No more subscription, and where the gate stands
A proper update this week, and it starts with good news.
We had planned to charge $30 a year for the LagKing app after the first six months. We are not going to. The app comes with the gate, free, permanently, and it transfers with the gate if you ever sell it.
That means everything the gate does, the app does, at no ongoing cost. Every game mode. Online play and leaderboards. Your full history. Firmware updates. All of it, for as long as you own the device.
Why the change? Because charging you every year to use a thing you already bought never sat right with us. We ran the numbers on what the subscription would have earned and decided we would rather have your trust than your renewal. If we ever want more of your money, we should have to earn it by building something genuinely new, not by putting a meter on what you already paid for.
A few of you have written in asking whether the price will go up before launch, or what the ongoing cost is. Now you know: $199 once, and nothing after that.
What we have been building
We built a machine to test the machine. It is a jig that rolls a ball at the gate the same way every time, from a known distance, so we can check what the gate reports against what actually happened. Then we rolled 428 balls at it.
It earned its keep on the first morning. Two gates that had been reading the same for weeks turned out not to be: one had drifted overnight, and we only caught it because the jig finally gave us something to compare against. You cannot find that by feel. You find it by rolling the same ball down the same ramp until the numbers tell on themselves.
Then we fixed it. Not with new parts, in the firmware, which is the outcome I was hoping for and did not want to promise you on Monday. The gate now measures the line a putt is on using more of what it sees, and the result is roughly half the scatter on slow putts, which are the ones that were hardest to read.
Here is the number I am proudest of. We measured one gate's zero, then measured it again on a different day, on a rebuilt version of the firmware, after the thing had been handled and moved around in between. The two readings agreed to two thousandths of a degree. That is what we needed to know: it is not drifting on its own, and a gate we calibrate at the bench stays calibrated.
That took thirteen firmware builds in four days. Not a boast, just what it took.
It also recovers on its own now when you hit it. You will hit it. Everybody hits it. It shrugs and carries on.
On the manufacturing side, we signed an NDA with a contract manufacturer this week and sent them the full spec package. That is the beginning of the conversation that ends with someone other than me assembling these.
It works in GSPro
Enough of you asked that I spent a day on it, and it is running. Your putts from the gate go straight into GSPro. There is a clip of it working on our Instagram, @lagkinggolf, and it is worth thirty seconds of your time.
I will be straight about the mechanism, because it is not elegant yet. GSPro will only listen to one device at a time, so the gate cannot simply sit alongside your launch monitor. It has to go through a separate connector program that takes both and passes them along together. It works, but it is more setup than I would like, and I want to be clear that part is not mine to fix. GSPro takes one input. Anything that adds a second device has to work around that, and we are the ones working around it.
One favor, if you use a launch monitor: the connector has to talk to your monitor as well as our gate, and there are far more monitors out there than I own. If you would be willing to test the launch monitor side of that connection with whatever you have, hit reply. That is genuinely the part I cannot test alone, and it would help a lot.
When
This fall. It could be early fall, it could be late fall, and I want to be straight about what decides which.
Before we can legally sell a wireless device in the US it has to pass an FCC emissions test. We have the quote and we are ready to book it. We held off booking while the accuracy question was open, because if that had forced a hardware change we would have paid for the whole test twice. That question is now answered in software, which is exactly why we waited.
One thing left before we book: confirming the calibration survives final assembly, when the optics get glued in place. We are running that this week. Assuming it holds, the test gets booked and the build starts, and I will tell you the day it is on the calendar.
Where we can ship
The United States at launch.
Every country has its own approval process for anything wireless. They are separate tests, run by separate labs, each with its own fee, and passing one does not count for the next. So a small company shipping its first fifty units picks the market it can actually certify, does that properly, and adds the next one when there is revenue to pay for it. That is the whole reason, and it is mostly a budget one.
Canada is the one I get asked about most, and I think we will have it at launch. I am not going to tell you that as a certainty, because part of the Canadian approval depends on an answer we are still waiting on. If it comes back the way we expect, Canada is there on day one. If it does not, it becomes a separate test with its own bill and it waits until we can fund it. As soon as I know, you will.
The UK and Europe are further out again. The rules there are a genuinely different project rather than one more test, and I would rather do it properly later than badly now.
If you are outside the US, stay on this list anyway. Expanding is a question of when we can afford the paperwork, not whether we want your business.
Thank you
Genuinely. The notes and comments over the last few weeks have been the best part of this. Several of the things above exist because somebody replied to one of these emails or left a comment, the GSPro work most obviously of all.
So keep them coming. Tell me what you want it to do, what would annoy you, what you would use it for that I have not thought of. Nothing would make me happier than spending next month adding and sharpening features instead of arguing with firmware, and the ideas are the part I cannot do on my own.