Devil's advocate take: Apple can afford to give you "free" sleep tracking because it makes its money from other sources like crazy markups on hardware and 30% tax on Appstore purchases, plus other subscriptions people pay Apple for like iCloud, Apple Care, etc.
But small specialized shops like Oura can't fund constant R&D on hardware dev and sleep tracking algorithms, infrastructure, plus continuous SW patches & updates to existing customers and products, without subscriptions, because they lack Apple's other revenue streams and muscle to negociate steep discounts on HW and cloud infra, so the one-time sale fee of Oura's HW product is not enough to cover all those on-going dev costs and keep the company afloat.
Not an Oura customer or shareholder, just though I'd share some light on the costs and challenges of competing in this space. It just doesn't work without continuous subscription based revenue streams. Low margins on HW sales are not enough to fund such businesses.
I’m not sure what you get with the Oura sub, but I would expect to get some form of ‘value’ in the form of services or analytics. Otherwise I’m just paying perpetual instalments for a device I thought I paid for.
Software app subs are one thing, but hardware is something else, IMO.
But small specialized shops like Oura can't fund constant R&D on hardware dev and sleep tracking algorithms, infrastructure, plus continuous SW patches & updates to existing customers and products, without subscriptions, because they lack Apple's other revenue streams and muscle to negociate steep discounts on HW and cloud infra, so the one-time sale fee of Oura's HW product is not enough to cover all those on-going dev costs and keep the company afloat.
Not an Oura customer or shareholder, just though I'd share some light on the costs and challenges of competing in this space. It just doesn't work without continuous subscription based revenue streams. Low margins on HW sales are not enough to fund such businesses.