Recently Strava raised its subscription fees in a rather odd and confusing way (see the forum thread at the end of this story for details).
Essentially, the increases were different in different countries and different depending on when your subscription started. And, somewhat bizarrely, the exact amount of the price hikes were not revealed. Until now.
We may never get the full story as to why they implemented things in this way (the relative strength of the UK pound may or may not be a factor) but there is finally a bit of clarity to some of it. Basically, they want people to be on the annual subscription rather than the monthly subscription.
People who subscribed before 23rd November 2022 will see the updated pricing (starting from 2n2 February 2023). Those who subscribed after 23rd November won’t experience a price hike at all.
For UK users, the new price will be £8.99 monthly (up from £6.99), or £54.99 annually (up from £47.99).
Strava Press Release:
Clarifying Subscription Pricing Confusion
We updated our subscription pricing. Our messaging was very confusing. So we’re providing more clarity.
In an effort to roll out pricing updates for our subscription, we made a mistake by not providing enough information directly to our community. We sincerely apologize for the confusion and concern this has caused many of our valued subscribers.
Our intention was not to hide these pricing changes, we just moved too fast. We also missed the opportunity to inform long-standing monthly subscribers that, by shifting from paying monthly to annual, they can avoid a significant price increase altogether.
Strava is fully committed to our community. This commitment means not allowing our subscribers to receive an automated email about changing subscription costs, or to read or hear about price change confusion elsewhere as that’s unacceptable. We hear and understand your frustration, and we aim here to make subscription rates clear to our community.
At Strava, we’re constantly working to innovate and improve the experience for all active people. Over the past 13 years we have added significant value to the Strava subscription, including features and experiences for route discovery and planning, tracking progress over time, improved privacy controls, more activity types and even prehab and mobility. We will remain committed to future investments to provide even more value to subscribers.
Since launching Strava in 2009, this is our first time increasing prices for all-access subscribers. As Strava has grown to include over 100 million people with over 8 billion uploads, the cost of supporting our active community at scale has also grown. In addition to continuously releasing and improving features our community relies on, going forward, we will periodically assess our prices. As a result, they could change in the future to better reflect the work it takes to build the best experience.
We sincerely hope that every member of our community can feel the value our team has added to Strava over the years to make your experience better. We are incredibly grateful for the support of our subscribers, and we thank you for being part of the Strava community.
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For some unknown reason, my subscription was billed in US$ so it varied slightly each month due to FX rate variations but I’d been paying $6USD since 2013.
I haven’t received an email from Strava about price increase but my account page was showing February renewal would be $11.99 USD per month,so doubling.
Obviously, I cancelled. Shame as I found the personal heatmap and leaderboards quite useful but I’m sure I’ll find a replacement for those features eventually…
You can now (finally!) select the default map in your profile – Profile/Settings/Default Maps/uncheck ‘use 3D map for trail sports’. (And yes it always took several attempts before – I ended up using both ActivityFix and Strautomate to beat it to submission).
I love you, thank you for sharing this, its bugged me every ride since it was launched!
My Strava Premium is free with my Gympass membership. Be interesting to see if it’s still included after the price hike (personally I wouldn’t pay for it, I’d just use Garmin Connect more)
Got fed up of not being able to use bluetooth power meter connected to my iPhone / Apple Watch and not using it enough. It’s such a small increase but was enough to make me analyse if I’m getting value out of it.
Sure I’m not the only one right now that is now looking through all auto renew subscriptions and culling those that are not providing real value. Very silly of them to time it for Feb. They would have likely got away with it in the summer.
Cancelled mine, just not enough I use to justify a £10pa increase. They will have to bring the price down or offer just the bits I use for a lower fee if they want to get me back.
I’ve been on 3.99 munflees since joining in 2015. It’ll now be 8.99 when it renews on Feb 15. So I think I’m out.
Premium features I used were the training log, fitness & freshness, and the route planner but here nothing I can’t do with Garmin Connect. I original paid as I felt 3.99 was a worthwhile amount for the whole thing, and as a software engineer, I believe software should be paid for. But I don’t get a tenner a month’s worth of use out of it now.
Cancelled mine – Garmin connect will just do fine and like many, cutting back.
I’d like to say I agree, but Garmin Connect is a steaming pile of poo so I may bend over (and apply the Singletrack Valentines bum butter) and keep Strava.
I emailed Strava about changing the currency and this is their useless reply (it’s not really encouraging me to renew):
Unfortunately we won’t be able to adjust your currency on our end. I would suggest canceling/downgrading your subscription to prevent it from automatically renewing:
If you subscribed through our Strava Website you can cancel/downgrade by going to:
Strava account
Cancel subscription
Complete subscription cancelation request
When your subscription expires, you should be able to resubscribe with the correct currency. If you’re not seeing the correct currency when you subscribe through our website, I would suggest trying to subscribe through Google Play or iTunes depending on your device.
Google Pay is still telling me that my annual sub will renew in May for £39.00 – which isn’t a number I’ve seen in any of the reports. Still, I expect when it actually happens it will be £54.99. then I’ll have to have a think about whether that’s a reasonable amount for a retired person to spend.
I’m billed in USD, I think because I joined when I was in Japan. $80 / yr seems a bit rich so I’ve cancelled until they can bill me in UKP. We’ll see if I miss premium features and bend over for the $80, as it seems that they struggle with switching pricing to your home country.
For those not wanting to go through the latest DC Rainmaker video, you can now see what your renewal costs will be by logging into your Strava account through a browser, not the app.
