Prime Example
These machines are actually a prime example of exploiting your customers for every penny.
First, they must pay for these machines - okay that's fine, it costs something to manufacture and produce them too - but then after the transaction is complete, you tell the person "well, you have the machine and all, but if you want to use most of the features you saw in the ad you need this monthly subscription".
Effectively they are double-charging the customer and continuing to do so. It's crazy in my mind that people would agree to pay for this. It should be one or the other, either pay a rent/subscription fee or pay a large initial sum.
Not both. Having both is just straight up customer exploitation.
I mean, let's look at the cost of their treatmill:
https://www.onepeloton.co.uk/tread
At the top it says:
From £2,295 or £59/mo¹ for 39 mos at 0% APR
All-Access Membership Separate
So, not only do you have to pay £2,295 for this machine, but on top of that if you want the smart features and membership you need to pay a separate all access membership fee.
How much is the fee?
According to them, the all access fee is £39/mo.
So let's do some math. They're 12 months in a year, so that's an additional £468 per annum you're paying for this machine.
So your machines price just jumped from £2,295 to £2,763 for your first year. Let's say you want to workout for 5 years. That's £2,340 worth of membership fees.
So for a 5 year workout plan with this machine you've paid £2,295 for the machine and £2,340 worth of membership fees, totalling £4,635.
I understand it costs money to produce the classes and such, but they could easily factor this into the cost of the machine itself, if they continued selling enough units with enough profit (and there's tons of profit in exercise equipment) then the cost of producing additional content could easily be covered. Let us not forget the price is already artificially inflated for simply having the smart features.
A regular treadmill at Argos, for example the "Reebok Jet 300" - will set you back £849 and includes the usual info about how many calories burned, mp3 connectivity, built in speakers etc etc. That's with no monthly subscription fees, so your 5 year workout plan with this machine would cost £849.
Instead this company are forcing customers to pay an inflated fee for the machine and then topping that off with a monthly fee. Thus they force paying customers to keep paying more.
So.. yup it's a no from me. I'd rather get a "dumb" treadmill which would do pretty much the same thing minus the classes.
But ofc, all this is just my personal opinion based on early morning first coffee research.