Strava hikes monthly subscription price
bikeradar.com
bikeradar.com
It's a hobby project of mine, because I wanted to build an app to track my hiking and skiing activities in a way I like it, including 3D visualization (I live in Switzerland, so it's usually always either up or down and that's hard to visualize on a 2D map) and easy comparison of past efforts on the same track.
You're more than welcome to try it out!
Wow this is freaking cool. Please do bikes!
I mean you can do bikes, it just takes a GPS track file (GPX or FIT) and plots the route. You can also try it out without creating an account (drag and drop your file on the front page: https://cubetrek.com)
Crude humor aside, that's enough to get me to go poke around later. Well done. I don't live in the Alps, but the hills around the Seattle Eastside area are enough to make good use of such a tool.
Here's another one: https://cubetrek.com/view/5813
Any of the code open source?
For technical details, there's a techstack rundown at the very bottom of the homepage (https://cubetrek.com)
Like you, I run this training platform as side project. I have been doing this since 2008. No price increase since then (always 19EUR). I come from your neighboring country - Germany. If you see the change that we join forces, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or email » https://www.nkn-it.de
I see CubeTrek more of a diary for your adventures and a progress tracker for outdoor sports.
Summit tracker for Strava. Updates your activity with the summited peak name. Go to the web app to see your full list of summits and a map.
Working on some big upgrades, like summit lists and way more stats.
Generating a list of all summits is a nice idea!
Thanks for sharing your project, I'll have to check it out! It was definitely a huge product gap for Strava, but it's gotten a little better since they've added the 3d maps.
Here's the catch: Garmin only allows syncing of future activities. I can't access your past activities from your Garmin account. There's a way around it though: https://cubetrek.com/static/bulkdownload.html
I canceled my Strava membership when I learned of the price hike news. I never got an email about it and couldn’t find any information on Strava about the price increase.
So I am no longer a paying member.
Your app look super cool, and would be great in Taiwan and Japan where it’s quite mountainous.
I’m interested in being a beta tester if you’re looking.
Note - if you follow Strava's history, this isn't the first time they've been screwy with their commercial model. They had this funky "Training, Safety and Analysis" pack pricing program[0] that was confusing and they ultimately reverted back to the simple pricing model.
Ultimately the unit economics just don't work out in this space - 100 million people don't want to pay to hold their training data in a prettier interface when they can just get it for free with Garmin (Strava does more than that btw, but the people who are fanatical about that info are a miniority). Likewise, if they don't IPO, there are too few players in the space that would make a $1b+ acquisition.
[0] - https://www.bikeradar.com/news/strava-is-making-a-huge-chang...
I've met a massive community of cyclists: rode with cycling "celebs," trained with really strong amateurs, met a ton of people, learned about weekly group rides, learned about the best rides in the area, and made some very good friends.
Most of this was facilitated by Strava. I'm glad it hasn't devolved into just another shitty social media app, but I do feel like they are not capitalizing on what makes them unique. Right now that is being the de facto cycling social media network.
This is my experience. Strava is the only social network where I've made friends. It is a net positive in life. Every other social network I tried to use caused me to fire some friends eventually.
But little by little, and then all of the sudden, everyone had Strava, nobody wanted to rest on a nice place to stop, it was always segments, segments, and more segments. People didn't want session some nice jump or a section, it was always a white knuckle ride top to bottom with no technique, or fun, and just furious time comparisons on the end of segments. People would even heatedly argue about them too, and some riders I know don't talk to each other anymore because of it. Forget about chatting while riding, how you can chat if your heart is pounding and you're chasing that elusive KOM?
So with time, that diverse group fractured because the slower guys couldn't keep up with the "I only ride segments" guys, and smaller groups formed, but those were actually quite short lived. Some of those still ride, but mostly solos or in very small groups which is quite sad to me.
