Er, $.03, surely…
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100% agree with you. TrainerRoad really lost its luster for me with the departure of key staff. The podcast got very boring and dry after that and I stopped listening to it a year ago. The technology promise of TrainerRoad and the absolutely KEY feature of being able to take unstructured rides into account with Adaptive Training and Progression Levels. RLGL is fine, but it’s not THAT useful, especially after having been training for many years. I stopped doing TrainerRoad workouts within the app and so all my PLs fell to 0, making the feature completely useless. That functionality has been promised for so many years now that it’s vaporware, which makes me sad.
I was on an annual plan, and have been a subscriber for many years, but I canceled my membership a couple months ago. I’m riding out the remainder of my annual membership, but at this point, the cancellation seems permanent for me.
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They’ve said multiple time the marketing department is Jonathan. He’s got enough going on with the podcast and social media.
While the idea of TR merch sounds great, I think Nate wants TR to be a premium brand. That would mean any merch would need to be an expensive, premium product. If I were him, I would not want to deal with all the complaints about pricing or quality when it’s not aero enough, a thread comes undone, weird fit, or other issue. Yes, that should be handled by the 3rd party but people will complain.
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I totally agree and think this is the real reason. It’s not that it’s not easy to get a merch company to produce coffee mugs, tshirts, key chains, stickers, coozies, simple jerseys, etc. It’s that they don’t want to do that kind of merch. Anyone saying it’s difficult to get the simple things I listed above has never done it. It’s REALLY easy. The high end high quality stuff is a whole different ball game, and yes, that stuff is also hard to sell.
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I’m not sure how you square that with their offering and price point.
We’re trying for Wednesday for early access, but there could be some last minute bugs that push it out a week or two. 
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We did use partners 
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Regardless of it squaring or not, the key word is “wants”. Whether it is a premium brand or not is all in the eye of the beholder.
Sure, my question though is how you would get that sense for something that is marketed as a budget option for training.
It wasn’t a derogatory statement at all, so I don’t want that to get confused. TR has always been a mass market product, that was always the point of it.
We looked it up, and the last time you contacted us for support was Feb 2023.
Looks like you had an issue with the app telling you there were adaptations to review, but when you went to review it there were zero there.
We got back to you 26 hours later, and then you saw that the adaptations were there, and you were just reporting a bug.
Can you direct me to the recent bad support experience you’ve had?
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That depends on how you define competition and the market. To oversimplify, apps (TR, Zwift, Join, etc) and live coaches. Are those a single market or different markets? The online market gets quite muddied which is another conversation (is it coaching, training or a game?)
Relative to the cycling apps, TR could be a considered a premium product. Relative to a live coach, it depends on the coach; some are great and some are not.
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The most popular options, Zwift and Peloton, are in the same ballpark. (Zwift costs 19,99 €/month in Germany and Peloton pricing seems to be $13/month or $24/month.) Other apps are likely a rounding error.
For serious athletes, I’d also include Fascat Coaching with its CoachCat chatbot. That seems to be a very interesting, different take on “computer-based coaching” compared to TR.
Coaching by actual humans is much more expensive, and the market much smaller. I couldn’t afford a coach.
At least price-wise, coaching (by a human) will always be much more expensive. I’d say TR is a premium product in the app/computer-based coaching category, on par with other non-budget options (Zwift, Peloton, etc.).
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Yep. That’s the last one I remember too . It’s been long enough that I no longer remember the details other than that 26 hours is a long time to wait when you’re concerned about your training plan being messed up. That stuff used to take an hour or two to get a response. Either that or I just got lucky in the past, but I remember lots of people used to talk about how awesome and fast support was back then. I wouldn’t have said anything if it wasn’t for the post I replied to saying support is only getting better, which wasn’t my personal experience.
I mean, it’s fairly easy to define, it’s done by purpose, not the medium. The market is cycling training. You could certainly say cycling training apps are a submarket and look at relative value there, but cycling coaching goes from apps like Join and TR through top level elite coaches.
Defining any app as premium is like saying a luxury economy car, it doesn’t make any sense.
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If that is how you want to define the market, great. It might not be how TR defines the market. There are many different users out there looking for different experiences which leads to different products and perceptions of those products in the market. Some people don’t want/need a coach, they just want to get faster in an efficient manner. Others want a game to ride around a virtual world. Others might not care about getting faster and just want to be fit. Some people just enjoy working out.
Even in the economy car market there is stratification. Some people think there are “good” economy cars and “bad” economy cars. Those subjective ratings are, again, in the eye of the beholder and it’s relative to some other product. Not be pedantic, but what is the definition of the economy car market? It will vary based on the person.
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I don’t disagree with any of that. But it has nothing to do with the point.
Of course there are good and bad ones. Just like good and bad training services.
I believe it’s very relevant. Each person defines their own perception of a premium product and where it sits in the market. That perception of premium or not is based on what they value and want out of a product.
I gotta get to work. Thanks for the discussion!
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I think it makes perfect sense to call both options premium, TR is a BMW M5 whereas a human coach is anything between a Porsche GT3RS to a Bugatti Chiron or a Koenigsegg. All of those are luxury options. Just have a look at TR’s customer service. In my experience they were excellent. Definitely a premium feel.
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I was offline all of last week and I guess I missed this thread, and just saw the email announcement.
Echoing a few others here. Saying “we haven’t raised prices in almost 5 years” is not really true for those of us who chose to allow our legacy pricing to update last year. I chose to allow my price to go up then as it felt fair and I wanted to support the organization. Had I known that a second price increase was coming this year I might have thought twice about taking the discounted price or legacy price. It does feel a bit unfair to those of us who purposefully chose to pay more last time around.
My annual cost in August 2022 was $129. Two years later it will be $209. I completely understand cost increases and inflation pressure, but a 62% increase is certainly making me think twice about whether to renew.
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That is the marketing, I feel that the podcast and forum is what TR uses to advertise their products
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