strava free vs paid feature set changes...

[smontanaro]

I've only ever been a free user, and leaderboard? I'd be so far down the list they'd have to mount an expedition to find me. Still, I do find it useful to compare my own performance over time. It's not terribly useful on segments I've only ridden a few times, but on routine routes, I see some segments I've ridden dozens of times. That's enough to make comparison and cancel out to some degree the effect of head and tail winds. It sounds like that's going away if I don't pony up the bucks?

[Keith A]

Originally Posted by Tony T

So,..... how does all of this affect the Strava Paceline Forum Club?

Not sure. I haven't taken the time to figure out what is moving to the paid subscription.

[p nut]

I wouldn’t think it would affect any of the clubs. Only changes are to individual user interface. From what I understand.

[Keith A]

Here are the details of what is going away...

New subscription features that were previously free
• Overall segment leaderboards (Top 10 view is still free)
• Comparing, filtering and analyzing segment efforts
• Route planning on strava.com, with a huge redesign launching soon!
• Matched Runs: Analyze performance on identical runs over time
• Training Log on Android and strava.com
• Monthly activity trends and comparisons

I must admit that I like checking out the segment leaderboards, so this might push me over to the paid subscription.

[redir]

Originally Posted by oldguy00

If all you care about is having your workouts uploaded to strava, then you are probably still fine with their free service.
I rarely bother to look at strava segments. Neither do my friends. Its more just a social platform for us to see what workout everyone did that day.

All I do is upload the ride maybe with some photo's and comments, make comments on friends rides and also like to look at the map, elevation, and max speed, distance and so on. I never got an email about this but is all that stuff still free then?

[tctyres]

For running, I find the matched runs feature useful. I do use the service, and I have not paid. I don't mind paying when the time comes.

Originally Posted by Toddykins

[snip]...I have yet to come across a more powerful single tool than Strava's heat maps for identifying good riding. This works pretty much everywhere the world over at this point (just don't go stealing my KOM in Bhutan, ok?).

If you have a suggestion as to what would work better, I am all ears.

This is true. Every time I want to ride in a new place, I just cross reference that map and I've got the guts of routes that I can construct.

There are probably things that would work better, but they might already be implicit in Strava. In major metropolitan areas, streets with bike lanes and sharrows come up automatically as hot. There would probably be a way to integrate speed from cars on Google Maps to Strava that would make safer bike routes, but I'm not aware of anyone who is doing that.

[benb]

I've been on Strava for 8 years now I think, and I paid for a good portion of that time. But I haven't paid for it in about a year and a half now, I decided they weren't offering a good value proposition for what it costs.

I'm also a software engineer and have been through this startup dance myself quite a few times.

Honestly I think they've screwed up too much for me to give them money and I don't feel any need to support them out of charity.

Giving away everything and not working hard on the pay tier and then realizing you're not making money after many years and then trying to lock things down to convert people doesn't work.

Strava has done very very little to their software in the last 5 years. My guess is they actually tried to bring in money to try and sell Peloton bikes, Zwift, TrainerRoad, etc.. and get a referral bonus from the those companies, etc.. because most of their new software development seems to have been integration work with those platforms.

I hate seeing Zwift/TrainerRoad/Peloton in my feed, it doesn't make me want to pay.

Now the other thing is this isn't even the first time they started taking features out of the free tier, but if they start removing social features from the app they are going to tank themselves fast and bring on the end. Social websites only work when they have a critical mass of users that keep the success of the service feeding upon itself. If you start removing the social features from the users who are free they will go away. As they go away the social scene starts to fail and more of the paid users will convert to free & then quit.