I guess Strava can definitely help you out if you're riding a road bike to find a group which suits your ability. I guess in every city you can have plenty to choose from. But that just doesn't work if your area has say 50 riders in total. Segments in the mountain are great, but only if you ride alone like a training, just don't drag a mountain bike group into it.
Just to make it clear, I don't blame Strava here at all, it is just people who get obssessed by numbers and see rivalry when none exist. Or as the saying goes: comparison is a thief of joy.
I get kudos from friends afar but the only person that Strava helped me connect with was someone that I chatted briefly at a stoplight with, who then found me via Strava flyover. But even then, we've never ridden together since.
Opt-in is probably a really good idea, even though it killed the feature. I really liked that feature. But yea, it was too easy to abuse.
Are you able to see any frequent routes using the global heat map?
Many bike shops also organize a weekly group ride as a marketing strategy. If you're already coming there to ride then there's a good chance you'll buy something or use their mechanic service.
Agreed. But this is a feature that only works on a free model. I'm not aware of any major social network makes money on 100% of its user community.
Yes Strava does do social stuff but they're a mixed bag and also free. I like that they don't do aggressive surveillance as a business model (it's one of the reasons I subscribe) but it's also pretty useless for organising and planning future rides.
Lots of people comment and give kudos after an event's happened but I don't know anyone using Strava to agree meeting up somewhere. All of that side of things seems to happen on Signal, Whatsapp or FB here.
I do like the route planning but I'm not sure I'll continue to subscribe just for that given the new prices.
Compare Zwift. I can log in and join a group ride at just about any time of the day.
Now, I know that’s not a completely fair comparison because Zwift is online so it always has access to way more riders, but where is the analogue in Strava?
Strava are in a unique position compared to Garmin Connect.
Whist I use Garmin and they seem to be the most popular bike computers I still know lots of people in my cycling club that use Wahoo or Hammerhead units.
Strava is the place that everyone comes together after a ride.
By the time they got serious about adding features, everybody who wanted them had already signed up for alternative services that had them. Now Strava is playing catch up with a bunch of newer companies, and each one them is focused on a subset of Strava's users.
For me, I signed up for RideWithGPS ages before Strava had a good route planner. Now Strava has one, but now I'm happy with RWGPS and don't have any reason to switch back.
Other people wanted better training tools, and they found services that helped with that.
Meanwhile, we've all kept our Strava accounts, because that's where the leaderboards and groups are.
It's an amazing app, and I'd love to pay them for it, but unless they were to start releasing hardware that allowed me to see and meet up with my friends while riding, it's hard to justify hundreds of dollars just for something that my garmin or google maps/ridewithgps already does by default.
Where Strava adds value is as a social network. It's fun to share your activities and pictures with friends, and see what they have been doing. I've gotten good ideas for routes to try or races to enter.
As a long time Strava user it is frustrating to see how it has been stagnant for many years and they almost never add useful improvements. They still don't support triathlons (or any other multisport activities). Many of the segment and challenge leaderboards are full of obvious cheaters.
As someone in the tri community in vc funded silicon valley, I haven't heard of a better alternative to strava? would genuinely be interested in trying something better but all my running clubs still seem to be using strava
I use intervals.icu for planning my training - it has one main developer and he’s great. And it’s completely free unless you want to donate (which I do)
That's the crazy thing about Strava's situation, so many companies have integrated with their API, or built Chrome extentions on top of Strava that replicate their functionality but better and for free. People have been begging for improvments like that for premium and I'd bet by now most have settled on something like intervals.icu and wouldn't miss premium anyway.
I haven't used Strava, but Garmin seems to have a decent enough app and their devices are pretty popular amongst the running and cycling communities. I've been using Garmin's app and a watch for about 6 months now and couldn't be happier with my experience.
For social stuff? They're the gorilla in the room. But, the pure social stuff isn't gated (comments/posts/groups).
For training analysis? TrainingPeaks, TrainerRoad, Wahoo Systm, intervals.icu, and others. Of course, some of those rely on Strava APIs to get data to/from devices.
