They’re removing that!
No more Summit or Packs, just one subscription fee.
The UK annual price is £48. I would guess that is where he got the £4 per month thing.
60 day free trial is available. I may sign up for that and give it a chance. I stopped using it for 6 months, then started again during lockdown to check local segments for my dawn raids. I have myself set to private, stand don’t follow anyone, but I do like to check my own leaderboard on local climbs. Not sure that alone is worth £4 per month to me, but perhaps with the addition of live segments on my Garmin … maybe.
Worth trying out to see I guess.
Ah! I didn’t realise they’d reduced the “full” membership cost - it used to be £4 per month for one pack.
It was less than £2/month for one pack when I joined, which seemed like a trivial amount of money for something I use quite a lot. Just checked and it’s still saying it’s going to auto-renew for £18.99 a year in August. Hope it stays at that price!
Ah sorry I hadn’t realised they had adjusted the price!
I think I paid around 4 pounds and it’s now 6.99 a month.
Will be interesting to see how this pans out for them - when I look at the leaderboards I only look at the people I follow. Segments themselves aren’t the main draw for me though it is the more social aspect of it - which thinking about it I can get for free!
That’s not true. They sell all of our data to governments and other corporations continuously. They leverage the value of our data that they collect and have monetised it for a long period of time. They’ve obtained that position due to their scale, but they’re effectively doing exactly what facebook do with our collective workout dataset. It’s ultimately our data they are using to create revenue.
I’m with DCR and the others. When they first existed, there was a number of other options that did the same for free. Strava did it better, captured users with segments, and built the userbase as a result of that based on those free offerings. They should have made premium more compelling. DCR gave two or three key features that would probably make me sign up to premium straight away if you had that level of clubs integration. Instead, they tried to compete with Training Peaks and the like, and that never even remotely interested me.
I really like strava, and check it all the time. But my view is this will kill it. Too many people are not prepared to pay for anything, and if you diminish their experience (especially with paid-for other services like on veloviewer), they’re just going to lose them. You only need to read the DCR comments to see this is going to backfire. The feed is full of paying premium members saying they’re cancelling as it ruins the interaction they’ll have with non-premium friends who can no longer see segments, etc.
What I just don’t get is what all the people at strava actually do?? 180 of them according to their email. For the updates they have provided over the years, I cannot see any way that level of human capital is remotely required.
ETA - supporting my initial claims, data has been sold for over half a decade: Strava begins selling your data points, and no, you can't opt-out [Updated]
4 Likes
They are not selling ‘your’ data as in specific to you, targeted to generate ad revenue like Facebook does. They sell the IP they have from collective data, I don’t think it’s remotely the same thing.
I read the DCR article, for sure they have got this wrong and they could have done things better otherwise they wouldn’t be in this mess.
Strava is an awesome product, just by the number of subscribers tell you that but you need to generate revenue to pay for developers to to develop better features to make it even better.
As I said before, I value it so am prepared to pay for it, good things don’t come for free. I hope that that the dozens of angry internet worriers pales in to insignificance to the thousands of users that see the value.
Yes, it’s different. But you said “they get nothing for your use”. That was factually incorrect. As the article I have added above states, back when they first started monetising, each user was worth $0.80 to be included in the dataset you could buy.
That value proposition comes entirely from a high uptake of use. This will hit that, although as others have said, am I actively going to go and disconnect my automated sending of data to strava? Probably not, so they’ll get my data anyway even if I stop using.
I don’t disagree. At least based on what it was. Not what it now is.
That’s where I disagree. Reading those headcount numbers in their own email stunned me. That’s completely unnecessary. What on earth do they all do? Scaling their userbase should not require such a scaling of headcount. They’re a tech company leveraging AWS. It’s not like each new user requires individual staff support. According to publicly available information, zwift has c280 employees. At least they are coding a real world game, hosting live events, and even developing their own smart trainers and smart bikes.
What have strava “developed” in the past three or four years that has evolved their offering? I can’t think of anything, which is why I am still a free subscriber. Yet I pay for trainerroad, zwift, training peaks, best bike split, to name but a few. So I am the perfect example of someone who is prepared to pay for something I see value in when offered a carrot. And I also do not respond well to the stick.
Runalyze, which I have notified people of on here before, is great. And free, run by people in their spare time. It does more than Strava has ever done. It’s had weather since day 1. It’s been on each outdoor Garmin Connect activity forever. Strava have only just released that, and as a “premium only” feature. Are you kidding me.
1 Like
That reminds me. Has anyone got a good discount code for Training Peaks? I renew in 3 weeks, and got 40% off last year. I assume they’ll auto renew at full price?
Yes, they do.
Pretty sure it was posted on here somewhere…
I quite like the social encouragement via strava, but the only reason Im using it really is to have one sync point.
