Google is a rather large company that — despite the number of projects they start and kill quickly — do things they believe will make money. Things like purchasing Fitbit, where there is a pathway for them to monetise the option. Initially, the question was that Fitbit is hardware and Google is about data, but they’ve now shown their hand in where Fitbit is likely to make them profit.
Until recently the subscription tiers were very rigid with two options to access all of your data. $14.99 per month, or $129.99 per year and honestly that’s a bit rich for accessing data bout you. The team at Android Central have read between the lines of a survey sent to Fitbit users (seemingly in the USA only) about subscription options with a new tier being added.
This new tier woulnd’t give you access to the full data suite that the Premium plan allows. It will give historical access to data. This data is currently available to all users but will potentially be restricted to 30 days for free users, with the $2.99 per month users having access to a year of data and premium – unlimited.
Perhaps the survey is only sent to US users because the merger with Google isn’t yet approved in the Aussie market. But it does raise the question about whether long time users will continue to have access to their own data, or if it will be a pay for it or lose it approach.
Recently switched from gw3 back to fitbit because the latter provided more historical data on certain metrics that I wanted to track. This might me make reconsider my choice…..I am already drowning in subscription’s…don’t want to add another one