Withings now charges $100 per year to sync your data to other apps
The $100 a year price tag is the detail that jumps out, because it's not a token fee. You already paid several hundred dollars for the scale or watch, and now the company wants a subscription just to let your data flow into Apple Health or Google Health. That's a hard ask for a feature that most competitors treat as table stakes.
I'd want to know whether existing users are truly grandfathered in or if this is the opening move before the fee spreads. Withings says new accounts created after October 13th are affected, which suggests they're testing the waters. The logic is understandable from a business standpoint, hardware margins are thin and recurring revenue is attractive, but the optics are rough. People buy these devices partly because the data is portable.
This fits a wider pattern of health and fitness companies trying to lock data in. The risk for Withings is that the sync feature is often the reason someone picks their scale over a cheaper rival. Charge for it and the value equation shifts. I think they'll watch churn closely, and if it hurts sales, this quietly gets reversed.