Almost a year ago, I had a very full inbox as people emailed, commented and wrote in droves about Garmin’s then-new Connect+ launch.
If you’re not familiar, Connect+ is a premium layer on top of Garmin’s existing Connect+ platform, the excellent companion app for top Garmin watches. More than a place to see your stats, Garmin Connect is a training planner, a gear tracker, a lifestyle log and more.
Garmin Connect+ introduced several new features, including Active Intelligence, Garmin’s AI advisory service that offers contextual commentary on your training and recovery results. It also offered an improved LiveTrack service, a Performance Dashboard that allowed you to view your historical data, exclusive badges, and several other small quality-of-life improvements and features.
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For this, Garmin is asking $6.99 / £6.99 / AU$12 per month or $69.99 / £69.99 / AU$120 annually, with a one-month free trial available. It’s not the first time Garmin has charged extra for a service, such as Garmin Golf, its InReach satellite messaging service or Outdoor Maps+, but they’ve always served a purpose.
It’s hard to overstate how many people started out thinking of it as being nickel-and-dimed for features that people thought they should already be getting after spending hundreds of dollars or pounds on an expensive smartwatch.
You can read our live blog for backlash for the full story, but it was a crazy couple of days. Garmin Reddit posts calling for a boycott hit thousands of upvotes, and I personally got hundreds of emails with lines like ‘If Connect+ goes ahead, 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, after the initial furor dies down, they’ll move more and more features behind the paywall, like Strava did’.
True to form, now the furore has died down, we’re just starting to see new features being locked behind the Connect+ paywall, in the form of nutritional tracking.
Vote in our Garmin Connect+ poll here
So a year later we do a follow-up: do you use Garmin Connect+? If so, is it good? If not, did you switch from Garmin?
No matter where you stand, we want to hear from you. Vote in our poll above and I’ll announce the results next week, on the anniversary of Connect+’s launch. You can also contact me at [email protected] and I will publish some of your emails along with the poll results.
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