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For me Strava is a ride diary and a route planning tool.
The ride diary bit will still work for free, but I might look at creating a simple gpx -> map thumbnail -> static website script and I'm fairly sure there's already a heatmap generator out there. I'm sure I can do something better than Strava - "do you remember that awesome 30km descent we did in the Alps, where was it?" is really hard to answer in Strava.
Route planning I can get from the Ordnance Survey app for less than half the price of Strava.
If Strava were an old fashioned app that retailed for £150 it wouldn't get many takers.
Route planning I can get from the Ordnance Survey app for less than half the price of Strava.
Or Komoot for £30 lifetime fee for global mapping.
a simple gpx -> map thumbnail -> static website script
Let me know if you get that working to a satisfactory state!
I keep all my .fit files from my Garmin on my HDD. I use a script to transfer them off the device and move in them into folders by year, and convert from fit to tcx to gpx. I wanted to also generate thumbnails for them so I could flick through with an image viewer and quickly find the ride I wanted. I asked here.
I also import the .fit files into Golden Cheetah which has very customizable filters - I can tag my rides with my own codes etc and filter by that or by distance ranges, time, etc etc. GC also has lots of customizable metrics/analytics/power/hr zones etc and R scripting if you get in that deep (I haven't). I don't have a power meter so some of it's lost on me, but it's good way of storing your rides although lacks the social aspect and photos but you can create segments and compare your latest ride with past rides etc.
I got my family to buy me a sub for my birthday. I hate pointless stuff and Strava is something I use several times a week so I reckon they deserve something for that. I don’t really use many features apart from the beacon - but that’s great for a) knowing that someone can check whether I’m unconscious in a ditch and b) putting the kettle on when I’m 5 minutes from home.
Just remembered one of the features that's saved me money regularly: Gear. Being able to add/remove/retire components and bikes has meant I've kept on top of servicing of forks, shocks, drivetrains and pivots. Once a month I can click on each bike and see what servicing is due or if a part fails I can see hoe much mileage it's covered. If a part doesn't last many miles I know not to use it again, if it lasts ages I get the same to replace it. With covering a lot of miles regularly, 4 bikes to keep track of and a lot of my riding suitable for at least 2 of the bikes meaning I just grab whichever one I feel like riding that day it's easy to lose track of how much it's been used. Just that alone is worth the £4/month cost to me, I then get all the other stuff basically free.
Do non paying members still get to see their segment times and compare to their previous attempts? And do they act as the 'runners and riders' for paying member to compare their times against. Lets face it in popular parts of the country with 5 figure+ numbers of rider attempts on a segment most of us are in the thousandths rather than the top 10. I looked at a friend with a free account's ride and his data looked much as it always did.
Got to confess it seems pretty reasonable - they must look across at what people are prepared to pay for zwift and think they offered too much for free. And personally if the alternative was it being smothered in adverts I'd rather it was this new business model.
I pay I think £18.99 for the Summit membership. Don’t know if that will be cancelled now and refunded or what?
If everyone subscribed for £1.99 a year, 55 million subscribers would give an income of over £100 million, not bad for a company with 180 staff.
Not sure I would get the use of it for £6.99 a month though, may just use Garmin instead!
I guess it all depends on your usage. I post 10 or so activities a week and it’s arguably my most used app.
But I still can’t get my head round people with a £3k bike or a pair of £300 trainers complaining about paying £1 a week for this.
they must look across at what people are prepared to pay for zwift and think they offered too much for free.
I think they have hence the ridiculous £6.99/month position.
Zwift is expensive but at least you get something for it and it has training packs and stuff in there on top of the riding element. It's software I use for a reasonable time every week, during lockdown I've been doing pretty much every day for an hour or so. Strava I finish a ride (having recorded it on something else) and once it's loaded into strava I then open it up, edit it briefly because it randomly allocated a bike to things, quick look then I'm done, unless it's not working which is frequent enough.
I reckon zwift costs me 50p/hour max at the moment, even on annual sub rates Strava would cost me £2.50-3/hour.
But I still can’t get my head round people with a £3k bike or a pair of £300 trainers complaining about paying £1 a week for this.
