Legacy Pricing of TR

TrainerRoad Software
854

I’ll try to keep this short and to the point. There’s a whole lot of emotion in the posts above that’s beyond me.
I was half expecting the tsunami sirens to fire up after RThompson’s final post. :volcano:

I’ve been around since 2017. Didn’t really start using things until 2018. $99 USD to AUD was all good for a training app. (The AUD was high).

I never asked to be fixed into a locked in price.
I don’t have a problem with my updates being cut off at some point because of that fixed price.

If the price goes up for full access to features I’d need to weigh things up based on the increase.
As of today, it’s about $260 Aud for an annual subscription. That’s getting up there for an app that I don’t really need to get faster.
I honestly couldn’t say if I’d stick with it permanently at $260/y. :man_shrugging:

At the end of the day the market is going to decide what the going rate for a training app is.

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855

How about this as an idea? Instead of moving legacy users to the new price, put the increase on the legacy price. If it goes up by $5 a month, then your legacy price goes up by $5 a month and the jump won’t be so big.

Both sides win?

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856

2 days a week of only very high intensity work - nothing useful for a base phase for example. They’re of no use for what a lot of people are asking for unless you love doing 126% FTP intervals for base work…

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857

I’ve been on legacy pricing since 2016. It’s a good deal for me and it’s under the threshold of what i need to worry about - relative to the frequency of my usage and its utility to me. I have monthly subs for many things like Spotify, Amazon Prime, Netflix, NowTV, Disney, Apple+, Playstation. It really adds up.

Unfortunately, I am really tight and so I fanatically cancel most of them when i am not actively using them and then re-buy them when i next want to use them again. For instance, I’ll cancel Zwift regularly and then re-sub when i want to use it again, maybe months later.

Although i might not be actively “training” for some months or indeed even some years (i had to take 6 months off this year!) I will keep TrainerRoad as my central “all things cycling” dashboard just like I use Garmin for “all things running”.

TR is a great resource but If i had to pay the full rate i would almost certainly cancel it until i was actively “training” again and year on year this would probably mean less and less…

As a long term customer, one who’s followed TR on their journey and followed the podcast since number 5 i think, it is important to think of us as a group that, if left alone, would probably just happily keep paying them a few hundred dollars a year for a long time to come… But also a group that might also think twice about losing their “special customer” price…

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858

Sums it up perfectly.

For me as a legacy $99 subscriber I appreciate the deal I receive and acknowledge that it’s probably a better deal for me than TR from a cashflow perspective… ignoring the fact that if I wasn’t grandfathered I’d either of cancelled or moved to a monthly payment a few years ago and at $99 I’ll probably stick around for years even if I don’t use it so much so probably net beneficial to TR.

I wouldn’t be angry if TR changed my pricing for new features, I totally understand that their lack of willingness to take on debt or external investment backs them into a corner when it comes to raising capital. But if they change my price, I’d definitely cancel but with no hard feelings and only wishing TR all the best.

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859

That’s what I thought was being suggested rather than completely getting rid of legacy prices

860

For reference, here is what Nate referenced and why the future discussion is welcomed.

Pricing on the other hand… is a delicate topic and this thread shows the negatives that can result from an off the cuff remark.

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861

And positives…

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862

I’ve got legacy pricing on the Forum access. If they raise the price on that, I have to go somewhere else.

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863

Cost of everything is going up, as a legacy subscriber I understand I got a good deal and will continue to use TR going forward as I do see the value. For me the calculus will always be watts gained/$ - TR is one of the best investments out there.

864

i’ve been a TR subscriber for almost a year, i didn’t know about grandfathered pricing until after i signed up. i feel pretty salty about subsidising TR for other users. i do really like TR but i’ve just cancelled my renewal and will test competing products (wahoo systm comes to mind and is a bit cheaper). lately i’ve mostly been using the trainnow feature while following progression levels which appears to be unique to TR. in reality the cost is nothing to me (and probably for most TR subscribers, it’s $90 and i’m sure that the vast majority of subscribers live in the developed world).

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865

I’m on $99 and my wife is on $129. If grandfathering ended we’d both probably cancel and go monthly for 4 months/year maximum.

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866

For me as a legacy user, it really depends on the product that is offered.

