The neutral layer

On July 22, Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks. If you coach, you already know why that sentence lands heavy: for twenty years TrainingPeaks was the neutral ground. Your athlete on a Coros, your athlete on a Wahoo, your athlete on an Apple Watch — everyone synced into the same calendar, and the company that ran it didn't care what was on anyone's wrist.

Now it does.

Garmin says the platforms will keep operating independently, and maybe they will. But coaches have been through this before. Firstbeat was acquired and its licensing quietly dried up. Today's Plan was acquired and then shut down — with coaches' data going dark on a timeline they didn't choose. Nobody is saying that happens here. Everybody is thinking about it.

The question worth asking

Set the acquisition aside for a second, because the deeper problem predates it.

Ask what the coaching layer should owe you. Our answer: it should be a tool, not a tollbooth. It should not care what device your athletes wear. It should not bill you again every time your roster grows — the going rate elsewhere is a $55-a-month coach plan plus $9 per athlete plus $99 just to start, which lands a twenty-athlete roster around $220 a month. And it should never make you wonder whose side it's on, because the honest answer to "whose side" should be boring: yours.

That's the whole design brief for Paxe. One plan for everything an athlete trains — the run, the lift, the race — built by you, a human coach, on a calendar you shape. Your roster and their compliance at a glance. Fitness, fatigue, and form in plain words, so your athletes read a so-what instead of a score dump. Free, for every athlete you'll ever have.

Where we stand

We're small, we're invite-only, and we're early — we'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise. But small comes with something the giants can't offer right now: nobody owns us. No hardware to sell you. No per-athlete meter running. No acquisition synergies to find in your training data.

The coach is the intelligence here. We just build the instrument — and we plan on keeping the instrument neutral.

If you're a coach re-thinking where your practice lives, apply here. Bring your athletes; it costs what it will always cost them: nothing.