Wink backpedals on its monthly subscription rollout

Wink announced that it was moving to a subscription-only model earlier this month, but customer backlash forced them to consider.

What you need to know

• Wink has delayed its plans to move all customers to a paid plan by May 13, 2020.
• The company had planned to end its free-service and move to a $4.99 plan, announcing this with only a week’s notice.
• It was subsequently met with backlash on its social media pages are users revolted.

Wink announced earlier this month that it would be moving to a subscription-only service. Priced at $4.99 a month, it would come into play from May 13, 2020. The company also planned to disable existing Wink Hubs for users who didn’t pay for from that date, effectively moving all its customers to either a paid plan or nothing.
As you can imagine from the ratio, customers weren’t very impressed by this.

We’re moving to a monthly subscription on 5/13 in order to better serve our users. This will enable us to continue providing the functionality customers have come to rely on, and focus on accelerating new integrations and app features. Go to https://t.co/zWYdv6HavN to learn more.

— Wink (@TheWinkApp) May 6, 2020

Today, Wink has backpedaled on that initial plan with somewhat dubious comments:

We want to start this message with a huge and sincere THANK YOU to everyone who subscribed. Wink was in a very rough spot, but thanks to your support, we are able to keep moving forward! It was not an easy decision to switch to a paid service, and we know that the short timeline put a lot of pressure on all of you, but we had no other way to continue the Wink service as it is currently known.

The support we have seen for our subscription service has been incredible. We feel we can extend Wink’s free service for the time being, confident that we can set a new start date for the subscription service to begin, giving you all more time to use Wink (subscription-free) whether you signed up or not.

For those customers who have signed up, we want to assure you that the first month’s payment has not yet been processed, and we will notify subscribers before we move forward with Wink Subscription.

Now, if you believe that Wink got so many people to promise to pay that they don’t need to actually pay right now — I have a bridge to sell you. For existing Wink customers though, the reasoning behind the delay doesn’t matter, just that it remains free for the time being.

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