Every Rowing Machine Subscription, Compared

A rowing machine subscription is the single largest variable in what a machine costs you, and it is the one nobody puts in the comparison table.

Here it is, with every figure sourced and dated.

Which of these are actually required

The “Required?” column matters more than the price.

Genuinely required — Hydrow, Echelon Row-S, NordicTrack RW900, Peloton Row, Aviron. These machines are built around a screen, and the screen shows the classes. Cancel and you keep a heavy magnetic rower with a dark panel. The hardware rows; the reason you chose it over something cheaper does not.

Genuinely optional— NordicTrack’s RW300 and, unusually, the Ergatta. The RW300 has a self-contained 5-inch LCD and 26 manual resistance levels, so it is a complete rowing machine without a membership; iFIT unlocks SmartAdjust and the class library. Ergatta says its rowers function without a membership too, which they do because underneath the screen they are WaterRowers.

What each one buys

Aviron, $29 — the cheapest, and one membership covers unlimited household profiles. Game-based programming rather than instructor-led classes, which genuinely works for people who cannot face another class.

iFIT Pro, $39— NordicTrack’s platform. SmartAdjust changes your resistance in real time based on your history, and the library extends well beyond rowing. NordicTrack states the requirement plainly on its own listing, which is more candour than most.

Ergatta, $39 — racing and games on a WaterRower frame. The five-year prepay drops it to $27 a month, at the price of paying $1,620 up front.

Echelon Premier, $39.99 — live and on-demand classes for the 22-inch Row-S screen.

Peloton All-Access, $49.99— the category’s production benchmark, and the Form Assist coaching genuinely does something no competitor matches. Note that this rose from $44 in October 2025, which is itself worth registering: a subscription price is not fixed for the life of your machine.

Hydrow, $50 — rows filmed on real water with athletes who row for a living, 6,000+ sessions. $38 a month on the annual prepay.

The five-year view

At the low end, Aviron’s $29 a month is $1,740 over five years. At the high end, Hydrow’s $50 is $3,000.

For context, $3,000 buys three Concept2 RowErgs — machines with a published 500 lb capacity, a five-year frame warranty and parts availability measured in decades.

The combined machine-plus-subscription table is here, and it is the more useful view.

Two risks nobody prices in

The price is not fixed

Peloton’s All-Access went from $44 to $49.99 in October 2025 — an 13.6% increase on a fee attached to hardware people had already bought. Nothing prevents any of these brands doing the same.

When you buy a subscription rower you are buying hardware at a fixed price and committing to a service at a variable one, for as long as you want the hardware to work as sold.

The service can end

A machine whose interface is a proprietary screen depends on the company that made it continuing to exist and continuing to support the model. Nobody publishes a support horizon.

A Concept2 PM5 will still record a session in fifteen years because it is a self-contained monitor with no server behind it. That is not an argument that connected rowers are bad — it is an argument for knowing which kind of purchase you are making.

The alternative that costs nothing

Sunny publishes 1,000+ trainer-led workouts on its SunnyFit app with, in its own words, no membership fee. MERACH and YOSUDA include their apps. Concept2’s ErgData is free and its PM5 records everything on its own.

Of the 27 machines we can price on this site, 20 have no recurring cost at all. Here are the best of them.

How we sourced these figures

Where a brand publishes its own price, we use it and link it. Where it does not, we say so.

Peloton’s figure is the one exception worth flagging: Peloton’s own membership page did not return an All-Access price to us on 24 July 2026, so the $49.99 comes from CBS News and Retail Dive reporting the October 2025 increase. That is a secondary source and we have labeled it as one rather than presenting it as first-party.