I am calling now. In a few years, this will be a case study on how not to treat your user base.
If you’re an athlete, you may have heard of a device called Whoop. You wear it on you wrist and it tracks your activity throughout a day. And it doesn’t have a screen so it can do that with way more granularity versus something like an Apple Watch, and have days of battery life. This is a device that has found its way on to the wrists of pro cyclists like Mathieu Van Der Poel to help them to perform at their best.
Now it’s not the hardware that makes Whoop a unique device, it’s really the software. It can give you a lot of data on your life as well as your training so that you can make data based decisions about how you train, your sleep, your nutrition, etc. And you have to pay for that as part of a subscription. But as long as you were a subscriber for more than six months, you would get new hardware for free. That sounded like a great deal. And it was until this week when Whoop took that away from users when version 5.0 of their hardware was released. When that happened, users were given two choices:
- Extend your subscription by 12 months to get the new hardware
- Pay $49 USD to get the new hardware
And to make matters worse, any mention of their promise of free hardware for any subscriber who has been subscribing for more than six months, such as this example which I found via the Internet Wayback Machine, was scrubbed from their website. There are other “receipts” as the kids say that you can see here.
I’ll be honest, that at first glance sounds shady. And the backlash from users has been swift and brutal. Here’s a couple of examples from Twitter:
Now I can see why Whoop users would be mad. And from where I stand, they have a point. I guess Whoop figured out that they really dropped themselves in this one and today kind of, sort of started backpedaling this:
After the backlash, Whoop is now changing its tune — somewhat. Those with “more than 12 months remaining” are “eligible for a free upgrade to WHOOP 5.0 on Peak,” one of its new subscription offerings. Those with less than 12 months left still have to either extend their membership another 12 months or pay a one-time upgrade fee, the company says. The same information is reflected in an update on its membership pricing page.
The company addresses the earlier blog post, writing that “a previous blog article incorrectly stated that anyone who had been a member for just 6 months would receive a free upgrade. This was never our policy and should never have been posted.” Whoop goes on:
As noted above, our policy for upgrades from WHOOP 3.0 to WHOOP 4.0 was that members with 6 months or more remaining on their membership were eligible for a free upgrade to WHOOP 4.0. We removed that blog article when it came to our attention and updated WHOOP Coach with the proper information. We’re sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
That seems to line up with a Forbes interview that a Reddit user found, in which Whoop CEO Will Ahmed told the outlet that members with a Whoop 3.0 band could upgrade to the 4.0 model, so long as they had “at least 6 months of membership left on their account.” The company used similar language in a 2021 blog post about the Whoop 4.0 band.
I will leave it to you to decide if this is a good response or not.
At this point, the damage I think is done. The way Whoop handled this has really damaged the trust of their user base, which to be clear were very loyal to the product. In fact, I would go as far to say that Whoop not only torched that trust, they torched it, and then nuked it from orbit. I say that because I guarantee that Whoop users who feel screwed over by the company are going to be taking a good look at Garmin sports watches which do a lot of what Whoop does built into the product. Or they may do what I did which is take an Apple Watch and use a third party piece of software called Athlytic which you use via a subscription that’s way cheaper than any subscription that Whoop offers to get most of this functionality. You can find out more about that here. Either way, if that happens, Whoop will not get those users back. Ever. And they will look this moment and conclude that this is when they shot themselves in the foot and never recovered.
Whoop Shoots Itself In The Foot And Angers Their User Base
Posted in Commentary with tags Whoop on May 11, 2025 by itnerdI am calling now. In a few years, this will be a case study on how not to treat your user base.
If you’re an athlete, you may have heard of a device called Whoop. You wear it on you wrist and it tracks your activity throughout a day. And it doesn’t have a screen so it can do that with way more granularity versus something like an Apple Watch, and have days of battery life. This is a device that has found its way on to the wrists of pro cyclists like Mathieu Van Der Poel to help them to perform at their best.
Now it’s not the hardware that makes Whoop a unique device, it’s really the software. It can give you a lot of data on your life as well as your training so that you can make data based decisions about how you train, your sleep, your nutrition, etc. And you have to pay for that as part of a subscription. But as long as you were a subscriber for more than six months, you would get new hardware for free. That sounded like a great deal. And it was until this week when Whoop took that away from users when version 5.0 of their hardware was released. When that happened, users were given two choices:
And to make matters worse, any mention of their promise of free hardware for any subscriber who has been subscribing for more than six months, such as this example which I found via the Internet Wayback Machine, was scrubbed from their website. There are other “receipts” as the kids say that you can see here.
I’ll be honest, that at first glance sounds shady. And the backlash from users has been swift and brutal. Here’s a couple of examples from Twitter:
Now I can see why Whoop users would be mad. And from where I stand, they have a point. I guess Whoop figured out that they really dropped themselves in this one and today kind of, sort of started backpedaling this:
After the backlash, Whoop is now changing its tune — somewhat. Those with “more than 12 months remaining” are “eligible for a free upgrade to WHOOP 5.0 on Peak,” one of its new subscription offerings. Those with less than 12 months left still have to either extend their membership another 12 months or pay a one-time upgrade fee, the company says. The same information is reflected in an update on its membership pricing page.
The company addresses the earlier blog post, writing that “a previous blog article incorrectly stated that anyone who had been a member for just 6 months would receive a free upgrade. This was never our policy and should never have been posted.” Whoop goes on:
As noted above, our policy for upgrades from WHOOP 3.0 to WHOOP 4.0 was that members with 6 months or more remaining on their membership were eligible for a free upgrade to WHOOP 4.0. We removed that blog article when it came to our attention and updated WHOOP Coach with the proper information. We’re sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
That seems to line up with a Forbes interview that a Reddit user found, in which Whoop CEO Will Ahmed told the outlet that members with a Whoop 3.0 band could upgrade to the 4.0 model, so long as they had “at least 6 months of membership left on their account.” The company used similar language in a 2021 blog post about the Whoop 4.0 band.
I will leave it to you to decide if this is a good response or not.
At this point, the damage I think is done. The way Whoop handled this has really damaged the trust of their user base, which to be clear were very loyal to the product. In fact, I would go as far to say that Whoop not only torched that trust, they torched it, and then nuked it from orbit. I say that because I guarantee that Whoop users who feel screwed over by the company are going to be taking a good look at Garmin sports watches which do a lot of what Whoop does built into the product. Or they may do what I did which is take an Apple Watch and use a third party piece of software called Athlytic which you use via a subscription that’s way cheaper than any subscription that Whoop offers to get most of this functionality. You can find out more about that here. Either way, if that happens, Whoop will not get those users back. Ever. And they will look this moment and conclude that this is when they shot themselves in the foot and never recovered.
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