Introducing Analytics Subscriptions
We are psyched to announce the biggest change in Rowing in Motion since its initial launch.
Over the past couple of months we have been adding a bunch of features to Analytics and made sure it is ready for prime time. Our new Android App, which has been available on the Google Play Store for exactly three months now (and will be available for iOS soon) requires to be linked against an Analytics account with a valid subscription. Starting today, users can finally purchase subscriptions for their Analytics account to get access to all features after their trial subscription has expired. Alongside these changes, we will simplify our product lineup and unify all three products we have today (Analytics, Boat App, Coach App) into a single App tightly integrated with our online service.
Why Subscriptions?
Subscriptions? Yes that’s right, we think coaches and athletes get the best value out of Rowing in Motion by using our Apps in combination with Analytics to analyse and track the progress they make in rowing better and ultimately rowing faster. To make it as easy as possible for our users to use these these two components together, we have tightly integrated Analytics with our new App and have plans for a large set of features where this integration will prove extremely useful (e.g. recording session metadata, storing athletes and crew configurations etc.). What we do not want however, is to make it more complicated for our users to purchase a Rowing in Motion system, let alone asking you to purchase the Apps and an Analytics subscription in two different places…
That’s why, from now on, we will sell subscriptions to Analytics only and at the same time require that the App is linked against an Analytics account with a valid subscription. This model has many advantages for you and us.
Trials
Selling through an App Store, we could not offer fully featured trials of our system. We tried to work around it by giving away a free version of the Boat App with limited features but enough to demonstrate that the system will work for you (hey, and you could use it as a free stroke-watch replacement). However, we could not do the same with the Coach App. Rowing in Motion is not a good fit for the App Store model either. It’s a “serious” product (as in to be used in a “serious” context) with a price tag that is probably too high to just pull out your credit card and give it a go. Since our new business model is focused on selling subscriptions for Analytics, we can give all customers a free 30 day trial so they have a chance to test a fully featured version of Rowing in Motion.
Organizations
If you have ever tried to purchase multiple licenses of an App to use it in your organization (e.g. rowing club, squad, school team, national team), you’ve probably realised it’s a rather big hassle. Let alone managing a fleet of devices, iTunes/Google Play accounts… This is really unfortunate, considering our largest and most important customers are rowing clubs and national teams! Oh, and did I mention we couldn’t give volume discounts? (Arguably we could have but that would have required every customer to enroll for the “Enterprise” App Store Volume Purchase Program).
With our new subscription model, we can cater much better to the individual needs of your orangization and can offer a flexible licensing scheme that suits your use case.
Analytics is a Service
Ok, so why do we sell subscriptions and no lifetime licenses? Well, Analytics is more a service than it is a product. To provide Analytics to you, we need to spend money every month on servers, bandwidth, storage and maintenance. At the same time, you will get more value out of Rowing in Motion the longer you use it and the more data you have to analyse and compare your rowing performance to.
We will of course continue to invest in developing new features for Analytics and the Applications. To make this possible, we need to have a sustainable business model that allows us to fund this development. We think our new subscription-based business model aligns these two aspects perfectly.
To underline how important we think it is that coaches and athletes use Rowing in Motion as a continuous feedback tool in their daily exercises, all our plans come with unlimited storage for rowing sessions. Our users are recording, uploading and sharing exercises with Rowing in Motion every day. Just have a look at these two pins below that track the number of rowing sessions in Analytics (live!):
Plans and Pricing
This is where things start to get interesting, right? The first subscription we will offer is our “Athlete Pro” subscription for 99€/year. With an “Athlete Pro” subscription you can have two active devices linked to your Analytics account, unlimited storage for rowing sessions and access to all features Analytics has to offer. You can find details on all our plans and a short FAQ on our Plans and Pricing page. When you sign up for an Analytics account, you’ll start with a free 30 day trial of the “Athlete Pro” plan.
We will make two further plans available shortly. The first one will be our “Organization” plan, which includes special features for Coaches and is individually tailored to the needs of your rowing club or other organization. The second plan is our “Athlete Free” plan. On this plan, you’ll have access to a set of basic, “training diary/stroke-watch” style set of features (comparable to the old “Boat App Lite”).
I have already bought the App, what about me?
Glad you asked! Let me first say a big “thank you!” for purchasing Rowing in Motion. We wouldn’t be here without you, so we want to make sure you stay a happy customer. Customers who have purchased the “Boat App Pro”, the “Pro” In-App-Purchase on the Boat App (Lite) or the “Coach App” can of course continue to use these Apps ad infinitum (which means for as long as you want; I couldn’t help it, latin sounds so sexy). However, uploading recorded sessions to Analytics from these Apps with an “upload token” will require a valid Analytics subscription.
Here’s the deal: Send us a proof of purchase to support@rowinginmotion.com and we’ll give you a free 6 months subscription for “Athlete Pro”. If you have purchased a Coach App, we will give you a free 6 months subscription for our Organization plan once it becomes available.
New iOS App around the corner
In order to allow our existing customers to use the Apps they have bought for as long as they want, we can’t provide an update to those Apps however that will suddenly require to be linked against an Analytics account. Therefore we will publish a new application on the iOS App Store that is just called “Rowing in Motion” and is similar to our Android App. There will be a couple of exciting new features for these two Apps in the next months, so stay tuned! What’s particularly cool about our new Analytics subscriptions is that you can use both iOS and Android devices with it, so you can continue using Rowing in Motion when you decide to change platforms.
Questions
We know that this is a big change, and there’s likely going to be some questions we haven’t answered here. Please check out the FAQ on the Plans and Pricing first and if you find your question is not answered there, please don’t hesitate to give us a shout at support@rowinginmotion.com.