Exploring the Surge in Fitness Tech Subscriptions: A Future Without Ownership?

Observations from a Visit to the Local Gym

While visiting your local gym, you might contemplate a quote that’s been circulating for a few years: “You’ll own nothing, and be happy”. This ambiguous quote, often credited to Danish politician Ida Auken’s essay, is about the potential of a sharing economy. Imagine living in a city where no one owned anything, and every resource was shared, much like a gym.

The Rise of Subscription Services

Today, this phrase is frequently used to discuss the expansion of subscription services. These range from online platforms providing the best streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime for movies and TV, Spotify for music, even gaming companies pushing users towards digital licenses instead of physical copies.

The term is sometimes used with the same tone as the phrase “freedom is slavery” from George Orwell’s 1984, hinting at an insincere attempt by the wealthy to persuade us to renounce ownership of our possessions and rent them indefinitely.

The Experience of Modern TV Streaming

Netflix offers you an extensive library of TV shows and movies to savour. But, you’re renting access to this media content. With the more affordable plan, you experience unskippable ads between shows and lack 4K viewing capability. If you stop your subscription, you lose access to Netflix’s content library.

YouTube, on the other hand, is free to use but subjects you to ads based on your search history. Therefore, you pay in terms of diminished data privacy unless you upgrade to the premium service.

The Future of Car Ownership?

It’s not unlikely that you might soon enter a car – yours or of someone else’s – where certain features, like a built-in dashcam with cloud storage or seat warmers, would be inaccessible unless you pay an extra monthly subscription or a one-time fee to download the necessary software.

The Intersection of Fitness and Subscription Services

Turning our gaze back on fitness, you might wonder why we’re discussing downloads instead of deadlifts. This week, Whoop announced two new devices, marking its first hardware release in four years – the Whoop 5.0 and the premium Whoop MG. Unlike other fitness trackers and smartwatches, you don’t have to buy the device upfront with Whoop. Instead, you pay for the app through a subscription model, and the device comes ‘free’.

Subscription services are not a novelty in fitness. Typically, you buy the device upfront, get a certain number of features with the purchase, and additional features are available through a monthly subscription plan. But Whoop’s model differs, essentially renting you a fitness tracking software suite rather than selling you an all-inclusive watch. If you stop paying altogether, your tracker becomes a useless accessory, unlike if you owned the software, you’d still have access to the free features.

The Fitness Industry’s Subscription Model

The fitness industry has long embraced the subscription ownership model. With limited space for bulky and costly equipment in our homes, we pay a monthly fee to use gym facilities. If we pay more each month, we can access all the gyms in the chain.

The gym fees feel different from renting a device, because we’re paying for physical space and facilities that we wouldn’t otherwise accommodate in our homes. However, is it really so different from a digital subscription where you’re effectively renting server space?

With Netflix, we’re paying for temporary use of its digital library instead of buying hundreds of Blu-rays to keep at home. It’s cheaper in the short term but costlier in the long run. In the case of Whoop, the tracker is just a screenless device that reads health data; you don’t interact with it in the same way as a smartwatch. It’s more like one of the best smart rings. Whoop’s actual service is in continual data interpretation – collecting data to identify health trends and make predictions.

Increased Use of Subscription Models

We’ve recently seen an uptick in paid subscription models launching alongside devices, especially in the fitness space. The introduction of Fitbit Premium in 2019, aimed at generating additional revenue, initially faced backlash, but users have gradually accepted it as part of the business.

However, maintaining apps that use expensive, energy-consuming AI tools isn’t cheap. We’re providing our personal data to these health and fitness services, and we can’t expect them to store it all for free. Fitness tech companies either need to sell you a profitable product upfront that allows them to operate indefinitely, charge you a monthly fee, or use the information they collect to display ads.

For some, the last option is more invasive than any subscription, leading them to prefer a monthly fee over their data becoming the product. If we’re moving towards digitising every aspect of our lives, we might have to face facts – we have two choices. Either stop buying all these cool gadgets, or as Auken’s essay suggests, be happy with owning nothing.