Very much chickens coming home to roost time - My take is, people would swallow this increase in price if Zwift was a forward thinking company who were quick to update, acted on customer feedback and implemented what customers asked for, instead of going off on their own little world delivering boost mode and Steering pad races in Crit City and other totally useless changes.
By itself, its not a huge change, but there is a very little brand loyalty created by the above lack of engagement and scattered approach to development so people are happy to draw a line in the sand and move on.
Im here till January as I took a years membership that has actually just become even more reasonable - but am definitely looking at other platform, and those platforms just got a whole lot more attractive with more users jumping on mass due this announcement.
Its an incredible skill to p!ss off your user base time & time again, plus then push peoples towards your competitors and close one of their failings (lack of numbers) by pushing people on mass to them so they look busier.
Interesting to see some of the big community resources for help are considering moving away off the back of this, that is the type of impact that should set alarm bells ringing (it wont, but it should)
Unfortunately I will be canceling my membership. The increases way too much. Alternative source to do my indoor biking. Any suggestions out there.
Ā£17.99 I can get a gym membership cheaper than this now. Iād love to know how many people have left zwift.
Zwiftās expenses are a black box, but I think you can safely assume that Zwiftās inability to run a profit is caused by mismanagement and excessive spending on marketing, rooted in Eric Minās ambition to become the Mark Zuckerberg of e-cycling, his naĆÆve expectations on the growth potential of a cycling platform like Zwift, and his foolish strategy to accomplish this by spending millions and millions on non-sensible sponsorship deals and marketing campaigns.
It seems unimaginable to me that development costs (associated with no significant development at all?) couldnāt be covered by the revenue stream of a 1million wide userbase, paying 15 euro per month.
At the moment i think they are spending more money on sponsorships and marketing than on game development. There is no way they are spending even half of that on development.Instead of getting more developers they are firing people from inside Zwift but at the same time maintaining big sponsors.
I think going forward zwift should be a bit more up front about costs.
If this had increased a Ā£1 a year for 5 years and zwift said āwe will review our prices each Septemberā or something a lot of people would probably be more okay with that. evenetually people would probably tap out like a ramp test!) but they might stick around longer than fewer very sharp jumps in price.
This change has got me thinking about it (and iāve been here a long time!). It is almost impossible to justify for my dad now. he is 70 and uses zwift a couple of times a week, keeps his subscription running year round, uses it more in winter less in summer but overall it is probably justifiable. at Ā£17.99 when all he really wants is something to encourage him to jump on the bike a couple of times a week to get his old legs moving it is probably no longer worth it.
I canceled my sub yesterday, I was angry but after sleeping over it, there is NO WAY IĀ“m going on that dumb #ā¬% ro@vy !&>! .
Sleep over it people, itĀ“s still the most fun platform out there and we do get a lot of fun events to participate in, We might get family subscriptions in the future. I think some good stuff is coming
Errrrrā¦ Zwiftā¦ Two Zwifters hereā¦ Might a family plan be a good idea ? We are going from 30ā¬ to 40ā¬.
Oh dearā¦ This falls on deaf manās ears, like all other ideas and criticisms.
Unfortunately this is too much of an increase at this time. In Portugal, 19.99ā¬ per month means 1.7% of the average salary, compared to 0.49% in Germany for example. Having a blanket cost for all of Europe completely shuts off countries with different spending ability.
I use Zwift mainly for structured training and very occasional racing. Especially with summer at the door here in Portugal, and being unemployed at the moment, I will have to stop using Zwift for now and continue with other alternatives like BreakAway on iOS for structured training and just plain old outdoor riding.
The suggestions Iāve been seeing around increasing prices annually for a time are more than sensible, hope you can revisit this decision so we can continue to enjoy the platform. All the best to you guys!
But you can, from a certain point of view: It was also a āhuge increaseā of cost, and they also really bungled the whole process. The later isnāt really big in this cycling related product, but people are complaining about being taken by surprise. It took Strava a month or more to come clean on their planes, which was on a level higher than embarrassment.
Strava also āclawedā some of the free services into the paid premium service offering. Yeah, they had a free offering, and still does, but the functionality of that level was made less useful for some users.
indieVelo now fully supports riding on AppleTV using AirPlay/ Mirroring from an iOS device (iPhone / iPad).
I canāt comment on the experience, I run it on a PC. Much better ride physics than zwift., supports all sorts of features that have been long standing requests on this forum. Just lacking graphics and community.
I did used Zwift previously on the iPhone and it was hard to use (user interface) and it got hot (not good for battery). Therefore I prefer Apple TV. But AFAIK Indievelo is already trying to support Apple TV.
Linux would be even better. Flatpak made support easy for closed-source applications, which often cannot hesitate from packing itself. But thatās another topic.
I hope that Zwift keeps in-house programmers! That would be expensive, but using hired contract programmers in some of the āstansā, or Asian countries, India/etc, is not without its costs too. My sister worked for a company that farmed out most of their development to India, and finally had to announce that was a mistake, but they couldnāt get their programming base back, so they tried to get their existing programmers to move there so they could babysit the contractors! Yes, seriously!! 'Hey, we screwed up, so we want you to move to a hell hole mess of a country just to sit and monitor those yahoos and make sure they do what we arenāt paying you anymore to do, the way we want it done.
She ended up quitting after going on a āItās a really great place to liveā marketing trip from their HR department. She said that no one had even come close to taking them up on their offer. (They refused to pay a bonus to people agreeing to the offshoring, but that might have changed)
KEEP LOCAL PROGRAMMERS, and then Iāll pay more and stick through the next increase, but if Zwift is feathering nests and paying for executive perks, their parasitic idle rich need to find another host to feed off of. (Is Zwift publicly traded? Are they buying stock back to increse their share price?)
Never mind the current subscribers who are cancelling, I really think this will hit new member subscriptions. Maybe growth in new memberships has plateaued and itās time to milk the cash cow. If Zwift is nearly $600m in debt, that is nuts and badly run. The completely ridiculous foray into hardware has probably wasted a significant chunk of that. Maybe Erics time is up.
Iāve slept on itā¦and Zwift can do one. Iām not paying Ā£180 for it as it is.
The straw that broke the camels back. Now looking at other appsā¦ā¦will be cancelling monthly subscriptions as soon as the club find an alternative app - trialling IndieVelo as we speak
This is my biggest gripe. If Zwift actually made things better instead of ignoring user requests and blowing money on unproductive sponsorships the price increase wouldnāt be such a big deal. But itās a bad piece of software run by people who act like they hate their customers and thatās where the distaste for increases comes from.
