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.