amazing folks out with bikes costing thousands cry about a fiver a month on strava

It’s not just a fiver for Strava, it’s a fiver a month for bloody loads of things these days. And I spent all my money on bikes so there’s none left obvs. Your logic is poor.

amazing folks out with bikes costing thousands cry about a fiver a month on strava

And then there’s folk who spend money on things that they get value from.

A fake often windassisted race result is not value.

if you dont get value from it dont pay for it. lots of people will and do get value from it.

fat middle aged men come crying on stw

I’ve been a subscriber for a while, only really for the beacon function so my wife gets a txt and then can see when I’ve left the office or follow my progress on a ride. Have same function technically with Garmin but find the livetrack buggy and can only notify via email. Beacon seems to be pretty robust.

The fitness/freshness thing is OK too but I wouldn’t pay for that alone.

Does it measure fun? No? Not interested, never have been.

Given the social aspect of Strava, it needs a certain critical mass of riders to keep it going, if half your friends/followers don’t sign up there’s less point so why bother?

I see the commercial reason for doing it but converting casual users to subscribers is a tall order and i think Strava needs that critical mass of people to keep it relevant.

We’ll see…i like Strava, bit of fun post ride but its becoming less used by riders i know and this might just be the final nail for me to not bother too.

Surprised to note they have 180 staff, from a software development perspective feels like they have half a dozen, with respect to the fairly glacial pace at which they add features, bug fix, and manage to ignore lots of long-term annoyances. They could probably get rid of 100 dead-weight hipster staff to massively improve their bottom line.

A fake often windassisted race result is not value.

Guilteeeeeeeee 😀

Commuting all year has its benefits.

Well I’m happy, this prompted me to go and check what I’m paying as my price rolled over from pre-summit packs approx 2 years ago.

Gone from £5.99 monthly to £3.79 a month annually as they’ve automatically honoured the previous annual price 🙂

I pay £10 a month each to Spotify and Amazon, and intermittently pay when I want to use advanced route planning on ride with GPS. £3.79 (or £4) is worth it for me for the motivation to go out for an extra ride every now and then, the other subs are worse value as they encourage me to sit on my backside!

I’m not fully convinced about the ‘no strava in a year bit’. It’s unlikely that the venture capital investors behind them, (very serious ones too) would allow that to happen. More like a combination of:

• CEO removed
• App infested with creepy adtech spyware
• Adverts in your face all over the place
• Ill advised hardware lock in
• Sold to someone awful, like Google or Facebook

You have a choice, buy the product, become the product (see above) or don’t get get the product. There’s nothing free on the internet.

And this was the plan all along, a social network doesnt work until there’s enough people to cause said network effects, so keep it free to the user, and the experience uncluttered by adverts until the volume is there. And then start the ratchet. Strava was hoping that there would have been more ‘organic’ conversions from ‘free’ to paid by now, but thats not how it went, so the ratchet has gone up a few notches.

Going to go out for a bike ride today – will see what it looks like on the app after.

I liked Strava for the following (in descending order of importance):
Comparing myself to myself on segments
Seeing my segment speed in general (am I top 10%, bottom 20% etc)
Counting up how many miles I have done in a year
Seeing what my pals are up to.

Though I do record everything through a Garmin and Garmin Connect, so I think a lot of that information will be in there.

Couldn’t agree more with this.

I use strava to compare myself to my previous efforts, the KOM for the places I ride (mostly trail centres) mean that the top 10 is totally irrelevant. Im hopeful a better, free or add boosted, app will come along to wipe strava out and step into its place.

Strava are clearly going for a big sale to one of the big boys, and want their balance sheets to reflect x quarters of increasing revenue. What they’ve done is create a scenario where the only people who use it will be the mega dedicated, not the casual, once a fortnight rider

A fake often windassisted race result is not value.

The fake wind-assisted results keep me warm at night ☹

I’ll probably pay, the route planner has provided me with years of useful distraction, and I enjoy the pointless and arbitrary chasing of segments, helps to mix things up when you’re riding the same roads over and over (especially at the moment!).

If I can somehow visualise time spent in different heart rate zones then that will be especially useful when I eventually resume training in earnest.

Interesting move.

Personally I dont think it’s about needing more money to survive, I think it’s probably that they feel they now have enough paid up members to keep the platform valid.

ie they have got a critical mass where enough are paying for data to mean something.

