Garmin users have been left outraged by the company’s decision to charge a monthly fee for access to some of its features.
The fitness company – which makes smartwatches, bike computers and other health technology – announced on Thursday that it would start charging its users for a premium subscription. It will cost $6.99, or same in pounds, and is known as Connect+.
Garmin had long suggested that it was avoiding charging a monthly subscription, and has always offered its fitness features for free with its products. That put it in contrast with other platforms such as fitness tracker Whoop, which requires a monthly payment to access its app.
The subscription will not be required for any existing features, Garmin said. Instead, users will have to pay for an array of other new tools: AI features that will summarise trends based on people’s health and activity data, as well as new graphs and better options for tracking other people’s activity.
But users have already expressed worries that Garmin might require the subscription for future new features, and frustration that they had paid for their premium devices in the belief that they would be given new updates and features for free.
“Getting sick of these tech companies trying to milk my money with low value crap like Connect+,” reads the top post on the Garmin subreddit.
“First, they always put some more or less useless eye candy features behind the paywall so that people don't get too agitated with the new introduction of the paywalling through subscription... then give it some time... a year or two later you will 100% have a ton of actually useful features locked behind the subscription because that's how they force you into paying,” one reply read.
Many of the top posts on that forum were voicing frustration with the new update. Some suggested that they would delay future purchases until it became clear how many new updates would be behind the Connect+ paywall and how it would work.
Health tech expert Ray Maker, who blogs as DC Rainmaker, noted that Garmin has long charged a subscription for some of its products – such as extra maps and its satellite communication tools – but that those tended to require third-party subscriptions that would Garmin would have to pay for. But he said that the Connect update was “largely in-house on-device software features that in any other year would have just been built into the Garmin Connect product”.
