Your favorite sous vide cooker is going subscription

By Phil Nickinson Published August 15, 2024

It’s official: Nothing is sacred. Anonva Culinary is the company behind the popular sous vide devices of the same name. And today in a blog post and an email to customers, it announced that it’s moving to a subscription model.

Here’s the deal: Starting August 21, 2024, anyone who already has downloaded the Anova app and has an account in the Anova app is good to go. You’re grandfathered in. New customers will have to pay $2 a month, or $10 a year, to use the device via the app.

For the uninitiated, the Anova Sous Vide cooker is a device that heats and circulates a water bath. Food — say, a steak — is vacuum-sealed in a bag, and then immersed in the water, where it cooks relatively slowly, but also evenly. Because you control the temperature of the water, it’s practically impossible to overcook the food. And all the juices are retained in the meat or in the bag. You then sear the meat (or whatever you’re making) to finish up. It’s relatively easy, and extremely tasty.

Anova says exactly what the subscription fee covers will vary a little bit depending on which model cooker you have. But the broad strokes are this:

The move comes about a month after it announced it was shutting down remote connectivity for its original Bluetooth and Bluetooth+ models on September 28, 2025. You’ll still be able to use them locally — as in plug ’em in, turn ’em on, and they’ll work just fine. You just won’t be able to control the devices via the Anova app after that date. (To make up for it, Anova offered owners of those models 50% off a new model, but that discount was only good for a couple weeks and expired on August 1.)

Charging you to use your Anova is the unfortunate (yet logical) next step. “Unfortunately, each connected cook costs us money,” the company said in an email to customers. “So, to continue delivering the exceptional service and innovative recipes you’ve come to expect, we’re introducing a small subscription fee for our app. The new Anova Sous Vide Subscription will allow us to maintain and enhance the app, ensuring it remains a valuable resource for all of our users.”

That’s the bad news. And you can argue that what Anova is doing here actually is the more fair way to go about things. Instead of just raising prices on hardware $10 across the board, you have a choice to pay or not, and to take advantage of the subscription features or not. It’s your call, and the cooker will still work locally via the physical controls.

Or if none of that works for you, you can always sous vide in your dishwasher.