Of course, they may instigate another price rise sooner, but as of now –
Mine renews in September (Annually) and is now £54.99 for 12 months.
I’m crap as I can’t remember what it was previously but, I don’t mind that for a year.
Further to my post above about binning because my monthly was going from 3.99 to 8.99, I may now reconsider. As the new yearly is 54.99, that’s 4.58 a month. I can live with a 60p increase.
I wonder if one aspect of these price changes was to try to shift more people to yearly subs.
As an annual subscriber I think that’s only an increase of £5 or £10….of itself nothing to get too stressed about. However, in the currently tricky time globally and a bit more squeaky than I’m used to personally on top of that – it’s been a nudge to get me to downgrade to the free version. I’m not convinced I actually use the premium stuff – I guess after the downgrade if I notice something missing I’m used to I might possibly reconsider. Too many people like me though and the free version will have to be downgraded again to make more of us stump up.
Finally got around to doing a short gentle outdoor ride yesterday, recording on my Lezyne Super GPS and doing a direct upload to Intervals site…
More than enough analysis including power data that I expect to keep me happy this year. Can create custom interval durations very easily on pc. Only slight downside is raw elevation and data can’t be corrected like it can on Strava for barometer equipped GPS units.
Intervals was intelligent enough to recognise same ride directly uploaded to Strava and not accept a duplicate.
I have only ever used the Strava route builder to loosely plan rides, rather than saving a route and sending it to my GPS units for navigation. But even with “places of interest” and “global heatmap” turned off, there is a horrible lag when zooming in or out of the standard route builder map.
Is that zoom lag horrible for all, or perhaps our pc showing its age, a ~7 year old i5-6600k system with RX 580 graphics?
I wonder if one aspect of these price changes was to try to shift more people to yearly subs.
I expect Zwift to do the same. It’s dominated by users in the Northern hemisphere and many of those don’t pay for/use it in the Summer months. A higher monthly cost, offset by the deal of an annual subscription, would be much better for their cashflow.
I paid for my wahoo X for the year. One of the reasons I went for it over zwift (that and it being better for training). Can do a load of stuff for free on it as well including the fitness tests.
Just checked in my account and it is also saying it will renew at $59 (having previously cancelled). It’s probably just a website glitch but I’ve cancelled the recurring payment in PayPal (Settings->Payments->Manage Automatic Payments).
Never bothered with Strava much…. Was fun when it was free. With mates you could see how your times compared to others in the bike park or local trails on that day.
Still use it occasionally to track a ride, but Komoot does the same, but without the competitive edge.
I pay for Trailforks (10€/year) and bought a Komoot package a few years ago (29€ for worldwide usage or something.
Use Trailforks lots. Very useful for finding locations to ride in foreign lands.
Trailforks also has a heat feature, which judging with my experience here in Spain is pretty accurate for showing which trails get ridden and which are a mess. Not sure where they get their data from.
Komoot is rubbish for trails, but pretty good for planning gravel, touring and road rides.
I’m not fussed about my stats, my cadence, heart rate now W/kg.
The heatmap is based on user ridelogs…so the trails getting a lot of riders (who are using Trailforks, or uploading ride data to Trailforks) will show as warmer trails to help identify popular trail usage.
I’ve got Trailforks but I don’t use it whilst riding (unless I’ve managed to get so lost that even my nose is giving up on the misadventure!), but when I finish my ride in Garmin, the ride syncs to Strava and Trailforks.
So whenever a ride is added to Trailforks (either via tracking on the app in realtime or via an uploaded ride file, it all gets added in to the Trailforks heatmap. Same as how it works on Strava and any other system that is based on ridelogs being provided by a userbase.
Strava has that and one of the reasons I subscribe. It can show you your heat map and everyone’s heat map. I tend to use my one for planning new road rides as I stick to nice back lanes. The general heat map has a lot of people riding on main roads around here, for some reason, so isn’t that useful for planning routes.
I cancelled my Strava. As an annual subscriber the change wasn’t much but in line with a lot of other people we’ve reviewed our annual outgoing to combat hike in price of living and Strava didn’t make the cut.
To be honest the free elements of Strava seem to be covering much of what I used Strava for. Even so I’m trying to ween myself back to Garmin which (now Strava is just on the freebie version) is probably better for the fitness side of an active life.
I’m trying to find some love for Kanoot….and failing. As someone who no long races or trains for racing but instead explores places just because, it ‘should’ be a really good fit. Maybe it’s me, but I’m struggling to get much out of it as yet. As half my active life is on the water and that’s not Kamoot’s thing maybe that’s part of the problem.
I use Komoot but only for route planning – which I then sync, through Garmin Connect – to my Garmin devices. I’m aware that it has all sorts of “social” aspects but I ignore these and I don’t record my rides on Komoot either. The “suggested for you” bit is very repetitive at the moment as I’m mostly riding/running from home but it has come up with decent suggestions when I’ve been away somewhere different.
A you say, Connect provides a pretty comprehensive fitness and analysis suite. I’ve supplemented with intervals.icu, just for a slightly different view of things.
Orange Switch 6er. Stif Squatcher. Schwalbe Magic Mary Purple Addix front. Maxxis DHR II 3C MaxxTerra rear. Coil fan. Ebikes are not evil.
I have been a writer for nigh on 20 years, a photographer for 25 years and a mountain biker for 30 years. I have written countless magazine and website features and route guides for the UK mountain bike press, most notably for the esteemed and highly regarded Singletrackworld.
Although I am a Lancastrian, I freely admit that West Yorkshire is my favourite place to ride. Rarely a week goes by without me riding and exploring the South Pennines.