If all your buddies have Garmins and post public rides/runs, you get segment leaderboards, friends news feed, popularity routing, kudos, a training calendar that connects to TrainingPeaks and all the stats you could want.
Plus Garmin has very capable sports watches and smart body weight scales to consolidate all your fitness indicators in one place. Also, it's completely free.
The downside is the user base is much smaller so less segments and who knows if your KOM is the fastest time. You also won't get randos on the internet kudo'ing your rides/runs and boosting your ego. Also, no cool extensions like Elevate, StravaSauce, etc.
My experience with their index scale is that it's garbage for anything other than weight.
Agree with everything else you say though.
https://app.trainingpeaks.com/ - if you have a coach
Is private equity involved here?
Someone in my family was recently looking for a calorie tracker app. All the ones I was familiar with (and liked) from years ago had been acquired by private equity, which only crippled the free tier and make subscriptions ridiculously expensive.
Seems like the private equity playbook is to cut development to the bare bones, increase prices, and let the app rot while they burn the goodwill to turn it into short/medium term cashflow.
Nope. But VCs are involved.
> Seems like the private equity playbook is to cut development to the bare bones, increase prices, and let the app rot while they burn the goodwill to turn it into short/medium term cashflow.
Quite the opposite. Most PE does not do this btw, unless it's large cap ($1b+ valuation or higher). This is VC backed, and they are actually aggressively investing in growth (at all costs).
Just playing devils advocate
Anyway, don't want to get hung up on that, but more to agree with your point about the usability of swipe left/right/double-tap here, there, everywhere. I understand the dev is working with they have been given, but I'm just trying to run not be pre-occupied with my watch. And kudos to the dev for outstanding work, and for making an app I want to use. But it just doesn't fit me.
So with latest updates in WatchOS 9, I just use the built-in workout app. If I need maps of some sort, I use an app called Footpath (which I discovered here on HN a few years back when the dev posted). Now, I think the $25/year is a little pricey for what you get. On the other hand, I continue to pay it because it's so damned handy. Scrawl on a map with your meat stick, using a phone or tablet, and it snaps it to trails/roads and gives you the mileage. When you're happy with your route, sync it to your watch, sorted. And unlike Workoutdoors, it will then proceed to read you directions (if you so choose). The directions are so good, I've done a 15 mile run on single track in community forests around Anacortes, WA without looking at my watch. Imagine a forest with trails everywhere, intersecting each other, running parallel to each other, making for confusing navigation. But with enough "in 50 meters, turn left on Trail 239", "go past the bridge, then turn right onto Trail 123", "you are off course. The course is 150 feet to your left." It is truly impressive and very helpful when I'm in an unfamiliar area. Garmin can do the same, but it doesn't talk to you, the buzz on your wrist is easy to miss, and all you get is a little arrow at the bottom of the watch screen.
didn't mean to ramble on about Footpath. No relationship, just a satisfied customer (mostly; drop that subscription $5-10).
My favourite was the bait and switch email with this subject line:
“Your complete personalised 2022 stats recap is here”
Which was actually just an email telling me to upgrade to see my recap.
And, yeah, I understand getting the stats isn't the point, but perhaps someone finds it helpful if Strava won't give up the data.
Good on them. If people will pay it, it's the right move. Can't spend internet points anyway so hit me.
On the other hand, I think most every consumer looks at it like they look at every other recurring service: is what I'm getting for my money worth it versus the competitors? The problem with Strava is that their premium features have been stagnant for years, and the feature set is provided by other companies and services for free or cheaper.
I think a good percentage of people are like myself and pay for Strava because I want to support them, and rarely use the premium features. Treating customers badly and not communicating about a price increase breaks the spell and causes the feature comparison and questions from customers.
This may not address your comment directly, but I can feel a strawman forming that I'd like to get ahead of for others.
