Tour Tracker Subscription Prices

Hello again from Tour Tracker Central, also known as my kitchen in Seattle. Today's topic is about increasing the subscription prices for my Tour Tracker Pro Cycling app this year. If you are reading this then you are probably a bit annoyed that I'm raising the price of the annual subscription prices. Fair enough. But just to be clear, this is not a question of trying to increase profit. This is about increasing revenue so that I can keep the app not just in existence but growing.

I first wrote Tour Tracker about 15 years ago. And for 10 years the primary business of providing custom apps to races (e.g. Tour of California Tour Tracker) and broadcasters (e.g. NBC Tour de France) supported the direct-to-consumers Tour Tracker Pro Cycling. It was great as it let me release an app that focused on covering cycling, while the NBC and other apps really focused on advertising and/or sponsorship placement. And it let me price the app at less than a cup of coffee a year for live coverage of the Grand Tours.

Things, however, have changed over the past 5 years. NBC's switch to streaming meant they no longer wanted a TDF app. And as you might know all of the U.S. races folded. So my golden geese disappeared. At the same time, users kept asking for more races and more features. And more races. And women's races. And the World Championships. And...

And while my cost of maintaining the app itself doesn't change much with scale, the cost of running the app does. More reporters. More fees to license data from the races or 3rd parties. More servers to manage races. More payments to Amazon for distributing the data to your phones. The net result is that we have gone from 3 races to about 30 with only one price increase in 10 years.

So, this price increase is ensuring that the app can continue to deliver what users want without compromising quality. That you will never see advertising. That you will get the best reporters in the industry. That you will get flawless data delivery via expensive-but-reliable Amazon services. And that you will continue to get timely and accurate data via our 3rd party partners as the number of races grow. I'm hoping that what we have built is worth at least as much as 2-3 cups of coffee every year.

Thanks for reading and I hope you stick with us. If the price is just too much for what we offer then I hope you find a solution that you enjoy. Allan