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:
-
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
374 comments
I have owned 5 anovas and bought at least 5 more as gifts. After your ill advised move to fleece customers for your app I will no longer recommend or purchase anything anova. I will be grandfathered in but that matters very little, the app is basic, it adds little value compared to Joule’s products and app which is the brand i will recommend in place of yours. If there was an app was open source I’d use that instead because very little has changed or improved in the years since I got my first anova.
I guess this is what happens when you don’t know how to run an effective business.
Congrats, you just ensured that I will not be purchasing the $700 Precision Oven that I’d planned to get within the next month! Thank you for saving me all that cash, and any that I might have spent on additional Anova products in the future.
Removing functionality, forcing people over to a completely controlled system they can’t use equipment they already own without signing up for, and then paywalling the basic features you took away within that system? That’s beyond unethical, and it’s a decision I hope will bite you hard. Especially when your oh so generous grandfathering in of existing customers has next to zero notice! Less than ONE WEEK for people to make accounts with you in order to avoid suddenly being forced to pay for basic functionality they’d already paid for because you’re remotely breaking their equipment.
I’ll be throwing my Anova cooker into the trash where it and your company belong, and finding an alternative. I won’t give it away, because that means somebody else would be paying you. And that’s just not right.
Get stuffed, Anova. :)
What an incredibly short-sighted, ill-conceived dumpster fire of a strategy. Your statement of “each connected cook costs us money.” rings hollow at best. It is certainly 100% untrue for bluetooth connectivity, and I am fairly certain the same can be said for WiFi. And in the event you are using some convoluted dependency on Anova’s servers (cloud or otherwise) for setting up WiFi, there are many methods you could employ to not.
You could have chosen to simply lock the recipe and guide stuff behind an account and subscription requirement, and left the core control and connectivity alone (and if needed, modify the Wifi connectivity setup and communication for core functions so they don’t need Anova’s servers). Instead, you have chosen to lock away everything that differentiates your product from the 100’s of other cookers out there in the market, in order to try and grab a little more money from customers.
While I’ll be “grandfathered in”, so this doesn’t directly affect me, I can assure you that if you stay this course, I will never by another Anova product.
This is an incredibly hostile move. It is one thing to start selling products that require a subscription, it is completely different to effectively remove functionality that used to exist without a subscription in order to start requiring one.
Users purchased their equipment based on an expectation of the policy at the time. It is FLAGRANTLY Unethical to then change the policy on an item people have already purchased and remove functionality unless they pay a subscription fee.
I have an Anova Oven and I have owned several Anova cookers, and I just bought another one recently. I will never again buy another Anova product if they continue with this policy. As a matter of principle, I will not support an unethical company.
Absolutely ridiculous! You lost a customer.