It's a difference between capex and opex. But mostly I think it come down to they have suddenly gone from £0 to £6.99/month and partly because they have gone for a single cost structure making people buy a whole load of (for them) pointless features. If the summit stuff was of interest people will have taken it up, and that's great but Strava have taken away the social aspect that most of their users were happy with and said if you want it you need to take up all of the other stuff too. The social stuff was also generated by the user's so it's a bit of a kick in the nuts. A mandatory £1/month for a social user level would have got mass conversion and generated a shit load of money. This will likely just see people staying with free and gradually using other platforms.
I just use Strava to log my rides, and to see where people I know have been riding.
When Strava first came on the scene it was fun comparing times to other locals, but as some seriously fast riders (or ebike riders) have put in times to get the KOMs so far out of reach I am not in the slightest bit interested in leaderboard results.
Strava was a good thing for cycling a few years ago - now it's nothing special; certainly not worth paying for.
But I still can’t get my head round people with a £3k bike or a pair of £300 trainers complaining about paying £1 a week for this.
Up until today my use of strava was broadly:
Every now and again look at my commute to see if I was being lazy or if it just felt slow. Maybe once a month.
Deal with my notifications without reading them. Every few days.
Delete the riders I might know, I don't and if I did and I was even vaguely interested if already be following them. Every time I open the app.
Get cross because my activity is buried in amongst a load of other people's commutes, trips to the shops, pootles with their kids etc that I couldn't care less about but they don't mark as private, forget what I was looking for. Every time I look for a previous activity of mine, maybe every week at a push, certainly once a fortnight.
Look at a friend's time on segments on our regular routes because they got a PB or something. Maybe once a month, if I've noticed (which I don't often because ^^^) or they've mentioned it was running well.
Skip past a load of photos of other people's bikes lent against a tree. I've seen their bikes before, I've seen a tree before and they've not come up with an especially interesting way of presenting the two together that makes me want to look at it, like the bike levitating or something, I'd look at that, but as it is they're not interesting photos. It's like food photos of sandwich from spar, or holiday snaps of a motorway service station. Every time I scroll down the list.
Look at the challenges remember that to complete them I have to mark my rides as public and fill everyone who follows me's screen with my commute just so I can get an electronic badge, and decide not to bother. Every now and again.
After a ride a ride at BPW or the like, compare times with friends I rode with. Twice, maybe three times a year.
Would you pay £1 a week for my subscription? I won't.
3k bike? Does it put a smile on my face? not every time I ride it but more often than not?
do I consider 3k on enjoying myself for serval years good expenditure? Sure.
Could I have spent less than 3k? Of course.
Would it be less good? Probably not.
Did I buy it because I liked it or because it was functional? Because I liked it, absolutely.
I'd pay a tenner a week not to be as ****in miserable as you tbh.
I’d pay a tenner a week not to be as **** miserable as you tbh.
A few cans of kestrel super is less than a tenner.
😂
Would you pay £1 a week for my subscription? I won’t.
Good news is the vast majority of what you described is still free - happy days!
Good news is the vast majority of what you described is still free – happy days!
🤗
I don’t really use many features apart from the beacon
For info, you can use WhatsApp to send your live location to a friend. Start a new message, click on the paperclip, share live location. Turn off when you get home.
Its not £6.99 its £4.
That aside Im going to leave Strava. I don't resent it's move, every one of these start ups needs to get a proper revenue stream eventually, but I don't think Strava is the best tool for MTB, so in supporting a subs model (the cost isn't an issue I think its a fair price) I just feel like I would rather put money into trailforks for example. Its not doing any good for the trails ('straaavvvvvaaaaaaaa'), its features are very roadie centric, and others are doing more for MTBers. While KOMs and leaderboards can be fun its a bit puerile and tends to bring out the worst in some people, so if I couldn't have it I wouldn't miss it.
Best off supporting those businesses that offer something really useful for the MTB rider is my view, and for that reason I'm out. I wish them all the best but I'll be leaving it to the roadies and focussing all my recording, segment creation and maybe eventually subs elsewhere.
^I’ve been looking at Trailforks as an alternative for a while and would probably do the same but the way it currently logs my rides is by drawing the data from Strava. If it linked up with Garmin Connect I wouldn’t have renewed my Strava sub for similar MTB focused reasons
I’ve signed up for the 2 month free trial to see if I notice any difference. Signed up to Komoot & Trailforks to compare them too.
Is it worth getting the Komoot mapping?
Trailforks' routing is still so far in its' infancy as to almost be unusable.
I used to use it all the time. But I seem to ride less nowadays so mileage logging etc seems pointless. I do still trouble the top 10 on stuff I know well, but really I know that all the properly fast riders don't use it anyway, so it's only a punters table of minor interest. Socially it's quite nice but ultimately, for me, it's just a minor novelty so I am happy to lose it.
