For those of us who are locked in at legacy prices, TR is an incredible bargain. Looks like the legacy pricing is ending…or not.
Good on them - I’m curious though - what sort of price-increase of resources is Trainerroad incurring on their end? I admit to being pretty ignorant of these affairs - is it server prices going up? Or software-app maintenance?
It seemed to me like they had a good, stable thing going already that required very little modification once in motion, but again, I know very little about these things and am likely totally wrong about it!
Like you, I can only guess, but personnel costs must have gone up, along with all kinds of external services (whether labor intensive or capital intensive; the cost of letting someone use your gear goes up as interest rates rise).
This would not be a problem if the user base was growing quickly. Trainerroad is scalable, being a SaaS business. If I sign up, they don’t need more software engineers.
So, if Nate is correct in saying that TR are under inflationary pressure, this means that the user count has stagnated.
Also: since they have no outside investors, they are not under pressure to “improve economics†or whatever.
Like you, I can only guess, but personnel costs must have gone up, along with all kinds of external services (whether labor intensive or capital intensive; the cost of letting someone use your gear goes up as interest rates rise).
This would not be a problem if the user base was growing quickly. Trainerroad is scalable, being a SaaS business. If I sign up, they don’t need more software engineers.
So, if Nate is correct in saying that TR are under inflationary pressure, this means that the user count has stagnated.
Also: since they have no outside investors, they are not under pressure to “improve economics†or whatever.
I’m just honestly curious as to WHAT those inflationary pressures are on a company like TR.
The software is already coded and developed for multiple platforms. You don’t need a lot more resources there. They’ve got enough workouts and plans to not need anymore as well. And in its current incarnation, it pretty much should run itself for the users with very little input required from the company.
And even if the userbase is stagnant or not increasing, it’s not like they NEED to keep growing. They have a lot of users already, and they’ll make plenty good money even if it declines a little. (In contrast to something like Zwift which may be pushing out new worlds, new sponorships, new hardware, which all require more revenue coming in.) Is TR doing something new on their end for their product?
Just surprised that something even seeming as low-resource-intensive as TR is encountering such price pressures. Again, I have no idea what they or the industry is going through, so I’m likely missing something huge!
To me, as an outsider who just listens to too much NPR, cost isn’t straight scalable to user demand and inflation for everything.
Kind of like yeah, inflation hits and your $3/gal milk goes to $3.40. But, folks making $100k/year getting the inflation adjust in their pay check aren’t suddenly going to need 12 gallons a milk instead of one gallon. In on other words, costs and revenues aren’t in lock step.
Same here, IMO. I think there may be some true inflationary pressures, but in general, it goes back to supply/demand/competition.
Why charge $XX minus $x for something another competitor service is successfully charging the entire $XX amount for?
Like you, I can only guess, but personnel costs must have gone up, along with all kinds of external services (whether labor intensive or capital intensive; the cost of letting someone use your gear goes up as interest rates rise).
This would not be a problem if the user base was growing quickly. Trainerroad is scalable, being a SaaS business. If I sign up, they don’t need more software engineers.
So, if Nate is correct in saying that TR are under inflationary pressure, this means that the user count has stagnated.
Also: since they have no outside investors, they are not under pressure to “improve economics†or whatever.
I’m just honestly curious as to WHAT those inflationary pressures are on a company like TR.
The software is already coded and developed for multiple platforms. You don’t need a lot more resources there. They’ve got enough workouts and plans to not need anymore as well. And in its current incarnation, it pretty much should run itself for the users with very little input required from the company.
And even if the userbase is stagnant or not increasing, it’s not like they NEED to keep growing. They have a lot of users already, and they’ll make plenty good money even if it declines a little. (In contrast to something like Zwift which may be pushing out new worlds, new sponorships, new hardware, which all require more revenue coming in.) Is TR doing something new on their end for their product?
Just surprised that something even seeming as low-resource-intensive as TR is encountering such price pressures. Again, I have no idea what they or the industry is going through, so I’m likely missing something huge!
