I am a standard Zwift Member i think, enjoying mtb and racer in summer outdoors and from oktober/november (depending on the weather) till march on Zwift. Zwift revolutioned my Winter Training, making it really fun and challenging. My Indoor Cycling distance during winter explode from about 500km to nearly 5000km.
So i will cancel my monthly Zwift membership at the end or march.
But wouldnt it be nice to have Zwift the whole year? Especially in Spring and sometimes also in Summer here in Austria there are weeks, you dont wanna bike outdoors and having the opportunity to ride a few kilometers indoor would be nice. But paying for a whole month in summer? Not really!
So i found it very nice to have, sort of a cheaper Year Membership. I am mostly member for 6 month * 15EUR would be 90 EUR. So having a yearly Membership at cost of about 120 EUR (which means 2 month extra costs for me) would be very nice. Would be a win-win-situation for both the members (we can ride a whole year for a relativly small more-costs) and for ZWIFT (you will get 30 EUR extra from your standard member and the courses will be a little more crowded in the summer of the Northern Hemisphere).
I think this would be very interesting for both sides and i am looking forward to hear the opinions of other Zwifters, as well as a statment of Zwift Company.
I suppose it depends on which side of the coin most users fall as to whether this is win-win. Personally, I use Zwift 12 months of the year due to often not being able to get out on the road during the week, or even weather issues. And if half of the riders are like you and half are like me, in the scenario you have proposed (basically 12 months for the price of 8) Zwift would actually make less money than they are now. At 12 months for the price of 9 they would end up with the same revenue.
There have been a number of other threads proposing an annual membership with a discount over just paying for 12 months (which seems to be the only option now), but so far there doesn’t seem to be any interest from Zwift. I’m not sure if they are not looking into it, or if they’ve done some sort of statistical analysis and determined that it would not be helpful to them.
For me, as someone who is going to use Zwift fairly extensively 12 months of the year, any sort of discount on an annual membership would, of course, be beneficial. The question would be whether there are enough partial year users who would fork out a bit extra over their current usage so that they could have Zwift available during months they would not otherwise subscribe to offset the money lost from folks already paying for 12 months of usage… There has even been talk of a sort of ‘punch card’, I think, so that a user could pay something like USD $1/day when they ride. Maybe that is another alternative.
Maybe there are more Zwift users like you, Nigel, but i highly doubt it. The majority will pay for 6 month or less it think.
A 1-Day-Membership would also be ok or a sort of distance we can buy to expand the monthly free distance.
I would guess that the majority of Zwifters pay for 12 months out of the year and the ones that cancel for a few months are in the minority.
I could see the value in a fee for a set distance.
I also ride 12 months a year and I see familiar names year round.
This Podcast (Zwiftcast Episode 58) with CEO Eric Minn can give you some more insight and why Zwift dont have annual subscriptions.
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I ride year round too but during this time of the year you really notice how many more users there are. This morning there were 11,000 people online between the two worlds. What is it? Maybe 3 or 4,000 (if even that) would be on at the same time during June/July?
There might be a lot of people who don’t cancel and keep paying monthly even if they aren’t using Zwift. Never underestimate how lazy people can be when it comes to subscription services. It’s probably why so many software companies love subscriptions so much.
Isn’t that the truth! It really shows the population difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.