A new company at Eurobike, S Rower, is aiming to turn your existing smart trainer into a smart rower, with its bolt-on attachment that works with pretty much any direct drive smart trainer. The company unveiled itself (and its product) here at Eurobike 2025, with a hardware accessory that takes advantage of the relatively universal standards of smart trainers, including both hardware attachment points as well as software control.
I had a chance to briefly look at the two pre-production units they had brought to Eurobike, which were mounted to both an Elite Suito smart trainer, as well as a Tacx NEO 2 smart trainer. What’s notable is that neither of those smart trainers are new or high-end by today’s standards, with the Suito being 7-8 years old, and the Tacx NEO 2 being about the same.
Ok, so starting off with the hardware first. The unit is an aluminum beam, currently as one giant piece. It sounds like for production they’ll likely aim to break it apart into two pieces with some sort of attachment coupling mechanism in the middle, mainly to simplify shipping, but storage as well. In any event, today you’ve got the main beam, and then it attaches to the head-unit component at the top.
Of course you’ve got your seat that rolls along the beam, along with a spot for pedals to be installed.
So, moving upwards towards the smart trainer, we’ve got the S Rower ‘head unit’, or main module. This attaches to your smart trainer via its cassette. It uses a standard bicycle thru-axle to attach to the trainer just like your bike would, except that instead of a chain, it locks onto the cassette’s outer most gear:
Then, inside the S Rower module (the case looking part), there’s a belt drive that connects to a wheel, which in turn connects to the rower handle. Note that it is indeed a belt drive, not a chain drive. Thus, it’s totally silent.
Atop that you see a small display, that’s just a simple tablet placed up there in a groove. You can attach any tablet you want, though I suspect the exact specifics of that little grove will change slightly by the time it ships.
Meanwhile, the tablet is running whatever smart trainer software you want. That’s because the S Rower doesn’t actually care what software you have, since that’s between your app and the smart trainer. Sure, they have a demo application here, in which case it’s using Bluetooth FTMS to control the trainer’s resistance level, but it could be any application.
For example, in chatting with the icTrainer app folks shortly after this, a few booths over, they already support structured workouts for rowing, and they already support every smart trainer on the market (and it costs a mere $29/year). Seems like a pretty obvious future pairing.
But again, that’s the cool part of standards – it doesn’t matter. The S Rower is leveraging cycling axle & cassette standards that work on every direct drive smart trainer ever made. And in turn, whatever app the user ultimately uses for the rowing portion is also leveraging with ANT+ FE-C or Bluetooth FTMS standards that have also been on every smart trainer made in the last 12-15 years. Again, standards are fun.
In any case, on to the most important: pricing and availability. Right now the company is aiming to start delivering products in Q2 2026 (so next spring), and the units will be produced in Italy. The units will be priced at $695USD, though you can pre-order today and there’s a discount down to $520USD.
To me, that seems ($520) incredibly reasonable compared to full blown rowers (normally $1,000 for non-smart integrated ones, such as the Concept 2). If you added the cost of a budget smart trainer ($400), or a secondhand one ($200-$300), you’re still talking substantially less than most smart rower setups (many of which don’t fold away very easily). Assuming the company can manage to deliver on the availability, and most critically, what rowers think of the rowing feel/inertia, I suspect they could be a runaway success.
But as always, time will tell. I suppose we’ll have to see next Eurobike, in late June 2026, whether or not they’ve hit their goals.
With that – thanks for reading!
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