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They retail for $99/pair and come with mounting brackets for drop bars. The Wireless Blips are not rechargeable and need to be recycled with other electronics when they stop working. SRAM estimates their battery life at up to two years, with more frequent riders likely getting a little over a year out of them.
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I'm unfamiliar with these things, but that sounds crazy to me. Imagine you go on a trip and they just die. Are you supposed to just carry spares with you at all times? Maybe that's why they originally weren't supposed to be used standalone?
A bike that can't shift is no fun to ride. What if you have a race coming up? You've used them for 6 months. Can you monitor the state of the battery in a reliable manner? Imagine the thing dies on you on your A race day. One year of prep down the drain because SRAM engineers are donkeys.
That's also de facto a subscription, btw...