I'd love to know how Strava is run. Are they a team in the US? Is it a business team and they outsourced their software dev overseas? Their software has stagnated incredibly the last 5 years. Maybe they have a ton of technical debt. Technical Debt is a term for what happens to software when you rush & ignore quality. You build up a debt that eventually makes everything take longer and longer and everything becomes more and more difficult, and it can easily sink a company. Maybe they laid off a lot of engineers years ago. None of it makes any sense. I get the impression Training Peaks or some of the other sites are much smaller companies than Strava and yet they tend to have a pretty steady drumbeat of software updates and new features.

If you ever go on their support forum you can see how many people have been upset. There are all kinds of bugs in Strava that have been reported hundreds or thousands of times for years and Strava has not been able to fix them.

No new features for years and years and bugs not getting fixed and then removing features is not a recipe for converting users to paid service, regardless of the domain. It has nothing to do with cycling.

[jpritchet74]

Originally Posted by morrisericd

Cycling Tips had a nice writeup about it today. I will continue to support Strava and others who's content / work I use for free and enjoy.

https://cyclingtips.com/2020/05/why-...ings-you-love/

This is it for me. I enjoy following my friend's rides on Strava and also finding new routes. Absolutely worth supporting the company at $60 a year.

[Wayne77]

Count me in as someone who has been paying the monthly fee for years who still feels he’s getting good value and plans to keep paying. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve used a service, something has changed with the pay structure, people get mad, and the thought isn’t “you guys are all wrong”, the thought is “geez I must be missing something here because there’s a lot of smart people talking about why the move sucks.”

So I guess this is another case where not knowing why I should be really angry is actually working to my benefit :-).

I bet the owners probably look back and agree not all the moves were the best, but hindsight is 20/20, and I don’t blame them for trying to figure out a way to be profitable...I know not everyone feel like they get more value than what they feel is worth $0, but for me personally I really like things like the heat maps, historical training data, live segments, etc. 8 bucks a months seems pretty reasonable. I hope this works out for them.

[benb]

I think the key element with whether or not you think Strava is providing a good value is probably whether you have compared and contrasted vs other services and whether or not you value training data/help or social features more.

Strava has had close to 10 years, where is coaching integration?

Why are the training features almost exactly the same as 2013?

Why have they never figured out a way to respond to reports of dangerous/illegal segments?

Why no progress on filtering out motorcycle/car KOMs?

Etc, etc..

I have been comparing and contrasting with Training Peaks personally.. I was on Strava first, I got on Training Peaks to work with a coach later.

Training Peaks you get notices of upgrades just like most paid software packages even though it's a website. The upgrades happen regularly and they message like a professional software application. There have been many many updates in Training Peaks since I started paying, there have been very few bugs, and the bugs get fixed.

They basically sell the whole thing like a professional product that justifies its cost, not like a social app/website that comes with the expectation it's going to be free.

To be honest I am not sure why Strava has not just monetized with ads. It makes way more sense for the way they started. They could put ads in the feeds, they could have famous segments sponsored by advertisers, whatever. I think they would get more traction with that, because social media users are completely used to be bombarded with ads. And the Zwift/Peloton/TrainerRoad/whatever stuff in the feed already feels like ads.

The other thing that makes way more sense IMO for monetization would be to monetize the apps. Website = Free, App = Paid. If you want to upload your rides from your iPhone or Android through their app, you pay for that since they can't really put ads in there. They would still need to figure out how to get something from users who upload via Garmin/Wahoo/whatever, but those users would probably be required to view their rides/data through the website where the ads would be.

[b33]

They are a VC backed company. That money comes due and when it does it has interest. I'm sure STRAVA is there.

I pay but I am finding less and less desirable about the platform and I was one of the first 100 athletes on it and have made segments in LA and NYC that are used by tens of the thousands.

The mere fact that segments don't separate individual rides from group rides is just pathetic. I'm in an urban area and the segments are a hot mess.

[benb]

Originally Posted by b33

They are a VC backed company. That money comes due and when it does it has interest. I'm sure STRAVA is there.

I pay but I am finding less and less desirable about the platform and I was one of the first 100 athletes on it and have made segments in LA and NYC that are used by tens of the thousands.