I’ve signed up for the 2 month free trial to see if I notice any difference. Signed up to Komoot & Trailforks to compare them too.
Is it worth getting the Komoot mapping?
Depends if you travel about a lot.
I got it free back before it hit critical mass and they had some sort of affiliate program that generated free codes for regular users to give away. It is a really good tool for finding routes in unfamiliar areas. And it's obviously going to be a lot cheaper than STRAVA going forward.
But then the underlying mapping s free, so I'm sure at some point trailforks will leapfrog them for MTB stuff, although Kommoot does seem to be actively targeting riders who use it for bigger XC and Gravel rides rather than searching for trails on a hillside.
TBH my main use for Komoot is so that when someone asks "can someone recommend a route around..........." it's easier to just generate a .gpx in komoot than it is to search through STRAVA for an old ride. That said, I'm not very organized, a few of the more committed roadies label all their strava rides as "90 Hilly Benson", so if they want a ride to Benson, or 90 miles, or hilly they can search for them easier! Rather than my haphazard combination of puns, innuendo, cake choice and lists of notable mechanicals and crashes!
Do non paying members still get to see their segment times and compare to their previous attempts?
No. According to the information on the VeloViewer site, you won’t be able to compare your times against your previous attempts. I’m not sure if that’s true as I didn’t see it in the stuff from Strava, but he says that he can’t provide that in VV unless you pay for Strava as he can’t provide anything to free users that Strava don’t provide.
I went out for a ride yesterday and got a KOM (I don't pay)
Not sure what all the fuss is about, then again that's never stopped this place before.
i like it and use it a lot. i especially enjoy opening it on my desktop and planning routes using heatmap while looking at the recent rides of the fastest locals, so you dont end up down some obsolete overgrown or decrepit trial. im also nosey and like to see where the good local riders are going, and if they have found something new to me. thirdly its brilliant to see people riding trails ive dug myself! i also like the social side of it, because we all have the same common interest, no bullshit.
erictwinge, how do I use the heatmap in routeplanner?
Still can't see any change to browser version or Android version
I am doing 500 miles and 30/ish hours per month in the saddle, paying £4.49/mo through Google Play (wonder if they will increase this?) and have been doing so since 2014. Personally, I reckon that a penny a mile, or 15p/hr isn't bad value just to have the rides logged, shared and a few statistics and bits here and there to show whether I'm improving or not.
To be fair, I don't think Strava is perfect - their development has been glacially slow and I'm still annoyed that they don't offer any form of family membership or something to support U16 riders like Zwift now do. Also, the detailed analytics on Strava remain rubbish, hence another tenner a year pushed at Veloviewer.
I work in the telematics industry and have some idea of what it takes to run the infrastructure behind a global platform like Strava. My only wonder is how they managed to keep it free, without advertising or other sources of income, for so long. This stuff ain't cheap to run!
They had my fiver a month before, they'll probably keep getting it after until and unless something better comes along.
Just thinking about this.
I use Strava as a ride data aggregator and leave actual analysis to specific programs or websites. Some of those websites charge, monthly or annually. Strava could act in the way that Apple do with their app store: leave the free apps/3rd party sites alone but take 30% of the cost of those that charge, in return they get a more advanced/open API and greater data rates.
The one thing I would love to see has been intimated above - make challenges not reliant on rides being public. Then make every ride for everyone private unless they expressly elect to make that specific ride public. It would make the social media feed aspect of it a load less tedious and I could re-friend a bunch of people I've stopped following for spamming me with the dull daily rides to work and back. They could even add an algorithm that nudged you to publish it if it looks particularly out of the ordinary for you.
Trailforks app can track the ride directly, so doesn't need Strava. You can manually upload a ride from a GPS device (Add Ridelog in Trailforks desktop site), but will need to go to Trailforks and then browse for the recorded file (probably needs transferred to a computer) and then upload it - so it isn't automatic, but it can be done.
If Veloviewer had a Garmin Connect API then I'd just drop Strava.
Went for a run this morning and no changes as yet to what I see as ‘free’ user. For instance I can see all previous times for segments I covered and comparable routes - I thought these were going to be removed?
I think its hilarious how you can still use it for free with not much change for a lot of people yet 50% of the responses are 'right I'm closing my account'. You know you don't have to pay right?!
