Thursday, April 11, 2013

My negative GymPact experience - Stay Away

If you know me then you know I am a sucker for making a little beer money on the side.  So when I learned about GymPact I figured I had nothing to loose and everything to gain by signing up.  The idea behind GymPact is you essentially make a bet that you are going to workout X number of days of the week and each day you don't make it, you loose out on $5 or more and each day you make it, you gain from all the others that don't make it out there (their website says typically $0.30/workout).  Sure that's nothing but I figured it would add up and plus I don't have to do anything extra since I already work out.  Plus they emphasized on their website that they had runkeeper integration so I figured sweet since I walk so much now that we don't have a car there's no way I am going to miss my weekly pact. I typically walk an hour almost daily!

Well it's all great in theory but here is my experience with GymPact.  First week is apparently a try out week where you figure out the kinks of gympact and give 'er a try.  This would be great if I had known it was a try out week.  No where did it indicate this on the website.  I had to google and that's what the interwebs told me.  So can you imagine here I am doing my workouts for the week and nothing is really changing in my profile.  So anyways now it's on to week 2 and I am still doing my work outs regularly except for whatever reason my runkeeper isn't syncing with GymPact properly.  I send them an email to try and find out what's going on and nada.  I send a follow up email and still nada.  I eventually was able to get it to sync on the 3rd device I tried.  But get this, I get a notification saying my runkeeper workout didn't count with no explanation why even though it met all the criteria on the website.  And the worst part was I couldn't log another workout for the day to compensate.  Thankfully I set my pact to working out 6 days a week so my 1 day buffer was taken.  I sent an email to GymPact asking them why my runkeeper workout didn't count and are you surprised that there wasn't a response?  Well week 2 is over and now we're onto week 3!  Except no indication of any money being earned.  Another email off to GymPact saying if I don't hear from them soon I would cancel my account.  My email it seems fell on deaf ears.  And well I did what I said I would do which was try to cancel my account.  Their website doesn't let you cancel your account but it does let you take a break from your pact so that's what I did.

So if you're thinking of joining GymPact, NAY I say.  If you google, you'll find plenty of others complain about their lack of customer service.  However when you miss a workout, they are quick to debit that $5 from your credit card right away.  No thank you.