Most of us will end up paying since we are captive users. The problem I see is that newcomers won't see the appeal of their services and therefore fewer and fewer will use strava. As soon as the leaderboards don't really show your overall performance among people going through that segment (as it has been up to now), they become obsolete.

Strava is doing what Whatsapp tried to do... with Whatsapp backing off. Strava is charging for what's been free till now. And their problem is that for the last few years they have neglected the core of the network: leaderboards and rankings. Why would someone pay to see a leaderboard topped by guys riding in a professional race, or disregarding wind effect (as Garmin Connect does) or comparing team time trials to solo efforts? I live in an area visited every year by La Vuelta... and I have lost some modest uphill KOMs at 22-26 mph to professional guys riding behind a car at 38 mph (seen with my own eyes).

I had been a paying member but quit paying last year because I am so annoyed at their training log features ignoring all workouts except SBR, which left me without XC Skiing, strength, etc. I think its been known that they are losing money but I am still taken aback on the lack of development of their platform over the past 5 years.

What really bums me out is that my 18 and 21 YO daughters are going to have to pay now too. My 21 year old is leaderboard and QOM on a lot of MTB climbs and my 18 YO daughter is QOM on the downhill MTB segments. They are really getting into it with their peer group due to segments and its going to take some wind from their sails. I guess I need to be a nice Dad and pay $180 for family memberships, which sucks. They should give junior riders and college kids a break by age.

I'm not so sure. Apple, Garmin and even Training Peaks could move into the market pretty quickly. I suspect the reason they haven't done it is because it would have been a bad business move. Strava has been burning through cash at an unsustainable rate and it would have been stupid to get money wasting race with them. Economically you can't win against a company who is willing to operate in an unprofitable manner year after year after year.

It looks like the reality has finally started to hit home with Strava. Assuming Strava starts having to play by basic market rules it becomes viable to compete with them. In effect they have lost their ability to just outspend everyone else and that opens the door to true innovation and competition. I struggle to believe the core of what Strava does is inherently unprofitable without directly charging the end user. Part of the problem seems to be Strava has way to many employees for what they actually do and that makes profitability a massive challenge.

Free customers are fantastic resources though. They can supply a crap tonne of data which can be monetized downstream. For far more than piddly little subscription fees may bring in. Just ask Google, Facebook, Instagram etc....

I've always thought RideWithGPS was underrated.

Yeah, I don't think they took anything away from me as a free customer that I actually use. If they took away leader boards completely then I'd have a problem, but being able to see top 10 is kinda all I need (for what I'm interested in segments anyways). I guess if I went and climbed Mt Lemmon or something I'd like to see where I stacked up against my friends, but that's an odd circumstance, for me anyways.

Alright, ignoring any stuff about ad revenue issues, too much staff, or talk of us being freeloaders wanting something free that cost us a coffee.................................how about the fact some of the stuff they want us to pay for now still DOESN'T WORK RIGHT.

-Route builder still is kind of buggy. It wants to randomly select sidewalks and random other map features. It is a clusterfuck of segments that never show up depending on how you're zoomed in or out. It cannot let you edit a route that you create from an activity, very well at least.

-The leaderboards system needs a total revamp. It needs "group" sections and individual. Predictions would be nice. Create a concept of a "your kingdom" concept showing a map of your results. I'd pay for that. Way it is now with self policing and some of the issues with it.......nah. I'll go to keeping track of it myself.

-The training stuff is a total afterthought versus like TP or Trainerroad et al. It should be a la carte to add this and drive the price down for the other stuff.

It's a great place, but they have to really polish it up for what it is.

Wait, how many people use Strava as compared to, say, Facebook?

I *highly* recommend anyone proposing all these half-baked business model alternatives listen to the From The Top podcast with the Strava founders.
https://cyclingtips.com/...-podcast-transcript/
To say they misunderstand their own product's core features is woefully inaccurate.

And for the complainers, if you don't like the changes, you should just ask for your money back.

Me too. When I first started, and didn't have a cycling computer, I found their app much better than Strava's. Route Planning is better, too. It just never quite gained the critical mass of participants that Strava did.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

You're right, that was poorly worded on my part, and it wasn't fair of me to describe it that way. They have been making significant progress recently in other areas, which is very welcomed in comparison to the past stagnant period under prior leadership. I understand everything can't just be free forever, but while this might be the best and most logical solution for their current position, it really feels like better planning up to this point could have made this more avoidable.

I don't have much insight into the company's internals, but if my own experience in technology is at all relevant, you can have all the right people and be making great short term decisions--that's not too hard-- but successfully planning and executing the longer-term big-picture stuff is where it really gets tricky, and if things don't pan out for whatever reason, you get less-than-ideal situations like this.

I'm happy someone is making these big decisions though (in addition to spurring on all the recent development addressing longstanding feature requests). I'd certainly rather pay for this than not have the platform at all.

