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
And this is how a company goes from first to worst.
Been using Anova for years. Not any more. This is a brazen greed move, and it’s my hope it goes down in flames in court as a bait-and-switch. In one blazing moment of avarice you’ve destroyed a carefully built reputation. I hope the stockholders hold you accountable for what will follow.
BTW the only thing as overdone as the greed is the number of ad trackers your website uses. Another scum move.
“Unfortunately, each connected cook costs us money.” It costs you many orders of magnitude less than $2/mo. It could cost you nothing if you designed the app to run locally, like it really ought to. To give that as a justification is wildly dishonest. I HATE subscriptions. I own two Anovas myself and have given several as gifts and previously recommended them to everyone. I will no longer recommend Anova.
Wow, this is a fantastic idea and I’m really happy that you’re planning on charging a subscription for a useless feature, because you guys deserve way more money for no reason..
Said no one.
My next sous vide will not be an Anova model. With the amount of connectivity issues your product has unless it’s on a separate 2.4ghz network, imagine the hell you’re going to get when people now have to pay for that garbage.
Good riddance.
Steven and Anova, I would invite you to investigate the difference between a value-add feature, and a core requirement. When you started selling sous vide cookers, having a companion app and wireless control would have been a value-add feature. If you’d started charging for it at the time, a lot of people would have chosen not to pay, but you could have made an argument for the added cost.
In 2024, this is a core feature. Made even moreso by the fact that you are putting less control on-device, and pushing more important features to app control. You also elected to force it to be cloud-connected, rather than provide local network control over bluetooth or local network. It’s no longer a value-add. Anova chose to make this a core feature.
If there’s one thing that every other industry from computers to cars has learned over the last few years, it’s that when you try to charge an ongoing subscription for a core feature of your product, you’re going to get pushback. You’re also going to lose sales. If your product does 10 things well, maybe you can survive that and have your cake and eat it too. But you have a niche product that does 1 thing. Annoying an enormous portion of your high-end hobbyist audience with this kind of thing is, if not THE largest unforced error, it’s certainly a top-10 short-sighted decision from a consumer goods company.
Apologize and back off before you have to reap the consequences of it. Don’t be a Hasbro…
Nope. Just nope. I won’t be recommending Anova to anyone else because the subscription economy is just taking over everything we buy and I will not have it.