I don’t know, why Nate made that promise and bound it so tight to his persona.
To me it looked a bit like an appeasement for the existing users, when prices were increased, but I might be totally wrong.

It would be absolutely reasonable, if legacy pricing would get thrown out of the window. If I were a new user, I’d hate it, if I knew, that someone would just pay the half of the price. This would be a reason for me to not use the product at all.
I like paying just 99$ a year, but find it unfair at the same time. (Of course, I won’t switch to higher rates). I also don’t feel like I deserve that lower rate forever, because I never founded anything with that amount, but paid for a product I am using.

So if just everyone would have to pay the same price or offers like 500$ for 5 years were made, I’d be fine with it.

On the other hand, I find 20$ per month too much for the product that is offered right now.
For me as a Triathlete, there are too many promised features missing. And existing features are not good enough to be really useful right now.

Planbuilder is just not there yet. If I’d be 4 weeks away from training, PB is just cutting that time out and throwing me (i.e.) into specialty instead of resending me to base, what’d be the right choice.
For longer Cycling events (>3h) the plans are not suitable due to not enough Z2 volume.
AT is nice with cycling, but only if you train only indoors.
For triathletes a simple consideration of past running volume for further adaptations and prescriptions would be crucial.

I love the reliable trainer workout control and the levels for so many workouts. But anything that should work just automatically right now, needs far too many manual readjustments.

If PB and AT would deliver what they promise, Tri would be properly supported and maybe something like red/yellow/green light would really work (not sure if that’d be ever possible based on HRV and RHR since even Whoop is not really reliable), I’d be happy to pay 50$ a month (and find it cheap), since this would really make a coach for me obsolete.

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867

Would just like to say though, TrainerDay has a very good plan builder for subscribers, probably better than TR, it looks at you Strava history, allows you to select the number of hours per week, which days, which days are long, and the plan, intensity start and progression, I’m not totally on board with the plans at the moment … but it is in beta

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868

I’ve on Grandfather pricing since 2017, then it was very basic but I kept up my subscription for years that helped fund the recent trainnow feature and progression levels you’ve ben using. Your welcome :wink:

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869

There’s no point in one or two people doing it, it needs to be a thing across the board.

TR isn’t going to be able to hire any more people for the extra $100 or so that individual pays. For a single engineer they would need more than 1000 people to do it, for a team of 7 (a good size for a software team) you’d need something like $750K per year, so c. 7500 people switching out of the grandfathered rate, that’s not something that can be done on an ad-hoc basis, it would need to be done across the user base.

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870

Legacy Pricer here,

When I joined in 2018 it was right before TR really started taking off on making TR what it is today. Since then they have added a lot of features that have genuinely made training better. Not saying I like the state of all the features, I’m looking at you Group Workouts.

At the end of the day if they increase the price so be it, $5, $10 a month is realistically nothing to a numbers/data driven/focused person. I bet we could all find that without much effort.

If you think you’re “subsidizing” legacy users, it isn’t any different than In-state and out of state tuition rates at State schools and I doubt anyone is complaining about that. On that note, I’d be fine with a price increase if it meant not having to have 2 devices during group workouts faster when we all want to do different workouts.

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871

It is wild that there is so much crying and whining over here about potential prices going up and it is shortsighted. It is not like TR is saying they’ll do what cable companies do, which is offer lower prices to get new subscribers while existing customers pay higher prices. If they were doing that, then I would understand people getting bent out of shape.

Money from 10 years ago is not worth the same as today. Inflation happens. My old neighbor bought his small house for 135K and sold it last year for 210k. My new neighbor didn’t throw a fit demanding to pay less money. Used bike prices are higher than they were 3 years ago.

The $189 per year comes out to 15.75 per month or under 4 dollars per week. If paying that is outrageous to you, then just make your own plan. Most of the year, twice a week do 2x20@90% + 10@100% and then do the rest endurance and recovery pace. As you get ready for big races, swap key workouts with some 5x4@120% and just go from there. That’s a free training plan.

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872

Thanks for the feedback. We’re not changing anything for legacy athletes.

We might revisit the tiers I talked about above, but probably not in 2022.

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873

Good. At least then you will be at least $99 better off come February! Will obviously wait and see when the tiers are decided on. Thanks for taking the decision out of my hands!

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