THIS. My local segments are full of car rides and bikes on run segments. The Singapore Marina segment situation is basically useless; probably half of the KOMs are not legitimate. I'm not a software engineer, but it seems like it shouldn't be too hard to put a hard stop on any segment efforts that are faster than world record pace.

I'd probably pay $60/yr for segments if it seemed like they spent any effort at all on them. And segments is all I'd be paying for that I don't get from TrainingPeaks.

 
i wonder if they anticipate e-bikes diminishing the informational value of leaderboards?

maybe they'll bring back the annual koms and have more yearly segmentation?

or maybe there's some signatures in the gps tracks from an ebike that could be detected with enough data?

Which is why I recommend that podcast. By coincidence I just listened to it last week and it changed my view of the company, the way it's done things in the past, and how it's recognized past mis-steps and is moving towards a well thought out product.

For only $5 a month this is a pretty nice app to have. Sure Strava might lose come users but I'm not exactly the type to complain about losing something I was getting for free...

$4000+ bike, $200 + wetsuit, Race wheels, GPS watch, Race fees but complain about $5 a month plus the segment leader boards are about as accurate as Zwift race results.

That's how I got into Strava, wasn't a big fan of it a few years ago as I was worried about it being a bad influence to easy sessions (i.e. chasing segments, KOMSs, etc.) I finally gave in to temptation climbing a volcano in Central America, as the guide (local trail runner) encouraged me to try a climbing segment for the final steep section at over 3500 m above sea level, I painfully missed the KOM by like 5 seconds over 17 minutes, and have been letting it ruin some of my training sessions every since.

I don't see much value to being a paid subscriber and the strong-arm strategy to give us access again to this feature, is a bit annoying, so I might just cancel my account.

They do sell big swaths of data to government agencies though, so I don't think the subscription services are necessarily what really fuels them. People give them tons of data and they turn around and sell it. I obviously don't know their financial infrastructure, but I think the data side makes them a fair amount of money.

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Team Zoot 2023

It's not a justification, but an explanation of the phenomenon............people are used to getting some super slick apps for free with just ads.

Pandora? Freaking free after listening to a couple ads per hour just like the radio? Yeah. Why do we think this mentality exists? It's easy to understand the why.

Also, not all Strava users are on $5000 bikes. Plenty of folks out there on 10 year old stuff at low cost. $5/mo isn't that much at all, but you better cross your "t" and dot your "i" once you start demanding all users use anything useful pay a monthly fee. I would say they still aren't at that level despite years and years now of existing.

So, to me, Strava isn't good at convincing customers to pay up. In this case, pulling off the bandaid probably wasn't the best move. I'd say they should have cleaned it all up and added some features first.

I agree about the 'reasonable opportunity' request, but that is not the way Strava has behaved. If reports are to be believed (I'm not a developer / interact with Strava other than a user), Strava made these changes and announced that they were done without any advance warning to most developers/3rd party users of the API. You might recall that that is exactly what Strava did some time ago with Relive - just broke the portion of the API they use during breakfast one morning. Surprise! And that's my real issue with Strava - they don't seem to play fair. Why does this matter? If they are willing to break with partners without advance warning, they are likely willing to break with YOU without advance warning. Are you waiting for the morning you wake up and Strava says - all you freeloading free users can no longer access your data as of this moment. Bye. So much for the hope of 'reasonable opportunity'.

Strava would have failed to exist during their first year without the data uploaded by free users. In fact, their entire original business plan *required* free users, because starting off with paying users would have resulted in so few users that the entire operation would fail to be compelling. Now, should Strava have a money-making strategy? Of course. But what is wrong with...we're making changes to ensure that we can continue to bring our community social and data services...and in 30 days, here's what will happen... Even if this info was just sent to developers/3rd party API users, my opinion on the 'evilness' of Strava would be very different. Long story short? They have demonstrated a willingness to screw the folks who help make them popular with little to no warning - I am confident that they are willing to do the same to you.

EDIT to fix spellcheck typo

Well, apparently the update hasn't rolled over to the desktop browser app, yet. I was able to download my history today without issue. Not sure what the process will be like tomorrow our Thursday when the roll out is complete.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

Moto drafting violates Strava policy. You can flag that.

quite right..

except a quibble, very little of the data is valuable..

Amazon didn't make a profit for most of its life, and has only recently pulled into the black, due mostly to its software business AWS which underpins everything else on the internet - Strava, Netflix, etc etc etc. On the internet you can live without Amazon but not without AWS..
https://gizmodo.com/...mpossible-1830565336

FB makes money from advertising, not from selling data. It does use your data to target ads at you, but that's not quite the same.
https://www.thestreet.com/...-make-money-14754098

So no surprise Strava can't make money selling data..
As you say I would not expect any free replacement to start up, as the supply of greater fools dwindles..

agreed 100%. the segment search is hilariously bad.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Er, that's a bit of an overstatement. They're dominant at near 50% of "cloud" market share. But that sure isn't "everything else."