I bought my Withings ScanWatch 2 last year because I wanted a hybrid smartwatch that tracks health metrics without screaming “I’m wearing a fitness gadget.” It looks like a proper watch, it runs for a month on a charge, and it syncs silently with Apple Health. That last part mattered — I use Apple Health as my central health hub, pulling data from different devices into one place. It’s how I spot trends, share reports with my doctor, and keep a longitudinal view of my heart health.
That seamless sync is now a paid feature. If you create a new Withings account after October 13, 2026, you’ll need a Withings+ subscription — $9.95 per month or $99.50 per year — to automatically send your health data to third-party apps like Apple Health, Google Health Connect, MyFitnessPal, or Samsung Health. The hardware you already bought won’t talk to the rest of your digital life without a recurring fee.
Existing users who created accounts before that date keep free syncing for life. The policy is tied to your account, not your device — so if you bought a new Watch 6 or Body Scan scale and register it under your old account, you’re still fine. But anyone new to the ecosystem, anyone who resets their account, anyone who creates a second account for a family member — they all hit the paywall.
The convenience trap
Here’s what gets me. Withings isn’t gating a premium feature. They’re gating the ability to move your own data between platforms you already use. Your scale still records your weight. Your watch still tracks your heart rate and sleep. That data still lives inside the Withings app. But the moment you want to send it to Apple Health — which is free, which is built into every iPhone, which is the entire point of having a unified health dashboard — that’s where the meter starts running.
Withings justifies the subscription by bundling it with other features: an AI Health Assistant, ECG reviews by board-certified cardiologists (four per year), Heart Age and Readiness scores, and a new AI Connector that links your data to external AI assistants. Those are genuinely useful features. But they’re not what I’m paying $99.50 for. I’m paying for the right to sync my weight and step count to an app that comes free with my phone.
This is the convenience trap that hardware companies have perfected: sell you the device at a reasonable price, make it work beautifully for the first month (the free trial), then slowly realize that the real value isn’t the hardware — it’s the ongoing relationship with your data. Once you’ve built a history, once you’ve integrated the device into your daily routine, once your doctor is asking “what does your watch say?” — that’s when the price goes up. Not because the hardware costs more to make, but because leaving costs more than staying.
The data ownership problem underneath
There’s a deeper issue here that goes beyond one company’s pricing decision. We’re living through a quiet transfer of data ownership. You buy a device, you generate data with it, and then the company that sold you the device decides that the data you generated together now belongs to them — or at least, they control how it moves.
Withings still lets you export your complete history as CSV or PDF at any time (source). That’s good. That’s the bare minimum. But the practical reality is that manual exports break the workflow. The entire value of a health tracker is continuous, passive monitoring. The moment you have to remember to export a file and email it to your doctor or upload it to another app, you stop doing it. That’s not a feature — that’s a barrier designed to make the subscription feel necessary.
I think about this in the context of my work in government ICT. We deal with digital transformation projects where data portability is a core requirement. Citizens should be able to move their data between systems. Vendors who lock data into proprietary formats or gate interoperability behind additional fees create long-term costs that far exceed the initial procurement price. The same principle applies here, just at a personal scale — and it is part of a broader erosion of trust that I explored in AI Data Centers Are Losing the Trust War.
Your health data is arguably the most personal data you have — and as I noted in The OpenAI Insider, the devices we trust with our most sensitive information often have the weakest safeguards. And the company that collects it has decided that sharing it with other services — services you might need for your health, services your doctor might use, services that could one day save your life — is a premium feature.
Where the industry is heading
Withings isn’t the first hardware company to try this. Fitbit (now Google) has been pushing Premium for years. Oura charges $5.99/month for the full feature ring. Whoop is subscription-only. The pattern is clear: the device is the hook, the subscription is the business model. It is the same playbook I unpacked in The X Subscription — bundle everything into one plan, then make leaving feel impossible.
There’s a legitimate argument for subscriptions. Servers cost money. AI models cost money. ECG reviews by board-certified cardiologists cost money. If a company is providing ongoing services beyond the hardware, they deserve to be compensated. But there’s a line between “paying for premium features” and “paying to unlock basic functionality,” and Withings has crossed it. Syncing data to a third-party app is not a premium feature. It’s table stakes for any health device in 2026.
The broader trend worries me. If Withings can get away with this, what’s next? Will Garmin start charging to sync with Strava? Will Apple lock HealthKit behind a paid tier? Will your glucose monitor require a subscription to send readings to your endocrinologist? Once one company normalizes data-gating, others follow. It’s the same playbook as ransomware — except instead of encrypting your data, they’re putting it behind a paywall and calling it a service.
What I’d do instead
If you’re in the market for a health tracker right now, here’s my honest advice. Look at devices that don’t require subscriptions for core functionality. Garmin watches sync with Apple Health and Google Health Connect for free. Huawei’s watches do the same. Even Xiaomi’s higher-end wearables don’t gate basic sync behind a paywall.
If you already own a Withings device and you’re grandfathered in — don’t create a new account. Don’t reset your device to factory settings if you can avoid it. The free sync is tied to your account, and once you lose it, you can’t get it back.
If you’re a new buyer and you still want Withings hardware (and honestly, the ScanWatch 2 is a beautiful device) — factor the $99.50/year into your total cost of ownership. A $300 watch that costs $100/year to use properly is a $700 watch over four years. That changes the math significantly.
My take
I’m keeping my ScanWatch 2. My account is grandfathered in, and the hardware still works well enough that replacing it would be a waste. But I’ll be watching what Withings does next. If they start grandfathering out other features — if they start charging for sleep tracking or heart rate alerts — I’ll be first in line to switch.
The lesson here isn’t really about Withings. It’s about the deal we make when we buy connected hardware. We’re not just buying a device. We’re entering a relationship with a company that controls our data. And the terms of that relationship can change at any time, with a forum post and a policy update.
Read the terms. Check the subscription model before you buy. And if you are already locked into an ecosystem, at least audit your privacy settings — I walked through that process in How to Manage Copilot’s File Access and Privacy Settings. And ask yourself: if this company changes the deal tomorrow, how much would it cost me to walk away? If the answer is “more than I can afford,” you might want to buy from someone else.