I have paid for the last 6 months or so, not sure what I really get of use from that, I occasionally look at my segments by age group Which makes me feel better, but I could just enter a race.

Fitness/Freshness just seams daft.

Will be interesting to see how many people leave. Back to Endomondo anyone?

Will be interesting to see how many people leave.

I went the other way and signed up. I’ve used it for free for years, maybe about time I put my hand in my pocket. Bit like on here really.

Does it measure fun? No? Not interested, never have been.

And yet, here you are.

I don’t mind paying a subscription on principle, but £6.99 a month is waaay too much for something I look at for 5 minutes after each ride or run.

It’s a £1 a month service at most for the 20 minutes a week I spend on it.

Personally I dont think it’s about needing more money to survive

Oh their burn rate* is well into the survival territory. They need to raise money every 12-18 months to keep the lights on. Strava has burnt ~$55M so far.

* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/burnrate.asp

Surprised to note they have 180 staff, from a software development perspective feels like they have half a dozen, with respect to the fairly glacial pace at which they add features, bug fix, and manage to ignore lots of long-term annoyances. They could probably get rid of 100 dead-weight hipster staff to massively improve their bottom line.

This was the reason I cancelled my paid subscription. I got fed up with bugs and annoyances never getting fixed despite loads of people reporting the same thing and just getting no fixes and answers.

I originally paid because I sort of thought it was the right thing to do after I’d been using it for a while.

I was hoping that this round of upgrades and glitch fixes there would be something for mountain bikers to get their teeth into, but it does feel like we’re tolerated like the ugly ginger cousin rather than part of the running/grim roadie family. I’ve been paying for quite some time, now, but blocking most of the services for non-paying members, while I can understand it, makes it less attractive to paying members if it’s going to drive away the majority of the users. (who are still also contributors after all)

I get that they want to earn something from one of the most successful activity apps, but while they seem to have developed a half decent app, the strategy behind the business seems woeful really

I’d imagine that there’s far more runners than MTBers use Strava, and that they know their market.

I signed up yesterday, been meaning to for ages after cancelling a couple of years back after a big accident.

I don’t make any rides public so leader boards are irrelevant to me, but use Routes regularly and enjoying monitoring my own performance.

Cost of a pint a month for something I look at many times a day. Seems like decent value.

There’s an element of subscription fatigue though.

Strava for logging
Komoot for planning
Zwift for indorr riding
Sufferfest for training*
Veloviewer for some nice graphs
ST for reviews of stuff you can’t afford and a working forum coming January 2005.*

Before you know it you’re paying more in monthly subscriptions than a 0% finance deal on a new bike.

If STRAVA is going to work towards a model where everyone subscribes it needs to at least be the best at a few things so it can cannibalize subscriptions off others. It used to be that if you subscribed to STRAVA you got the Sufferfest training videos so you didn’t need quite so many subscriptions. Feels like something needs to consolidate a bit, like they need to sell out / merge with someone else to offer something a bit more tangible.

Or Garmin should buy them, I imagine every time they move the paywall GPS sales take a hit, I’d probably drop the faff of charging/uploading my garmin if STRAVA ceased to be useful.

*actually the only ones I pay for.

amazing folks out with bikes costing thousands cry about a fiver a month on strava

My most ridden bikes the last 4 years have all cost less than an annual Zwift subscription.

We’re not all………..

Strava used it’s mostly free users to generate the content on which it survives: routes, segments, leaderboards, DATA etc. so perhaps they now consider they’ve harvested enough to feed on for a while. It does suggest that they gave away a bit too much for free initially though.

I do use it but mainly for the social aspect and basic tracking. Once my sub is up, I’ll probably not renew it.

I’m currently on a 2 month free trial of the paid for stuff and I’m struggling to see what it adds.

Strava is useful for pulling all the things I do into one place but the approach to anything other than biking and running is a bit cack. I tend to check against previous efforts and against friends but not much else. Very occasionally I will use segment explore if I go to new areas but it works so erratically that it’s hard to rely on compared to trailforks.

On the whole the segments on MTB routes at anywhere ridden frequently have become pointless with every man and his dog setting up minor variations for every section depending on where they stop for chats.

I’m struggling to justify paying for a thing I use for minimal time with little benefit. No it’s not a lot, but it’s half a zwift sub and I’m using that 5+ hours/week at the moment, a Disney+ sub or multiples of an STW sub and I don’t like to think how much time I spend here.

