What a subscription actually buys
It is worth being fair about this, because the answer is not “nothing.”
A membership buys instruction, programming and the sensation of being coached. Peloton’s production quality is genuinely the category benchmark. Hydrow’s rows filmed on real water are pleasant in a way a spreadsheet of split times is not. Aviron’s games work on people who cannot face another class. For someone who will not train without external motivation, that is not a luxury — it is the difference between using the machine and not.
What it does not buy is a better rowing machine. The stroke on a $990 Concept2 is better than the stroke on any subscription rower we cover, and the Ergatta is literally a WaterRower with a screen bolted to it.
The arithmetic, plainly
Take the two ends of this site. A Concept2 RowErg costs about $990 and nothing after that: five years of ownership is $990. A Hydrow Wave costs about $1,995 and then $50 a month: five years is $4,995, of which $3,000 — sixty per cent — is the membership.
That difference is roughly four more Concept2s. Or, put another way: you could buy a Concept2, a tablet to watch classes on, a rubber mat, a seat pad and a heart rate monitor, and still be thousands of dollars ahead at year five.
The full table runs this for every machine we can price.
The question the subscription brands do not answer
What happens to your machine when you stop paying?
For most connected rowers, the honest answer is that you keep a heavy magnetic rower with a dark screen. The hardware still moves — it is a rowing machine — but the thing you actually paid for, the reason you chose it over a $400 magnetic machine, is gone.
Two exceptions are worth naming. NordicTrack’s RW300 has a self-contained 5-inch LCD and 26 manual resistance levels, so it rows perfectly well with no membership; iFIT is required only for SmartAdjust and the class library. Ergatta says its rowers function without a membership too, which they do because underneath the screen they are WaterRowers.
Everything else is a machine whose value is rented.
What free apps actually give you
Sunny’s SunnyFit app, MERACH’s app and YOSUDA’s app are all included at no cost and all state so on the manufacturers’ own listings. Sunny publishes 1,000+ trainer-led workouts on SunnyFit with no membership fee.
They are not Peloton. The production is more modest and the libraries are smaller. But they exist, they are free, and they close much of the gap that the $50-a-month brands are charging to fill.
And on a Concept2, the free ErgData app plus the PM5 gives you something no subscription brand offers: numbers that other rowers recognize. A 2,000m split on a PM5 means the same thing everywhere.
Who should pay for a subscription anyway
People who know themselves. If you have bought exercise equipment before and it is currently a clothes rail, an instructor telling you what to do at 6:30 on a Tuesday may genuinely be worth $50 a month.
Just make the decision with the five-year number in front of you rather than the monthly one. $50 a month does not feel like $3,000, which is exactly why it is priced that way.
