The Galaxy Ring landed with no subscription fee – but it raises questions over whether consumers are worse off.
After the Samsung Galaxy Ring launch last week, I kept hearing one argument repeated: ‘At least Samsung opted against a subscription fee’.
But the prevailing wisdom around additional cost fails to understand the true cost of great wearables: it’s the software and algorithms that create brilliant and accurate insights, not the hardware.
When it comes down to it, wearables are simply bundled collections of readily available sensor technology.
While creating smart rings involves navigating tough engineering challenges relating to multiple sizes, durability, and IP, the huge cost is not the hardware in the long term.
Creating truly brilliant wearables instead means extensive algorithmic development, continuous clinical and human trials, and validated scientific development – the cost of which eclipses the hardware many times over.
Therefore, the model that makes sense – and enables wearables companies to continue to add features and improvements to their devices – is a subscription-based one.
Read this: Samsung Galaxy Ring vs Oura Ring Gen 3
Subscriptions are not necessarily cheaper
If you bought a Samsung Galaxy Ring at $399 instead of an Oura Ring Gen 3 ($299 + $5.99 per month), you’d have to wear the Samsung for nearly two years before breaking even. Statistically, there’s a high chance that you’ll have either stopped wearing your Galaxy Ring or chosen to upgrade to another before that time has come.
So, opting against a subscription model doesn’t necessarily make things cheaper.
That’s not to say that the current subscription model is right, either, we should note.
Currently, we have high-ticket hardware accompanied by ongoing subscriptions. Again, Oura is the best example of that, with its smart rings beginning at $299 (rising to over $350) with a relatively chunky monthly subscription tacked on.
Driving value
Yet, the value driven by this model eclipses most of what we’ve seen elsewhere.
Not only is the Oura Ring Gen 3 one of, if not, the most impressive and effective wearables we’ve seen to date, but it’s also added a host of features this year.
Major new updates have landed virtually every few weeks: Consider that Pregnancy Insights, Cardiovascular Age & Cardio Capacity, Stress Resilience, Symptom Radar, Integrations and its AI Advisor have landed for the Oura Ring Gen 3 in 2024 alone.
Whoop – another standout wearable device – has come closest to realizing this new vision. Its up-front price is effectively a year/two years of subscription, making the device ‘free’. The downside is that a two-year subscription yields an up-front cost of $399/£384.
What we see with traditional tech – especially from Apple and Samsung – are large updates around a new release, which usually align with new hardware. That means users are often stuck with the same experience for a whole year before the company improves the product, with features usually rolling back to older devices.
And Whoop’s hardware is arguably the most simplistic – and, at least from what we can see, the lowest cost to produce. So, a higher proportion of that is going toward software and development. It, too, has added a slew of updates in the last 12 months; it’s another constantly evolving and improving product.
We need better subscriptions for consumers
To make the argument that Samsung’s entry into the market will finally kill off the much-maligned subscription model misses the point: subscription models demonstrably fund the best experiences on wearables.
And racing back to the security of a single payment stymies the idea of ongoing improvement and validated metrics.
But we need wearables companies who opt for subscription models to dispel the notion that it’s the more expensive choice.
That doesn’t necessarily mean giving products away. But I’d like to see more done around the ideas of wearables companies entering an “agreement” with users that membership equals better service. That could mean saving money in the long run – with ever-reducing premiums, which acknowledge that the member has, at some point, paid off their development debt.
It could also mean free upgrades (with perhaps minimum terms of service à la Whoop), when new hardware does eventually come. That would make the experience a true subscription, rather than what we have now, which is buying full-price consumer tech devices, with an ever-lasting payment attached.
Because the evidence points to subscriptions fostering the best wearables experiences.
Ultimately, with its single-price strategy, Samsung is unlikely to challenge Oura for quality if its features in this cycle. But it might jusrt create the more successful product, thanks in part to the perception that subscription-free equals better value – when in many ways, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
