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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

I assume Strava thinks about it like you: we have an affluent base who spends thousands a year on their sports, they can afford it.

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.

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> their premium features have been stagnant for years

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

They definitely did that to compete with Komoot and Ridewithgps. Compare the platform with piggy-back app intervals.icu which adds so many more useful technical training features and you'll see what I mean.

>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.

Again not my experience. The heatmap is essential and frankly all the other apps suck for route planning (including the ones you listed as well as others that have come and gone over the years). Strava's route planner has no competition, their main concern is not some upstart app that computes obscure workout details, but getting disintermediated by Apple or Garmin bundling apps with their wearables.

I agree that doesn't excuse poor PR around price increases though.

Not your experience, but it's definitely the prevailing sentinment by users in the threads I've read about this. If I read a lot of people saying "I can't cancel because I need the route builder" then maybe you would have a point.

Overhauling one feature that only a few care about isn't a persuasive argument that they've kept up with their competitors.

"Strava's route planner has no competition"

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.

I'm never really sure about Komoot either. In the UK it struggles with the difference between a really big town and a city.

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.

strava had manual mode forever fyi......

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)

The heatmap integration really is the killer feature for me. I otherwise don't like Strava's route planner, but the heatmap is better data for deciding what road to take than anything available elsewhere.

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?

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.

I've had a handful of subscription services that I've canceled when they raise their prices. I stopped subscribing to Strava and Netflix quite a long while ago. I dropped Prime last year. Currently I subscribe to water, gas, electricity, fixed-line internet, cellular, Costco, landscaper, mortgage, and government.

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.

> I think most every consumer looks at it like they look at every other recurring service

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.

Nobody considers Strava's training tools 'serious.' It's a social network for training. The premium tools all have better versions on other platforms like Training Peaks, Xert, TrainerRoad etc. that literally every athelete uses instead. No athlete is sharing their training data with their coach on Strava, so given that I think comparisons to entertainment are fair.

>but I can feel a strawman forming

Let's address fallacies as they happen instead of before they do, okay? I find this uncharitable.

Or even Garmin connect, I was looking for a coach and most wanted to use some sort of training peaks/garmin combo.

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.

I had a friend who did that exact thing. Was a decent cat 2 or 3 at that point but was constantly chasing KOMs and burned themselves out hard.

Well my Netflix and UberEats bills are $0 and if a subscription service is to be compared to a basic human need as food itself, that's a bit of a complete misunderstanding of a general humans hierarchy of needs. That applies to any entertainment service.

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