Been covered a couple of times already, but not sure if you read those posts. They have given / sold large amounts of data to quite a few cities. However, the $ they get for this is absolutely peanuts compared to what you may think they get for that data. Even if they did sell data to 500 cities a year for US10,000 a time that's 5 million [editted] revenue per year which doesn't cover the cost of selling that data - (think about it they need to have legal and financial arrangements specific to every country they do work in, and as these are public sector clients then there is minimal flexibility on behalf of the customers). And whilst some on here may consider that cycle data is an essential part of planning / running a city, 98% of ratepayers don't - they think cyclists should be funding infrastructure from bike permits/tax not car drivers.

It may be that the three stages of their business plan were 1) build users and VC like facebook 2) sell data / advertising (data wasn't really as valuable as they hoped, everyone spat the dummy at the way they added advertising or 'promoted content'), so now they are suggesting people that use their service pay for it.Having demonstrated that there was a percentage of people that have been paying for essentially negligible reason / benefit for the last 8 years, then faced with the option now to not use the main core feature of the service a proportion of people will now pay what is a relatively small cost, a larger proportion will just miss out on the feature and carry on auto-uploading, and a proportion will disconnect. But that still increases revenue. In some ways the cost they are charging is an awkward one. It's a charge which means that people are upset at something that was free no longer is. They would feel that way if the cost was $1, $5 or $50 a month, it's simply because it's a cost. However, the 5 means they need a lot of people to pay, you can't count on a small number of core users funding it for everyone. And the reality is that the 'principled objectors' are the most vocal. People that are "meh, I got 8 years free as an introductory offer, now it's the cost of a coffee a fortnight" are a lot less likely to post on social media than the "How dare they charge me for looking after my data for me" group.