Fitness and entertainment are not comparable. If you're into fitness, you're in 100%, especially so at the competitive level. If you're an entertainment person, don't compare it to your Netflix bill, compare it to your grocery bill. Suddenly it makes sense.
>but I can feel a strawman forming
Let's address fallacies as they happen instead of before they do, okay? I find this uncharitable.
They were actually, please don't use Strava. You will not follow the training plan and just exhaust yourself to set a PR when I want you to be slow and consistent instead.
Not my experience. They overhauled their route builder and made it subscription-only in 2021 - and kept improving it since. The route builder with the built-in heatmaps has no competition, and is a killer feature for many. Also there's the whole network effects thing where there Strava dominates social networking for recreational cyclists/runners
>Also there's the whole network effects thing where there isn't really another social network for recreational athletes
Most of those features are in the free version. Many keep the free acccount, and utilize more serious tools for the rest.
I agree that doesn't excuse poor PR around price increases though.
Overhauling one feature that only a few care about isn't a persuasive argument that they've kept up with their competitors.
That's an absurd statement.
All of the route planning tools have their advantages and disadvantages. I frequently create routes for cycling and a couple of times I used Strava, Komoot and Garmin Connect for the same route. Garmin Connect always works because it can ignore map data if necessary. Strava and Komoot were not always able to create the route I want (looks like Strava have added a "manual mode" as well).
Most of the people around me use Komoot, it's also my preferred tool now. The information density on the map is great, the POIs shown on the map can be customized and editing works well enough.
Strava is okay. It definitely looks sleek. The biggest issue is that routes cannot be edited in the mobile app, only created. Editing is possible in the browser but really awkward. Try rerouting parts of an existing route.
Heatmaps are useful sometimes, e.g. when I'm abroad and I don't know if a road can be cycled on at all. But the most used roads are not necessarily the best ones. Komoot doesn't have a heatmap visualization but there are comments, ratings and photos of segments.
It seems to obsessed with what things are called and takes no notice of how big, in population density, they actually are. That's a pain when planning touring routes in unfamiliar areas because it will exaggerate the importance of tiny cities and completely hide the presence of massive towns.
I have the three services and I too think strava is by far better than all others (i do around 20k cycling a year and i am the one in charge of making routes for my cycling club)
This is me. With the proliferation of subscription services for just about anything software-related, I'm reassess all of my services a few times each year. I regularly unsubscribe/resubscribe to TV services and do the same with Zwift for indoor cycling.
Any software that was once a one-time-buy and which becomes subscription, I simply get stuck on the last version that I actually bought.
> Your annual membership will automatically renew on 22 August 2023 for £47.99
Hard to get excited about. Maybe it goes up to £54.99 as per the article, also hard to get excited about.
Worse the app is still plagued with import issues and inaccuracies such as the famous Strava tax where it always rounds down distances so people stop for instance a race when their running watch shows a 10.0 km run only to find out that it was just 9.995 km and Strava shows it as 9.99 km.
That is a 10 meter difference between what Strava and the running watch report. That does not sound that atrocious?
I always ride a little extra now.
They also take the actual activity time if GPS has overcounted, unlike Strava.
What other options are there when you staff demands huge raises or leaves for greener pastures?
Apparently, Strava rolled out these increases with no explanation or notice to users. And oddly, they refuse to tell journalists what the official subscription fees will be, leaving it to the journalists to dig around and figure it out on their own.
I understand prices have to go up to pay for hosting and development, but this is a weird one. Massive increase, no new features announced, and next to zero communication from the company.
Unless strava is losing users their costs aren’t going up, especially not 30%.
It’s easy to argue that costs go up but that’s not due to development, but due to corporate overhead.
Unless they are doing something really wacky with saas costs, they should have low marginal costs so as long as they have a decent growth, costs go down.
Not only are they simply storing the received data but they do a lot with it like calculating segments.
That's the naive in theory world. In practice, it is not always the case that economies of scale lend to reduced hosting/infra costs. They can in fact balloon, especially for a small population or a small niche use case.