I think Id rather have it all in Apple Health and workouts into the TR calendar. Then just post to forums when I feel like it.
Does anyone know why they havent done swimming yet?
They started accepting swim.com input but only partial data.
I only have a strava account as my cycle mates are all on there and suggested (nagged) I join. It’s not the price itself that stops me, I don’t think I would get the value from it. I use a combination of training peaks and excel to monitor my training. My brother and SiL use it as their training store though so I can see them paying for it. My wife uses it as part of feeling connectd to her running club mates, especially now, but not sure if she will see the value in paying. She doesn’t really look at anything on there except segments but don’t know if that’s enough for her to pay?
It’s a complete ‘meh’ from me. I’m private now anyway.
Complete mismanagement, they’ve got 50 million customers and they can’t monetise it without removing core features and putting them behind a paywall. They needed to develop more features people are willing to pay for an add them to the subscription package.
Runalyze’s VO2max guesstimate, pacing recommendation and marathon readiness are perfect examples of really good features they could have built. Blog posts and changing the feed order are not.
4 Likes
OK, factually incorrect but I think you understand my sentiment and can see the difference.
Entirely for free with no adds as it stands? You have very high expectations.
I’ve got no idea as I’ve no expertise in such things, maybe Zwift is contracting out much of the grunt work it’s a younger company would make sense. Doubt they are playing connect 4 all day.
Never heard of Runalyze but I would guess if you scale it up to where Strava is you would need a similar infrastructure.
I pay for Strava but I don’t really use many of the features beyond the core ones and this is probably the problem, who is going to say yes it’s worth paying for Strava because it has some oxygen thing or it will tell you the weather (because we definitely need another weather app), segments IS the core feature and really the only feature beyond sharing the activity most people are interested in.
FWIW I think there is a different perspective between triathletes & cyclists. Triathlete possibly already uses TP and is much happier to do cycling by numbers, end goal is usually some race. Proportionately very few cyclist race, they just want to get out & explore the world, there is more value in seeing other peoples routes & activities & ‘racing’ segments.
I don’t think so when you look at the general backlash.
They are a freemium model. You have core free functionality, which as you say, was segments … it was the reason they won the original battle … and then you incentivise people to subscribe to your premium service by offering compelling additional features over and above the core things.
They’ve failed to do that. You can’t then just go, let’s take away the core thing, as if that had always been behind a paywall, strava wouldnt be what it is now.
As I’ve said, they monetise the data of their users. The business model should have been for that to cover the raw essentials of free users, and then premium to fund additional features.
You called the use of our data IP, which is arguable, as things like heatmap are not their data at all. It’s just their collection of our data that they’ve then sold. Garmin would have exactly the same type of data … not 100% like for like, as Garmin will have data from users who’ve never subscribed to strava, but strava will have data from Suunto users, etc, but they’ll broadly all show the same kind of thing. So it’s nothing novel or new at all. If everyone chose to deactivate their strava account tomorrow, and under GDPR type rules require the deletion of their personal data held by strava, strava would be left with nothing usable at all.
I’ve had free Strava Summit membership on and off for the last few years as part of a sponsorship through HotChillee, but I’m not sure there’s anything being taken away from free membership that I’ll particularly miss.
I like the “social media” element of seeing what my friends are doing and I usually check for any “achievements” that show up after a session just out of interest to see how my perception of a sesson matches reality of I’m doing one of my regular routes. Given the number of strava users on my regular routes, it’s very unusual for me to be challenging the top end of the leaderboard, so I’m only really competing against my self and not chasing KOMs.
Our running club has been using it a lot recently for virtual 5ks, similar for cycling club, whereby we have monthly segments to aim at. All of that will be a lot quieter under the new pay structure which is a shame.
TBH I use a lot of these features, stuff like comparing rides on TT courses to see where you lose/gain time, pacing strategies etc. so will stick with it, but agree with the sentiment here. They’ve spent a lot of time seemingly building stuff people don’t want!
I would say though it’s pretty impressive they are doing this with 180 people. Don’t forget all this has to work at scale, and across lots of platforms (web/andriod/iphone etc etc), it’s not trivial stuff they’re doing behind the scenes.
1 Like
I kind of agree. But also don’t. Nothing has changed in terms of core strava functionality for years. And that’s what they’ve taken away. It’s all surely leveraging the same back-end dataset, and if the operation of that hasnt fundamentally changed (which as I say, I’ve seen no evidence of), then it shouldnt require that many people to keep the iOS and android apps operational as those OS’s are updated, and for things to work on various browsers?
When you have single people building functionality like stravistix/elevate in their spare time, which far exceeds any kind of development work strava themselves have been able to achieve, I just don’t see what those people are doing