4 Gadgets That Get Worse The Moment You Cancel The Subscription

We live in a world where everyday conveniences often come with a recurring fee; many companies are looking for an endless payday. Ultimately, buying a modern gadget doesn't always mean you're done paying for it — instead, you may have to rent its most useful features. What started as an upsell years ago is now often a trap to keep you on the hook, and companies may even limit your hardware if you don't pay for an ongoing subscription.

Thankfully, not every subscription out there is suspect, though there are certainly a few that stand out for making their associated gadgets way less useful when you stop paying. The Oura Ring is a prime example, with its more detailed analysis gated behind a paywall. Then there's Ring and its video doorbells, which let you see who's at the door but require a subscription to replay recorded footage. Whoop's fitness bands are similarly stymied; Once your membership ends, you can no longer collect and analyze new biometric data. Lastly, we have Remarkable and its E Ink note-taking tablets, which put unlimited cloud storage behind a subscription by restricting syncing for documents you haven't used recently.

So before you buy any of these gadgets, it's worth asking yourself whether you're comfortable paying indefinitely or are happy to settle for fewer features — or, in Whoop's case, willing to give up ongoing tracking entirely. Sure, a few dollars every month doesn't sound like a lot, but over time it piles up, adding a much larger price tag to something that is often already expensive. After all, isn't modern tech supposed to make our lives easier, not give us more things to manage?

Oura Ring isn't alone in offering an optional companion subscription for its smart ring lineup, pricing this sub at $5.99 monthly or $69.99 annually. Many smart devices offer an optional subscription as an upsell and switching to an annual plan can usually save you a few bucks. Thankfully, with Oura, you do get your first month free, so you can adequately judge if the subscription is worth the cost. However, without a subscription, your experience will be limited compared to users who maintain their sub, while competitors like Samsung and RingConn do not sell subscriptions at all. This is why Oura can feel that much more restrictive in comparison when you lose out on access to features like detailed sleep reports, heart rate graphs, and temperature trends.

Should you choose to skip out on the Oura Ring subscription, you will retain access to your three daily scores for Sleep, Activity, and Readiness, but not the detailed insights behind them. So you'll get a basic understanding of how well you slept, how you're balancing activity and rest, and how ready you are to tackle a new day's activities, but the why and how of the situation are gated behind the subscription.

So if you're undecided whether the Oura Ring is right for you and your daily tracking needs, it's worth keeping in mind what features are available without a subscription and if you need the more detailed reports you get when paying the sub. While the Oura Ring Membership isn't too expensive, you may be better served by a competitor who offers the reports you need for free, rather than continually paying Oura for that access.

If the popularity of optional subscriptions already gets your blood boiling, then you're likely not going to enjoy the pricing model for Whoop's fitness bands. Instead of buying the hardware outright and choosing whether you wish to pay for an optional subscription or not, you are buying a year's worth of service with Whoop which also includes a fitness band. The subscriptions start at $199 per year and reach all the way to $359, depending on which non-optional subscription you choose. This means you can't stop paying the subscription if you want your Whoop fitness band to continue working, though in return you get access to features like sleep analysis, stress monitoring, and even blood pressure insights, depending on which subscription tier and, subsequently, which band you choose. Still, the hardware is pretty useless without the sub, illustrating perfectly how a Whoop fitness band gets worse the moment your subscription ends.

Of course, it's worth considering that since the hardware is bundled with a year's subscription, you're basically paying for the service and the hardware upfront. Yes, you'll have to keep renewing, and keeping your band doesn't lower the annual pricing. You can, however, get upgraded hardware with your renewed sub, but eligibility applies, so it isn't guaranteed.

So on the one hand, you can avoid having to purchase hardware and a separate subscription if you choose a Whoop fitness band; it's all-inclusive for a single price. But on the other hand, there's no option to use these bands without a subscription, locking you into a never-ending fee that is absolutely required for basic functionality. This can be a hard pill to swallow when there's such a large departure from the typical pricing structure of a smart fitness band.

When it comes to smart video doorbells, Ring is certainly a major choice amongst the competition, though, like many smart home products, there is an optional subscription available that gates features behind it. The subscription is priced at $4.99 monthly or $49.99 annually for a single Ring Solo device, but it does lock one of the camera's best features: a saved video history that can be perused at the user's convenience. Person, package, and vehicle alerts on compatible devices are also locked behind the subscription, but being able to view older recordings is the main draw for sure.

Thankfully, the free tier for Ring's video doorbells offers standard motion and doorbell notifications, so you'll still receive alerts when there is someone at the door; you simply won't be informed who it is/was or if they left anything behind. Still, a live view of that will be fairly informative so you can decide on your own if the door is worth answering, and with the two-way talk feature that works without a subscription, if you're still puzzled who's at the door, you can literally ask. It's when you miss these events that the lack of saved recordings becomes a problem, since without an active subscription, there's no footage to go back and check.

Like all smart home products that offer an optional subscription, you need to go into the purchase informed about what you get for free and what will require a recurring cost. Should you be perfectly fine with live alerts and no recordings, Ring can come in clutch to see who is knocking or delivering to your house. However, if you require evidence of these visits with video footage, well, be prepared to pay a subscription for the privilege.

Taking notes with E Ink e-readers has grown in popularity as the display technology grows closer and closer to a pen-and-paper experience. Remarkable makes some of the best note-taking e-readers, leaning hard on a minimalist design philosophy that includes the software on the device which is designed around taking notes and reading documents like PDFs and eBooks. But just because something is designed with purpose doesn't mean there isn't an optional subscription, which Remarkable offers as Connect at $3.99 a month or $39.90 annually.

With this subscription, you gain access to unlimited cloud storage and sync, searches across handwritten and typed notes, and additional sharing tools. The main sticking point here is cloud storage, which is especially handy if you own multiple Remarkable devices or plan to use the mobile/PC apps in tandem with your tablet.

Should you cancel the Connect subscription, only files opened and synced within the last 50 days will continue syncing through Remarkable's companion apps. That said, you do retain access to third-party cloud storage. When files fall outside the 50-day window, they'll stop syncing, but will remain accessible on your tablet. So if you don't plan to utilize any cloud syncing or storage with your Remarkable, these shortcomings from a lack of a subscription won't be an issue. On the other hand, if you find you primarily use your Remarkable for note-taking at work and at home and wish to keep all your notes accessible and editable from the comfort of your phone and PC, you'll have to pay for the sub.