Since 2014, we’ve been committed to providing you with high-quality connected cooking through the Anova Culinary app. It’s been thrilling to bring sous vide cooking into your kitchens and see the #anovafoodnerd community grow. We love being part of the journey, from your first sous vide cook to your latest culinary experiment.
As our community has grown, so have the demands on our resources. Our community has literally cooked 100s of millions of times with our app. Unfortunately, each connected cook costs us money. So, to continue delivering the exceptional service and innovative recipes you’ve come to expect, we’re introducing a small subscription fee for our app. The new Anova Sous Vide Subscription will allow us to maintain and enhance the app, ensuring it remains a valuable resource for all of our users. Here are the details:
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Who will this impact? Only new customers will have to pay for a subscription. Existing customers who have an account with us before August 21st, 2024, will not be charged a subscription fee. To be an existing user, you must have downloaded our app AND made an account in the app before August 21st, 2024. In the event you are an existing user, you will be grandfathered in to free usage of the app. You helped us build Anova and our intent is that you will be grandfathered in forever.
If you don't currently have an account but are using the app with your Bluetooth-connected cookers, after August 20th, you'll be asked to create an account in the Anova app so that we can automatically give you legacy / grandfather status and continued access to the full features of the app.
- What does it cost and what do customers get? The subscription will cost $1.99 per month or $9.99 per year USD. What you get with a subscription will vary from product to product, but in general, here’s what it includes:
- Anova Sous Vide Guides: Learn the basics with guides created by our experts. Choose your preferred level of doneness and press start to get cooking.
- Cook Notifications: Remote updates on your cook status.
- Recipe Discovery: Find recipes from award-winning chefs, #anovafoodnerds, and more.
- Recipe Saving: Bookmark your favorites and share your recipes with friends directly on the app.
- When will this go into effect? This subscription will go into effect on August 21st, 2024. Again, if you already have an account with us and purchased a product prior to August, 21 2024, there will be no change in our service for you.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support. Our mission is to change the way the world cooks and this subscription will help us to continue on with this mission. We are excited to keep cooking with you and can’t wait to see what you create next!
Stephen Svajian
Co-Founder and CEO
332 comments
Completely not okay, like many said here won’t be gifting or recommending your products anymore moving forward, minute you charge me a monthly fee for using a cooking device I already bought I’m cancelling. If your servers are that expensive for the little amount of traffic they get hire better developers that use cloud resources more wisely but don’t pass the bill of your failed business model to your customers or risk losing them.
What a disappointing move charging a monthly app fee. I’m grandfathered in but I will not buy future products and will not recommend your appliances going forward. I really hope you reverse your decision on this unfriendly business model.
I’m really disappointed to see this.
How about instead, don’t charge your customers extra.
Give users local control of their tech.
Offer an awesome home assistant integration, completely local. That way you won’t have to pay for servers.
You might even be able to get it for free by opening your hardware up to hackers who would code that sort of thing for fun. Open source can lead to some pretty amazing things. Heck, the web server running your website is probably open source.
If you want tech-savvy mavens to recommend your products to others, that’s how you do it.
By delivering massive value.
Definitely not by taking it away. That’s the kind of thing that would make people warn others away from your product, no matter how nice the features are. You’d probably have better luck charging $50 more for the sous-vide and giving away the service.
Do you even need the cloud service though? Changing a setting on a local device really shouldn’t involve the cloud.
From a company relations standpoint, I don’t know if you can come back from this, but if you can, it probably involves a big apology, listening to the other commenters here, and forgetting this entire “let’s shear our customers” concept.
Please don’t be evil. There’s already enough of that going around.
You’ll have to pay your programmer some other way.
Cheers.
I’m in the market for a sous vide and was considering Anova. Thanks for making my decision for me, definitely taking my money elsewhere.
What part of the enshittification cycle are we on?