Fitbit to shut down Coin product services on February 28; cards will still be usable until end of their battery life
This was all inevitable, of course. Fitbit has made its plans for Coin clear since it bought the mobile payment company back in May of last year.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Fitbit acquired Coin's wearable payment assets in May 2016, it committed to keeping existing Coin 2.0 cards working while folding the team and IP into its own devices — the May 2016 asset deal always implied the standalone product was living on borrowed time. The February 28 service cutoff is that promise expiring on schedule: cards physically function until their built-in batteries die, but the payment service behind them goes dark.
This is the second time in three months Fitbit has closed out a company it absorbed rather than continued its product line — it did the same with Pebble, whose software assets Fitbit took in December while Pebble canceled unreleased hardware and refunded Kickstarter backers. For a company squeezed on consumer hardware margins, buying teams and patents while retiring the products is becoming its standard integration model.
First-order effects
- Coin card holders lose the payment service on February 28, with usability capped by each card's remaining battery life — no replacement path exists since Coin products stopped being sold at the acquisition.
Second-order effects
- Fitbit's own user base takes the lesson alongside Coin's: the Pebble shutdown and this sunset together signal that Fitbit-acquired hardware depends on servers Fitbit controls, which pressures the company to show payments and software features landing in Fitbit-branded wearables to justify the deals.
Third-order effects
- If the acquire-assets-kill-products pattern holds across Coin and Pebble, independent wearable makers become harder to fund — backers and buyers discount the risk that an acquisition ends their device's cloud support — pushing the category toward consolidation around a few large platforms.
The trend: Fitbit is building its wearable platform through asset acquisitions that retire the target's products, trading short-term goodwill for consolidated engineering talent and IP.