflix did not raise their prices by 46 %, though.
(2) Even if that move makes sense financially (you know this better than I do), I still think the roll out was bodged. You could have timed this with the release of the new desktop apps so that users know what they are getting for that extra money. Or you could at the very least have an explanatory blog post at least telling us that you will turbocharge development.
Your users have gotten used to the TR team’s openness and have come to expect that. Take that as a positive 
This is a disingenuous argument.
If I raised prices from $1 to $2 that’s a 100% increase but its literally a single dollar.
It’s 5 bucks a month. What was the last component we all bought for our bikes? How much did it cost?
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As CEO I want our price to reflect our value. I seriously think that nothing you can spend your money on in cycling will make you faster for less money. I think we were underpriced for a long time.
When we do price raises that are tied to features we get the inevitable “Well I don’t use that feature, so don’t raise my price”.
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I think subscription companies do. If you subscribe to service and the price increases you have to give notice. Now for current subscribers no change so no notification needed. But I think its 2 things the size of the increase is out of whack with other services and underlying economic data and this is the 2nd since October so in 9 months its almost doubled. You are asking people to pay increased subscriptions for functionality that isn’t even available yet… Or may never make it.
It would have been better to announce it in the podcast this week, state the reasons why and put prices up the following day.
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So in effect what makes us faster are the training plans. Xert is half the price and has a training plan component. Plenty of people seeing big gains there. Half the price, did TrainerRoad make you twice as fast? Doubtful.
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I am perfectly fine with the new price and would be totally ok paying that. To me TR has two unique selling points, the vast training (plan) library and its incredible user base (and your connection to them). You put a lot of effort into both, and it shows.
But because of your openness when it comes to future product plans, I think the other members expected to be treated differently than Netflix treats us.
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I’m grandfathered but what are we really talking about here? $0.53 per day (based on a 360 day year)? Frankly, the value to me exceeds the cost by a dollar, so I would sign on vs. the local trainer that charges $250 PER 8 WEEK SESSION!
Bottom line, @Nate_Pearson and crew are worth it.
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Thanks for the reply, between Mrs Fleas apps for triathlon and my cycling apps it has got rather expensive. I long for the day when one app will satisfy all our desires!!! It does get a bit frustrating having to have two TrainerRoad accounts, then Training Peaks etc, etc. I’m excited/curious to see what is coming, my personal wish would be for more individualised workouts based on your physiology rather than just a percentage of FTP. Good luck.
Not only, we pay even for the upcoming swim and run features that me and other cyclists don’t need.
For me TR was a cycling thing and that is shifting. Keep it at core, no analysis features needed, there are others for and TR will never beat them. TrainingPeaks or WKO to name one…
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Ultimately, TR can chose any way they want to announce a price increase, and any timing for that.
I think the biggest misstep here is the way this change happened (more specifically was/was not announced).
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Whether they mean to or not, they effectively set a precedent for their company with the early notification of the price increase last September.
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They knowingly announced the price change early on the forum, Facebook, and podcast.
- They even encouraged users to “take advantage” of the opportunity to join the service at the current “low” rate and lock that in with their grandfather pricing policy.
- Right or wrong… intentional or not, that set the bar and expectations of future price changes from users.
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Probably more surprising to me is that the notification for this price change came in a 3rd reply to a customer complaint on the forum.
- It’s 24 hours after the apparent price change, and I still have not seen what I would term an “official” announcement. No email, no forum post in the “Announcements” section, no press release… nothing.
- The only knowledge of this was driven from, and continued in a forum thread. A thread that could be unnoticed by a fair number of people (even if they are members here).
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Even as they chose to not offer a pre-warning (which could be argued either way), I still think an “official” declaration of the price change on the actual date of release (apparently yesterday morning) in various forms (email current subscribers, forum post in the appropriate section, and press release to the main indoor training/cycling world sites) would have been appropriate.
- As it stands, we have clear statements from Nate here, so we know we are getting good info. But the appearance is a reaction to a customer complaint, along with the heated discussion about the change in light of the points above.
- This type of thread was bound to happen with this change, even in the best of circumstances. However, there is a distinct difference in proactively stating a change (official TR statement in a primary resource), and handling the repercussions of that vs what we have here.
It’s a black eye for a company that set a pretty high bar for customer relations and notifications in the past. Change is hard… and sometimes, the way that change is handled matters as much as the change itself.
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Dude prices go up all the time without warning. I needed to fill my gas tank and figured I’d do it in the afternoon rather then the morning, it went up 40 cents. I couldn’t complain to the attendant. Movie ticket prices go up over time. Food prices go up.
TR has the right to increase their prices at any time to any price they want. They have been doing so much more for free as well as for members. Had they just randomly dropped prices no one would be complaining here.
The ones who are complaining saying that they only use it six months a year or something like that and its gets too expensive. If you use it 20 times a month for six months that comes out to 120 workouts. If you signed up for a new plan at $189 a year that comes out to $1.58 per workout. Thats hardly anything.
I know people hate the upfront cost, but once thats paid it is really easy to forget about and realize how much you are getting for the year. And I said it earlier if someone is that upset/feels they do not need all the features TR offers, well you don’t need a subscription somewhere to do a 2x20 @94% workout, or a 3x8 @105%, etc. Can always just set something up yourself and hit the lap button on your Garmin.
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