A properly designed saas should have a non-linear cost per user so more users means lower marginal costs. If not, then something is amiss or it’s not a digital product. The “increased costs per user” is just marketing PR blargh.
Probably because there is no one price, but rather determined from a formula. Individual price setting is a wet dream of any business with low marginal cost. This is, to my understanding, the force behind DVD region locking (which later transitioned into digital services) - the optimal price depends on the consumer purchasing power, which varies significantly by region. Now region ≠ individual, but the more cohorts and factors you have, the closer fit you can theoretically achieve.
In other words, Strava would probably love to charge premium from Bay Area power users on FAANG compensation. At the same time, they’d love to acquire and retain paying users in the lower brackets, rather than none at all.
I’m not sure of the legal risks, but in the court of public opinion this is akin to scalping your own product. If I get a different price than my friend, I’ll feel ripped off.
To me, it’s surprising that this isn’t happening more. This is an almost inevitable consequence of the surveillance capitalism paradigm of the digital landscape. The incentives are there, and most importantly, the data needed for individual prices is there.
I’ve had a Strava since, forever? Over a decade at this point. It’s the de facto app for cycling and running and is one social media app I get real value from.
I will say- as someone who pays for Strava Premium their product strategy has been a mess for ages. Feature requests go unacknowledged for years and they keep adding silly features no one wants.
I’ll keep using it because my friends are all on it, but it does feel like they are slowly dying of self inflicted wounds.
As a cyclist who likes to use many different routes in different areas, I have accumulated 100+ routes.
Yet there is no filtering or grouping system. Why can’t I filter by geography? Or make folders of routes.
Edit: I did see on desktop they recently added filter cycling routes by distance or elevation, but that isn’t my problem at all. And the max distance filter is 50 miles which doesn’t filter down the list very much.
TP is obviously even better as a product if you’re working with a coach hence why so many triathletes favour it.
Strava’s a fantastic social platform but I don’t use it for anything more than that.
I suspect the new training status stuff that’s been rolled out would likely be a good fit for cyclists, even those who haven’t purchased a power meter.
Generally Garmin has much better features than Strava for setting up and executing a structured training plan, then analyzing your performance. But Strava has better social features. Many endurance athletes use both platforms. It's easy to create a free tier Strava account and automatically sync activities from Garmin to show your friends.
If you know that you're going to be running in challenging conditions like snow that reduce your pace then use the Trail Run activity profile and set "Record VO2 Max.” to Off. That should prevent it from changing your fitness metrics.
Always has been that way; that's the whole idea of Strava (or Komoot, RideWithGPS, etc). These platforms are for casuals.
> Ironically some of the highest performing endurance athletes I know don't even use it anymore. TrainingPeaks + Garmin is where it's
Always been this way as well (TrainingPeaks/TrainerRoads). These platforms are for training and improving performance. Garmin is Garmin... majority of endurance athletes wear Garmin devices (or Suntoo).
Having said that, it's easy to upload to multiple platforms so they all treat Strava or other social media as brand awareness.
For training, sure, but a significant proportion of Olympic calibre athletes use the social elements of these tools.
At least in road and trail running, this doesn't line up with my observation. There are plenty of elite athletes, at least in the US, who are posting their training on Strava (Jim Walmsley, CJ Albertson, Molly Seidel, etc.) At the fast amateur level (e.g. those chasing the Olympic Trials Qualifier time), Strava adoption is pretty ubiquitous.
Out of the the athletes who are active on social media in the first place, those who don't post on Strava are usually doing it either for privacy reasons, or because they do not want to share their training plans for their competitors to copy.
Yup, (personal) brand awareness. Strava is for casuals but the training results will be posted there regardless who you are (except as you mentioned, for privacy). As I stated above: Strava is for casuals, those Amateur->Pro level posted there "just because" it's easy to do it not because they rely Strava for Data Analysis.