TLDR – Paying is ok but the monthly charge is way out on the usage it gets.

TBH unless my segment is inside the top 10, then it doesn’t matter… So top 10 is fine with me… I don’t have many inside top 10 admittedly, but if i’m 345 or 860,000 on another segment, who cares.

Hopefully i’ll be able to at least see how my segment times compare to my previous segments, but that’s all i really need.

I’m not saying i won’t pay for it, as i do feel i use it enough to justify the small payment… but i’m staying open minded at the moment.

I only really use Strava to log my rides – not really interested in the KOMs etc, so i feel £6.99 per moth is a bit much.
I only ride twice a week so we’re heading toward £1 per ride which i don’t think is good value to me.
I’ll happily stick with the free version..

They have also removed the old ‘download GPX’ functionality, for non paid members.  I’m actually not worried about the KOM and leaderboard nonsense. I don’t tend to trouble much of it and it’s been ruined since ebikes became more prevalent.  But the GPX function was useful if you wanted to try a friends route or needed to find a new trail.  I am happy to pay for Strava too, but not at £6.99 a month! Couple of quid tops for me! If Strava disappears, then I don’t think it’s a bad thing really, something else will come along to replace it.

I’ve paid £18.99 annually for a subscription option which has now gone, but the renewal in June is still at that price.

That’s about the right price for where I value it. I use it a lot, I should pay for it, but I don’t want another monthly subscription (far too many now).

If the number of non-paying subscribers is as big as it appears in my feed then I’d scrap the free tier entirely and have one that costs £10/year and one that costs £25 a year.

Don’t see why any user would expect to get it for free with no advertising/monetisation.

I only see this as affecting the slow mo jos if all they’re concerned about is segments. I’m an unsociable rabbit so for me it’s not the sociable aspect so much….it’s more the stalking facility that appeals to me. FlyBys are still working so that suits me fine. I shall continue to stalk on for free.

I think it is fair enough. The tool is pretty good, certainly the best at what it does and the difference between paid and free has always been too small.

I guess time will tell if people move to something else but I cant see it right now.

i like to nick other peoples rides and modify them, i also like plotting routes using the heatmap – can i do this for free? coz i might cancel..

i assume they have not bothered to modify the minimum segment length? so many short/steep descents near me that you cant segment…

TBH unless my segment is inside the top 10, then it doesn’t matter… So top 10 is fine with me… I don’t have many inside top 10 admittedly, but if i’m 345 or 860,000 on another segment, who cares.

I actual find those more useful.

If I find myself i the top ten it’s because it’s an unpopular flat route and I’m the only one to have done it on a gravel bike!

What would be more ‘useful’ would be if they showed the big leaderboards as a bell curve so you could see where you were relative to the average.

e.g. am I 200’th out of 1000 because I’m slower than a good chunk of people, or the TdF pass through and the top 199 places are all the peleton several minutes up on the mortals.

Mine is 3.99 a month, about the price of a beer, but much better for you. 🙂

I won’t be paying to use Strava. It seems you’ll still get a KOM and a place in the top ten if you’re free user- if so that’s fine as if I’m not in the top ten then I’m not interested anyway and obviously need to go away and train more or try harder. Not interested at all in the ‘social’ aspect of Strava, but it is a good tool as an advanced cycle computer, an incentiviser and a bit of fun. I’d rather find a free alternative than pay for it…recommendations?
what’s this Komoot thing like?

Subs for everything now. £4 a month is a £48 bill year after year. Complete rip off. I’ve a great mapping app – £3 a year , now that’s acceptable.

ET – yes I do the same ….lets hope “strava to GPX” keeps working!

i assume they have not bothered to modify the minimum segment length? so many short/steep descents near me that you cant segment…

Hopefully they haven’t changed that, and it’d be great if they could eliminate all the sections that are less than 500m long too – far too much GPS error to be of any value.

In fact they could clean up the whole segment bit, too many duplicates, short sections with junctions in the middle etc.

Does anyone know the actual financials for Strava? Seem to be a lot of assumptions going around (not really here) but I can’t see anything that shows the actual state of the company

Cheeky sods. I gave them all that information on where and when I ride my bike for free. Even let them aggregate the data and make money from selling it. Now they want me to pay for the privilege of giving them my data.

Well that’s one way of looking at it I suppose.