Likely cost of living increases for their 92 employees (mostly software and data engineers) and server costs (there can’t be a whole lot else for a SaaS company can there?). Salary costs are likely on the order of 10+ million a year alone. That’s 50,000-100,000 annual users just to cover salary depending on how competitively they pay and the split of legacy vs current price subscribers.
Like you, I can only guess, but personnel costs must have gone up, along with all kinds of external services (whether labor intensive or capital intensive; the cost of letting someone use your gear goes up as interest rates rise).
This would not be a problem if the user base was growing quickly. Trainerroad is scalable, being a SaaS business. If I sign up, they don’t need more software engineers.
So, if Nate is correct in saying that TR are under inflationary pressure, this means that the user count has stagnated.
Also: since they have no outside investors, they are not under pressure to “improve economics†or whatever.
I’m just honestly curious as to WHAT those inflationary pressures are on a company like TR.
The software is already coded and developed for multiple platforms. You don’t need a lot more resources there. They’ve got enough workouts and plans to not need anymore as well. And in its current incarnation, it pretty much should run itself for the users with very little input required from the company.
And even if the userbase is stagnant or not increasing, it’s not like they NEED to keep growing. They have a lot of users already, and they’ll make plenty good money even if it declines a little. (In contrast to something like Zwift which may be pushing out new worlds, new sponorships, new hardware, which all require more revenue coming in.) Is TR doing something new on their end for their product?
Just surprised that something even seeming as low-resource-intensive as TR is encountering such price pressures. Again, I have no idea what they or the industry is going through, so I’m likely missing something huge!
Likely cost of living increases for their 92 employees (mostly software and data engineers) and server costs (there can’t be a whole lot else for a SaaS company can there?). Salary costs are likely on the order of 10+ million a year alone. That’s 50,000-100,000 annual users just to cover salary depending on how competitively they pay and the split of legacy vs current price subscribers.
Wow I didn’t know they had 92 employees!
I honestly thought they were like a group of <15 people with stuff like billing etc contracted out to 3rd parties.
What are all those software engineers doing? I thought the platform was already set up and basically good to run mostly ‘on its own.’ Or am I missing a continuous stream of new features that are being implemented?
I’ve been a subscriber since 2018. In that time they’ve released:
CalendarOutside workoutsRamp testGroup workoutsPlan builderImproved powermatchAdaptive trainingAI FTPRun imports
Some of those big, some small and some I’m probably missing. It also seems like once every 2-3 weeks there’s an app update with bug fixes. They support windows, android, iOS and MacOS versions and a browser based front end that all work pretty seamlessly. It’s an ecosystem that just works too (unlike some other’s I’ve tried using). It’s an entirely different app from when I started using it 5 years ago. Back then it was workout library and player with 15-20 pre-made plans that you had to keep track of which workout you just did and which workout comes next.
Listening to the podcast and reading stuff on the forums, they’ve got several features in the works such as improved run integration and unstructured ride inputs into AT (workout levels 2?).
I’ve been a subscriber since 2018. In that time they’ve released:
CalendarOutside workoutsRamp testGroup workoutsPlan builderImproved powermatchAdaptive trainingAI FTPRun imports
Some of those big, some small and some I’m probably missing. It also seems like once every 2-3 weeks there’s an app update with bug fixes. They support windows, android, iOS and MacOS versions and a browser based front end that all work pretty seamlessly. It’s an ecosystem that just works too (unlike some other’s I’ve tried using). It’s an entirely different app from when I started using it 5 years ago. Back then it was workout library and player with 15-20 pre-made plans that you had to keep track of which workout you just did and which workout comes next.
Listening to the podcast and reading stuff on the forums, they’ve got several features in the works such as improved run integration and unstructured ride inputs into AT (workout levels 2?).
^this
I’ve been using trainerroad since 2014 and can confidently say that their product is much different and expansive today than it was when I started. Frankly, I’m surprised i got legacy pricing for this long. Good for them!
I’ve used TR since 2019 on some discount deal and it has significantly more functionality than when I started and is constantly improving. The software is not static and they have a ton of free education content. Huge fan can’t imagine switching for what u get it’s a bargain. nate Jonathan Amber and Chad seem like my best cyclist friends even I never met any of them just from the podcast the odd forum interaction and comment reply. Well them and backwards hat Dylan.
