Mellow App 4+

The Mellow sous -vide is size limited and takes up space when not in use. It requires an app to set the temp. The key thing it had was you touched a button and it cooled then later heated to be done at a specific time by selecting from a limited number of recipes. Sorry that a server farm to provide this costs money, but that can’t be $50/year, or $14 for a month! Maybe $5 a year could be understood, but as it stands, no one would pay the $400 I paid, then another $50 every year for an appliance, albeit formerly great, that gets used maybe 15 times a year! Reduce the usurious subscription!
The company continues to misrepresent via the cooling “feature.” Whereas before, it automatically cooled until time to heat - i.e set up in AM and leave to co e home to dinner ready, now it only cools until you are around to set a manual program. They could at least allow a sequence in the advanced menu to let you cool until a specific time, then heat, but they limit the lowest programmable temperature to 86 F to effectively disable the cooling that you overpaid for when you bought it.

When we originally purchased the sous vide it worked great. A little goofy to have to use the app but it worked. Then we started having to be paying a membership fee to use the app completely. We decided to pay the membership fee and continue using the app as we had found a lot of use for the mellow. Not too long after we ran into significant issues with connectivity to the sous vide. We had to uninstall and reinstall the app Almost every time we want to use the sous vide. Now the app won’t even open, we followed conventional troubleshooting uninstalling and reinstalling, clearing app cache memory, and trying different devices. Without the app the sous vide is worthless, we can’t use it. Well customer support has been helpful in the past, and eventually the previous issues have work themselves out. The continued issues with this app especially in the face of how much money we’ve shelled out for the membership and for the device are just not worth it.

If you don’t have one yet and are considering this device, RUN. This company charged us all a hefty premium for a smart device then waited a few years and pulled the rug out from under its customers, requiring a monthly fee to use the critical features. Even if you’re okay with the fee, it’s obvious this organization is willing to put the screws to you down the road if it wants a little more profit. It might me $6/month today, why not $10/month next year or $20?! They are obviously willing to do so with impunity.

Plus the usable size is tiny. If you need to have a dumb machine (like the Mellow if you don’t want to pay a monthly fee), you’d better off getting something bigger that you can put larger cuts into.

We are going to give ours away to our older non tech savvy family, slam this company on all mediums, and purchase and support a competitor. You should too.