Honda Drivers Now Have to Pay a Subscription to Open Their Garage Door

Seriously?

From convenient to annoying, monthly subscription services have risen beyond their convenience and straight into annoyance. What started as paywalls to unlock features already available on owned vehicles – as was the case with BMW and its pay-to-heat-the-seat debacle – and also more advanced paywalls, like Tesla’s full self-driving function.

While the latter makes sense because it costs money to run data centers, hire people to run them, and pay developers to improve the system, among many other things, hiding basic functions and features behind paywalls is generally questioned in the industry.

Now, we have yet another pay-to-do-something story, and this time, Honda has come under fire thanks to a customer and his new Honda Passport.

A Passport to Your Garage

The story came from a Reddituser who complained online. Prior to this, his Honda had a small button on the mirror to open his garage door. With the old system, all you had to do was push a button, and you’re good to go home. After getting into an accident and getting a new car out of the deal, this Reddit user found himself in a new 2026 Honda Passport.

“They moved the garage door opener from a button on the mirror to a paywall subscription service,” he wrote. What was once a simple button is now a whole app ecosystem. Thanks to Hondalink and MyQ, that feature is now a subscription-based system that’s locked behind your phone and a paywall.

But You Get More Features

Hondalink is a suite of connectivity features that allows your phone to track, monitor, and interact with your vehicle through your smartphone. The deeper you go in this subscription rabbit hole, the more features you get to unlock. The complimentary features will allow you to receive notifications about your vehicle’s status, while more advanced subscription tiers will let you access “Remote” features that track your car’s location, among many other things. On top of those features, Honda also offers a “Security” subscription package and a “Concierge” package.

The good news is that you might not have to subscribe to Hondalink’s more advanced tiers. The integration in question is MyQ, a garage door opener app that runs on a subscription.

Now, the bad news is that the app requires you to install a MyQ receiver in your garage door and connect that to your home router to get started. After that, you need to make sure that your infotainment is connected to your phone via Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. From there, it’s $129 for a three-year subscription plan, or $179 for a five-year subscription plan with MyQ, which is $3.58 per month for the three-year plan or $2.98 per month for the five-year plan.

So what do you get out of your about-three-dollars-a-month payment? Well, you can open and close your garage door from anywhere as long as you are connected. You may also schedule when your garage door will open or close, and set it to open for any guests or visitors you may have if you’re not home. Oh, but if you subscribe now, you get a complimentary 30-day trial. Nice.

A Complex Solution For a Simple Task

Homelink was the go-to standard for many Honda owners when it came to opening their garage doors. It seems that Honda is getting cozy with MyQ instead of installing that Homelink-capable mirror in their vehicle cabins. Once upon a time, Homelink-capable mirrors came standard on many trim levels of previous-generation Honda vehicles; now it’s a solution that you have to buy separately.

Customers who want to retrofit the Homelink mirror will also have to pay up, since Honda charges about $170 for the part. Furthermore, if you want to migrate from Homelink to MyQ, and your garage door opener is incompatible with MyQ, you’ll have to buy a new receiver and subscribe to the app.

My solution here is to just ditch all these subscriptions entirely. Personally, our family’s garage door isn’t connected via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or anything. The only “subscription” that we have – if you can even call it that – is some batteries. Traditional remotes won’t be as clean or as flashy as the in-car buttons and remotes, but they get the job done, and that’s good enough.

Do we really want a future where everything, including your kitchen sink, is locked behind a paywall? Back then it was heated seats, now it’s a garage door, what’s next? Reduced horsepower and performance if you’re not subscribed? The inability to drive your car unless you’re paying ten bucks a month after you’ve fully paid off the vehicle?

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