Those athletes will rely on other platforms to analyze their training data (Garmin offers more insight for example).
Setting up Strava to link with Garmin is easy right? Things will sync from that point onward.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/01/strava-raises-prices-dou...
There was a similar uproar last time when they gated a bunch of popular features behind premium, but anecdotally it massively increased the subscribers among serious users (myself included). As long as they have a defacto monopoly in the social fitness space, serious users will pay.
And Adobe - I was just told my $14.99 plan was rising to $19.99.
Quickbooks online - a similar rise last November.
It's great only because of massive community. Heatmaps (the killer feature besides segments), ability to see what routes other people ride, segments. Those are simple uses of content the users provide which makes it great and let you discover routes, meet people and have a little competition.
If we had some kind of way to export the data to another project and wouldn't need to go through the minefield of patents then a leaner start up could easily take its place. Maybe it's not a billion dollar niche yet but a few hundred million market for a team of a few good programmers could be good enough to give it a shot.
I finally quit Strava when I got an Apple Watch and they added friction to Apple health sync. As a paid subscriber it was received as deliberately hostile UX to pump daily engagement numbers
They have a great network of amateur athletes but it's not worth the risk
In Strava's case they already have the integration complete and the hostile UX is them forcing you to open the app and manually trigger the sync rather than running the sync as a listener or during background refresh . They could even add a "sync all" button but instead they force you to sync dozens of activities (my activities tend to be short + mixed).
I recommend getting ready for on device for your app – all apps are heading toward on-device for data & even model training.
Apple is a special case, because they offer a tightly closed ecosystem with watches, phones, laptops...
That’s after a lot of negative press about their heatmaps revealing things best kept private and flyby’s being used to stalk people.
If Strava don’t know what they’re going to charge then they shouldn’t communicate until they can put that number in front of customers. The alternative is… this!
I was a subscriber for a long time but canceled about 2 or so years ago when they went big in on sponsored content. For me it provided no value over Garmin’s tools, which are free (with a device purchase?) and IMO superior for deep fitness tracking, and respecting of my data privacy. I seldom run into an athlete who doesn’t use a Garmin device. Similarly, the Peloton folks have their own fitness data dashboard, and I assume the Wahoo folks do, too.
Strava’s competitive advantage should come from its vast data moat, but I feel like they’re struggling to monetize that effectively. Their social feed is its primary attraction today, but putting that behind a paywall would harm the revenue they get from offering sponsored content (challenges and posts) and analytics products for city planners.
Segments was their original big feature, but that has seemingly fallen to abandonment.
I _want_ an effective, low-frustration, high trust way to find and follow popular user-created maps (and segments I guess.) Every map search service, from Garmin to Run/RideWithGPS to Strava feels close to something great, but each lacking that wow-factor. If anything, AllTrails is closest to a polished and powerful UX that could swallow that entire market if they had the interest in going multi-modal (beyond the heavy focus on destination trail running/walking/hiking).
For most people, it makes all of zero sense. For someone who spends 500h+ a year on their bike, it's an easy purchase.
Strava kinda sucks but it blows the competition out the water.
This sounds like the over-complicated scheme you get after too many product managers spend 6 months holding meetings where nobody wants to back down, so instead they continue to add complexity until every last piece of the decision is a compromise.
Strava has been flailing for years now, dropping much used features and just generally antagonizing its customer base. It's a wonder they're still around and as widely used as they are. Just goes to show how many bad decisions you can absorb as a market leader, I suppose.
The app is incredible if you're a data junky and very serious about performance. Strava is more sexy about maps and sharing though.
I guess for those who want routes/segments might gravitate towards Strava but I use a fairly standard set of routes so I dont value in that either.
Or for "landline" Telus fiber based last mile ISP service bundled with TV.
Its going to burn alot of bridges and there’s no way out of the quagmire
Its just a case study of when the means (always be closing) stop justifying the end