Garmin Ticked Off Smartwatch Users With Its New Subscription Fee

I’d bet the muckety-mucks at Garmin are still wondering where it all went wrong. It seemed like a relatively mild company move, no?

Introduce a $7-per-month (or $70-per-year) Garmin Connect+ subscription of personalized, AI-driven insights into their health and activity, and make it optional. After all, as Garmin told TechRadar, “The Garmin Connect app is a free, personalized experience, and that’s not going away.”

And then the hatred began to flow.

a furious reaction

Much of the backlash is emanating from the Garmin subreddit, where users—at least those into their devices enough to spend spare time on a forum dedicated to them—are fuming.

It pays to be skeptical these days whenever a company introduces a paid tier. Promises are a dime a dozen, and it’s not unheard of for companies to begin neglecting or neutering their free tiers as an incentive for people to shell out cash for the paid tiers. There’s no use in cannibalizing their money-making tiers with their very own free tiers, now is there?

I’m not saying confidently that Garmin will do this, only that the skepticism on the part of fed-up Garmin users is understandable. For its own part, Garmin said in its news release, “All existing features and data in Garmin Connect will remain free.” It doesn’t seem to have mollified the widespread outrage that’s been smoldering since they announced Connect+.

As the original poster of a thread titled “DO NOT sign up for Garmin Connect+…” goes on to say, “Imagine if features like popularity routing, morning reports, or advanced coaching plans were released today—they would almost certainly be locked behind this subscription paywall.

“While these features do provide value, they are not inherently tied to hardware capabilities. This approach sets a dangerous precedent and risks making our user experience significantly worse over time.”

In 23 hours since it was posted, the thread has garnered 7,700 comments as people chime in with similar fears that their expensive smartwatches will receive future updates only for those willing to shell out for Connect+.

Given the backlash, we expect Garmin to say something soon. My bet is Garmin will toss customers a bone without capitulating entirely, perhaps some statement about being committed to nurturing all their devices regardless of subscription tier, or yadda yadda.