I am a long time trainer road subscriber and really like the platform compared to the other platforms currently offered in the market. The train now feature is outstanding. I am more than happy to increase my subscription rate so that they do not have to either look to outside investment or sell/merge with other companies and all the negative impacts associated with that move. Keep up the great work TR!
I think labour costs are rising everywhere including for TR. Even if they weren’t growing, they would still need a lot of customer support and back end people to keep the bugs at bay.
Additionally, I think many businesses like TR are in the grow or die model. If they don’t keep trying to improve/change their product, eventually their competitors will outpace them with a lot of shiny new features. So TR has to keep hiring so as to keep innovating - which means more cost.
As others have noted, the software does a lot more than it used to.
It is also possible that like many tech “startups” TR isn’t very profitable yet - and the founders are trying to keep the balls in the air until a competitor buys them. This may be an attempt to inject more funds into the business to keep it going for a few more years while they wait for a suitor.
I’m not sure if they are against VC funding, or if they just can’t get it - but either way, it’s impressive to build a business with this many users without any outside capital.
Wondering if it’s as much a sign of the bike industry bubble about to go pop? Anticipation of declining subscribers so increase the prices to keep revenue up? Strava have just announced a nearly 30% fee increase for UK users.
Likely cost of living increases for their 92 employees (mostly software and data engineers) and server costs (there can’t be a whole lot else for a SaaS company can there?). Salary costs are likely on the order of 10+ million a year alone. That’s 50,000-100,000 annual users just to cover salary depending on how competitively they pay and the split of legacy vs current price subscribers.
Salary is probably the largest swing and there’s also all the other SaaS that most companies use that’s gone up in price as well. There’s probably a good amount of per employee and variable cost SaaS products that they’re using that have also been bringing their rates up this year. You can do some trimming when things have overlapping feature sets or try to reduce utilization, but a lot of those products are pretty sticky once you’ve built processes around having them.
This reminds me of buying socks with “lifetime” warranty. It’s always too good to be true.
Or Flo wheels. As a startup, they were pretty unique. Now they’re in a sea of carbon wheel manufacturers at the mid-price level.
I still think Flo is great still. Just as a mature company they couldn’t maintain the killer price differential they once had.
I’m not sure if they are against VC funding, or if they just can’t get it - but either way, it’s impressive to build a business with this many users without any outside capital.
I can’t be certain, but I’d bet a lot of money that there have been a handful of folks (and I’d guess a whole lot more than that) wanting to fund TR in some capacity. My startup in the same space has had serious investor interest and we haven’t even launched and most folks haven’t even heard about it. Given my experience, it seems to me like there’s next-to-no chance that Nate doesn’t field some investor interest. He’s probably got a canned response at this point. 
Their loyal user base is impressive indeed and they’ve done a lot of things really well to build it. Well earned.
I’ll bet you’re absolutely right. I think they are in principle against VC investment for their own company due to potential loss of control. Nate has talked about it on the podcast in the past. They don’t judge it for others, it’s just not for them.
This reminds me of buying socks with “lifetime” warranty. It’s always too good to be true.
In case you haven’t followed along, the price increase for legacy members is entirely optional. You can stay at your current old pricing w/ no loss of features.
They’re basically just asking for volunteers to pay more. By reading the thread at the TR forum, quite a few people are doing it.
I stuck with my legacy pricing, I went for several years without even using TR but never bothered to cancel because I didn’t want to lose that pricing knowing that some day I would return. I figure I’ll give it another go now and if I stick with it I’ll change my pricing choice… I’m at a crossroads though as I’m really struggling to find something I like between Fulgaz, Rouvy, Zwift, and then plans in TrainerRoad, Tridot, MyProCoach and of course TrainingPeaks. I realize I am wasting a load of money and should just get a coach!
They have made a lot of changes and improvements in TrainerRoad though but it looks like their triathlon plans are the same as they always were, other than the bike workouts adapting. I could be wrong on that. I assume the swims and runs don’t adapt?