from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept
In recent years the Garmin line of smartwatches had an advantage over an increasingly crowded smart watch field. Unlike Google/FitBit, they were avoiding hiding a lot of features behind annoying subscription paywalls.
Looking to goose quarterly earnings and give investors that impossible, sweet, perpetual growth they crave, Fitbit has been increasingly putting more and more basic functions behind its subscription paywall. Most of the stuff isn’t interesting enough to warrant any sort of extra payment, and, like most subscriptions, the company can’t help but slowly, steadily raise prices.
Garmin had been leeching annoyed customers from Fitbit by avoiding this tactic; until now. Garmin recently introduced a new premium Garmin+ tier it says will provide “AI-powered insights,” a Performance Dashboard that tracks your workout histories and improvements to Garmin’s LiveTrack service (which does exactly what it sounds like).
The subscription service costs users an additional $7 a month. Garmin is quick to claim that customers’ “free experience is not going away,” but that usually winds up being an empty promise once companies are on the treadmill of goosing quarterly earnings with often-pointless paywalling of features.
To be clear a lot of Garmin’s watch lineup is significantly more expensive than most smart watches. Some variants of the Fenix 8, for example, can cost upwards of $1200. So not too surprisingly a lot of Garmin customers are pissed off by Garmin’s opening the door to enshittification and even higher consumer costs. At a time when they’re already facing a lot of higher costs due to kakistocracy.
“To everyone who cares about the future of Garmin customer service: DO NOT SIGN UP,” one Reddit user recently complained. “We need to take a firm stand to stop this totally detrimental trend of subscriptions everywhere. We are already paying hundreds for watches that only last a few years because batteries are not replaceable.”
“Never paying for the subscription,” one commenter said, “but it is going to make me rethink my future watch purchases,” lamented another. “I could justify the Garmin expense when I knew I was getting all the features with the watch, but we all know what happens to a service once a paid tier is introduced.”
They’re right to be annoyed. It’s extremely rare that once such subscription paywalls are introduced, the company introducing them doesn’t inevitably push their luck in a clumsy bid to goose earnings. Things generally just devolve until the company has pissed off so many customers it begins to feel a major dent in market share; deflating the point of the whole revenue-goosing effort in the first place.
A closer look at the AI features Garmin is now charging extra for reveals software that doesn’t appear to be doing all that much:
“My first few insights were pretty basic—just comparing my intensity minutes to a goal that I didn’t realize I had—but I figured more interesting analysis was yet to come. After a week, though, I haven’t seen it. The most exciting moment was when I caught the AI in a flagrant math error.”
This behavior ultimately opens the doors to other, younger, hungrier competitors that respect their consumers (or at least pretend to). But with pointless Trump tariffs imposing huge new taxes on everything you buy, that innovation evolution cycle could be stuck in slow motion for the foreseeable future as everyone pays more for everything, for no coherent reason.
Filed Under: consumers, enshittification, fees, fitness, market share, paywalls, smart watch, subscriptions
Companies: garmin