The mere fact that segments don't separate individual rides from group rides is just pathetic. I'm in an urban area and the segments are a hot mess.

Yes for sure... 10 years is a long time, and the VCs & investors probably decided it was time for an exit years ago.

The other thing with paid services is I don't necessarily expect them to sell my data to others and/or use my data as part of the value proposition to others.

If all of us users didn't let Strava share our segment times with everyone else than Strava's value to the paid users drops.

Whereas when I use Training Peaks my data is my data. AFAICT they are not mixing my data with anyone else's and they're not monetizing the aggregate data from all the users to create a different revenue stream. (Strava apparently licenses the heat maps to cities for planning, etc...)

Any time you're a social platform you need to keep the costs low because your users are part of the product.

Facebook users are the product, not the customer.

Strava is kind of a mix:

- Free users are part of the product
- Paid users are both product & customer
- 3rd party data customers are a factor as well

[unterhausen]

is there a localized version of the heat map or do you still have to go to the global heat map and zoom in for a while before you get to the area you are interested in?

I thought about going with the part of strava I use when it only cost $30, but $60 is above my level for doing something on a whim. Right now anyway.

[Wayne77]

benb, thanks for the additional points - make a ton of sense. I’m sure part of this is just that...I’m not informed enough to know all the alternatives out there. That said, product mix / feature set is such an organic thing. One persons ideal feature set may be another’s bloated overkill I suppose.

Sometimes when I do have the energy to do really thorough comparison shopping it turns into a laborious pros and cons exercise leaving me feeling like there are no good options out there, wishing I could cherry pick all the good from each alternative to combine into one ultimate ideal and being bummed that I don’t have the capital to do it myself...and eventually settling for something with some dampened enthusiasm and a little voice telling me that if I had not taken the hours to research and read reviews to figure out why I shouldn’t be satisfied with a product I’d be happier with whatever I settled on and kinda stoked that such a cool product exists. Sometimes I don’t know something is lacking with all this cool tech until someone tells me it is :-)

The other thought that occurs to me is that there’s probably a really interesting psychology study here...economics of choice, and that sort of thing. I think someone did a TED talk on this years ago. I used to be a really big audiophile. I’d listen to a reference recording on a new set of high end speakers and could pick out every little nuance that wasn’t just quite right. That was years ago. Now I just have some Jaybird Bluetooth earbuds and my ears are used to the way things sound and so I think they sound pretty swell and really enjoy my music every bit as much if not more so than I did then.

So now I’ve gone WAAAY off topic...apologies to the OP.. It’s a good discussion and appreciate all the perspectives.

[benb]

This actually made me decide to delete my account completely.

Strava has always had this social media anxiety thing for me too. There's a good part of that and a bad part of that, it can be motivating to see your friend's rides. And then there has been the annoyance of all the non-ride posts/updates.

But it can also be demotivating when you're not your fittest. And Segments have been demotivating for a long time for me cause it's always questionable whether there's cheating or inaccurate data going on. (The data accuracy on MTB is way worse IME) Same thing with group rides vs solo rides.

The Social part is Strava's strength, that's where you have to decide if the value is there. For me if I'm not willing to pay for the social part I'm not willing to pay for the other parts where they have long been not very competitive, and the social has gone downhill since the feed became clogged with stuff that isn't actual rides.

To delete you go to the Profile menu -> Settings -> My Account and then scroll down to the bottom.

They have a pretty good "Download all my Data" process similar to deleting facebook. Strava's appears to be better because they don't wreck your data the way FB does when they hyper-compress your photos & videos.

The other thing with all these freemium web products is they appear cheap but how many are you signed up for? $60/yr for Strava is not much, but if you're 10 different things does spending $600 on a bunch of websites start to sound expensive? I tend to look at each one with that overall picture. I get way less value out of Strava than paying for streaming music or video for example.