> you can ship the device to your customers when it’s ready and meets your quality bar, and you can theoretically do it for free, because they are already paying a subscription

Which is exactly what Whoop _didn't_ do. It seems that the subscription model did not actually work for them.

> you can be confident that they are aligned with your interests

Not at all, as this demonstrates.

> If instead they are required to repeatedly earn your business

The trick is that Whoop dropped this requirement for themselves after they got folks to sign up and before they shipped a hardware update. Presumably they think they can keep running that back---lose all their customers, get new ones who don't know, rinse, and repeat. We'll see how that works out for them.

So, I mean, I think you have some great points but it just doesn't seem to work out that way in the real world.