A strange world I've never entered. This eases my FOMO.
If Veloviewer had a Garmin Connect API then I’d just drop Strava.
Me too, not going to happen though apparently.
Thinking about it, Strava may have just done me a favour. I think it probably ruins more rides for me than anything else.
Often I'll go out, really enjoy my ride, get home, check Strava and then be disappointed because my time on some segment I didn't even know existed isn't very good. Bloody stupid. Even worse, next time I do that ride I'll push it on that segment just to improve a pointless number and often enjoy it less. I only stick with Strava because I really enjoy the explore features in VV and that only works if you use Strava. If I can't see my position on a leaderboard it may actually make it easier for me to just go out and enjoy myself.
I record all my rides on my wahoo app on my phone. It gives me the minimal analysis I need, and the only thing I really keep Strava for is the garage feature - this allows me to track my approximate milage on each of my bikes and make informed decisions about how long certain components are lasting. If wahoo had that, or there was a 3rd part app that spoke to wahoo that did the same thing, I'd drop Strava as the social functions don't float my boat.
I'll be paying initially, but longer term it all depends on whether all my mates continue to use it as well. The beauty of strava is everyone uses it. If folks stop using it then it becomes pointless. I have no interest in how I stack up against a load of randoms who may be pros, on ebikes, or just far fitter/unfitter than me. I do have a passing interest in how i get on conpared to those i ride with or compete againt in real life.
I came across this analysis of Strava users. http://markslavonia.com/sampling-strava/ It's five years old and Strava had 8.2m users at that point in time. He estimates that around 2.3% of users are subscribers. There's this quote:
Why does this matter? Many of us are passionate about Strava and want it to be sustainable. The company raised $18.5 million in October 2014 and is not yet profitable. This analysis suggests that Strava’s revenue from premium memberships is around $11.5 million per year. Besides, Strava’s free service is pretty great – the company hasn’t started pushing hard on existing users to switch to premium. If it can eventually convert many of its growing number of active users to paying customers, it stands a good chance of keeping its product free from intrusive advertising and clutter.
Let's extrapolate that to the present. According to Strava's blog in Feb 2020 they had 50 million users and were adding 1 million per month (that's remarkable growth). Their current annual subscription is £48.00 so assuming the same percentage of subscribers:
48 * 50,000,000 * 0.023 = £55.2m/pa
Out of that comes the salaries for 180 staff and the hosting costs.
Every million new users will add around £1.1m to the revenue, conversely, lose a million and their revenue drops the same.
I’ll be paying initially, but longer term it all depends on whether all my mates continue to use it as well. The beauty of strava is everyone uses it. If folks stop using it then it becomes pointless. I have no interest in how I stack up against a load of randoms who may be pros, on ebikes, or just far fitter/unfitter than me. I do have a passing interest in how i get on conpared to those i ride with or compete againt in real life.
Along these lines Strava is great for looking at your races - segments and the flyby can completely break it down and give you a lot of insight. There is actually no other way of doing this, as far as seeing how you shaped up against your competitors, thinking about it. Of course this completely depends on other people using it like you say, which they mainly do IME, but this could change. I think I read somewhere that they flyby would be unchanged, but that still doesn't mean much if the userbase substantially shrinks.
I think a big part of segments getting a bit old and uninteresting is that most of us have probably lived in the same place for a while so know all of the trails and routes. I certainly don't pay them much heed nowadays, but if I moved tomorrow I reckon they'd be a big part of exploring the new area.
48 * 50,000,000 * 0.023 = £55.2m/pa
Out of that comes the salaries for 180 staff and the hosting costs.
Hosting costs Oh how I hate that term. Go to AWS or Azure Pricing Calculators and assuming you know what you're doing price up a suitable platform to handle the millions of transactions of those millions of users, and the storage and data platform costs and global burst scaling you need to cope with demand peaks. Oh and don't forget the associated globally redundant backup costs, and the farming out of analytics data to a suitable SIEM so you can ensure you're as secure as you can be. Then don't forget to factor in all of the millions of API transactions the free partner apps are making too. See how much of your Millions that soaks up.
Still can’t see any change to browser version or Android version
The GCN show interviewed Strava CEO in yesterdays program and he said it the changes are being applied over next few weeks.
Not sure if that is to see how many people start subscribing before the features are removed from free side of the app?
I don't doubt it - I saw recently that Amazon make more from AWS than their web shop.