Certainly what you get with software that costs $5 a month for the product and $10 for the marketing like FF.
AFAIK they’re privately owned and there is no way you know those numbers.
It’s also not that uncommon in the software world to do that either, so really you base the purchase decision on the merits of the software, not what they pay for Marketing.
There’s competitors, but only one is truly close in feature set. Some are adequate on overall needed functionality.
Garmin spends inordinate amounts of money on marketing, too. Doesn’t mean they don’t lead the panel installed IFR GPS navigator market.
Garmin’s minor but significant ace in the hole is Concierge for those of us with Flightstream devices.
If times were tough (and owning an aircraft, there’s always bills WAY bigger than two chart software subscriptions per year, which are still three times cheaper than paper charts from Jepp were decades ago) I’d buy Garmin Pilot before ForeFlight now. Because I would never ever want to go back to pulling a SD card out to update the panel mount gear, ever again. Never.
Pilot downloads the crap the airplane needs whenever it’s opened and the files are available, and after a couple of update cycles I can now update the airplane in two minutes flat.
But I’m familiar and have a flow with ForeFlight so I keep it for now. Pilot is darn close in needed functionality though. On iPad of course. Garmin severely badly needs to fix the Android version to match feature and functionality sets between the two versions.
And I’m sure as hell not going back to buying $12 paper VFR charts, let alone whatever paper IFR charts cost these days.
We’re in our free year of Pilot that came with the GTN, but I won’t be dropping Pilot ever with Concierge in it. Way too simple and convenient to keep the aircraft updated and IFR legal. If that’s ALL I used it for, $8 per 28 day cycle is well worth not jacking with laptop, SD cards, and removing and screwing around with them ever again.
The other features of the Flightstream 510 are awesome, but Concierge is what will keep me renewing Pilot. I’d rather go gouge my eyeballs out than mess with SD card updates. That feature is truly revolutionary.