Almost a year ago, I had a very full inbox, as people emailed, commented, and posted en masse about Garmin’s then-new Connect+ release.
If you’re unfamiliar, Connect+ is a premium tier that overlays Garmin’s existing Connect+ platform, the excellent companion app to the best Garmin watches. More than just a place to see your stats, Garmin Connect is a training planner, gear tracker, lifestyle logbook, and more.
Garmin Connect+ introduced several new features, including Active Intelligence, Garmin’s AI advisory service that provides contextual feedback on your workouts and recovery scores. It also offered an improved LiveTrack service, a performance dashboard that allowed you to view your historical data, exclusive badges, and several other small improvements and quality of life features.
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For this, Garmin asks $6.99 / £6.99 / AU$12 per month or $69.99 / £69.99 / AU$120 per year, with a one-month free trial available. It’s not the first time Garmin has charged extra for a service, like Garmin Golf, its InReach satellite messaging service, or Outdoor Maps+, but they’ve always had a specific purpose.
It’s hard to overemphasize how many people started out, perceiving it as a nickel and dime for features people thought they should already have, having spent hundreds of dollars or pounds on an expensive smartwatch.
You can read our backlash live blog for the full story, but it was a crazy couple of days. Garmin’s Reddit posts calling for boycotts got thousands of upvotes, and I personally received hundreds of emails with lines like “If Connect+ moves forward, I’m definitely done with Garmin,” “greedy company,” and “All new features from now on will be behind a paywall.” And in a few years, when the initial anger calms down, they will move more and more features behind the paywall like Strava did.
True to form, now that the furor has died down, we’ve just started seeing new features locked behind the Connect+ paywall, in the form of nutrition tracking.
Vote in our Garmin Connect+ poll here
So, a year later, we’re following up: Are you using Garmin Connect+? If so, is it good? If not, did you move away from Garmin?
Wherever you are, we want to hear from you. Vote in our poll above and I’ll post the results next week, on the anniversary of Connect+’s launch. You can also contact me at [email protected] and I will post some of your emails along with the survey results.
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