Withings charges new accounts $99.50 a year to sync with Apple Health

A new Withings owner who sets up an account gets one free month of Withings Plus, and that month includes syncing to third-party apps ^[12]. When it ends, the syncing pauses. Readings already sitting in the other apps are not deleted ^[13].

The Verge names Apple Health and Google Health as the apps affected ^[2]. At the $9.95 monthly rate, twelve months come to $119.40 ^[7], so the annual plan saves $19.90 ^[8]. Three years on the annual plan cost $298.50 ^[9].

The sources differ on how the change surfaced. The Verge says it came out of a discussion on Withings' support forums that MacRumors spotted ^[10]. MacRumors says Withings announced it ^[11].

Portability is the wider claim, and the evidence supports less of it. What is gated is automatic sync to third-party apps ^[1]. Neither source says whether manual export of data is affected, so we would not call all data portability a paid feature.

Two questions sort every Withings buyer: was the account created on or before October 12, and does the buyer read the data in Apple Health or Google Health instead of the Withings app? The four cells:

- Old account, reads in a third-party app: free sync stays ^[5]. - Old account, reads in the Withings app: nothing changes. - New account, reads in the Withings app: nothing to pay for sync. The sources describe the gate only on third-party sync ^[1]. - New account, reads in a third-party app: the only cell that pays, at $99.50 a year ^[3].

For that last cell we recommend adding $99.50 a year to the sticker price before buying, and comparing the total with devices that sync without a subscription. We would price it at month two. The tradeoff is time: a test run inside the free month has sync working and tells the buyer nothing about the bill ^[12].