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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year, Strava removed many of their free features. Previously, free users weren't really limited by the platform. Predictably, not many people subscribed.

Forcing users to pay for popular features received a lot of public backlash at the time ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228426 ) but in retrospect it appears to be the right choice.

People never like losing access to free features, but losing part of your non-paying customer base isn't such a bad thing after a company has reached scale anyway.

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Yes, Strava's main mistake IMO was not differentiating enough between free and premium versions. I am a long time subscriber because I like the social aspects of Strava but I almost never use the premium features. The basic free plan does almost all of what I need.

The most annoying part of Strava's changes this year was removing access to segment leaderboards from their API (https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/05/strava-cuts-off-leaderbo...). This broke a bunch of 3rd party apps, including some that seem completely innocuous. For instance, I used an app that displayed a list of segments for mountain passes in the Alps and the number of times each had been crossed so far this year. The goal of this was to help people figure out when it was possible to cross a pass (which might be well before the road is officially open), but now that's broken.

I personally didn't like this change because it removed the tiered nature of the paid platform. Previously, you could mix and match 3 feature packs, at $2/month each. Now, they've combined it into $5/month flat, regardless of how many features you use.

This may be the right answer for them (chasing the premium competitive market and all that, and maybe less tech debt with fewer tiers), but it caused me to drop my subscription. As a "casual" cyclist, I was willing to pay $2/month, but not $5/month, for the value I got out of the service.

> Predictably, not many people subscribed.

How do you know this? I don't believe I've ever seen them (or anyone else) publish actual subscription numbers... closest thing I've seen is some statistical analysis done by a VC way back in 2015.

I don’t see the premium offerings as worth the cost for most casual athletes. I think they’d do better with advertising and corporate tie ins like the challenges.

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