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.
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)
"Money shot" is right; let me just close that office door...
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.
Shameless plug also: I am the developers and operators of the free and vendor independent training log » https://www.velohero.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
That is amazing! A totally deserved plug - love it. I don't live in a very hilly area, but I was frustrated my strava jig tracks looked so 'slow' as I was going up and down my local coast hills on my run. Hope it can work in my area.
It should, the elevation data comes from the NASA SRTM dataset, so unless you live somewhere above the arctic circle, it should work. Try it out, you can drag and drop a GPX/FIT file on the homepage (http://cubetrek.com) without setting up an account.
Nice, where do you get the data from? I'm using OpenStreetMap (OSM features annotated as 'Peak'), and check with PostGIS for peaks that are close to the GPS track.
Yes, I use the same (OSM features annotated as 'Peak'). I've found a few edge cases, like volcanoes, which I also want to count as peaks.
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.
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.
Yes! But only Garmin so far (working on Polar now).
You need to set up an account and than link your Garmin account in the profile.
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 just tried a quick experiment, and it will import GPX files that are exported from Garmin. Whether it will directly pull data from Garmin Connect is a question for the dev, but a quick test drive did not reveal that functionality.
Privacy controls and public posting delays (as in: analysis is available immediately, but public route posting gets delayed to a set time interval) would be excellent, particularly for those people who are more viral than they’d like.
Late reply, but here goes: currently there are two states only, private (only the user can see it) and public (everyone can see it). There are no social features (yet?), so no friends or similar
Not surprised. My take - Strava was founded over 13 years ago, which is a dinosaur in startup land. They've raised $150m+ from investors and they want a return, so the company is scrambling to make decisions which can make the company more money. So I wouldn't be surprised if the specification for pricing was made by a committee and implemented by engineers with little direction. And since no one has conviction on what will work, this is your result (throwing stuff at the wall).
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.
I think you're mostly correct here, but Strava's main selling point isn't the data store and interface (which in my opinion is not great). It's the social feature.
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.
As a current subscriber I'm not sure I agree with this.
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.
I 100% agree with your criticisms. That was my point. Strava’s main feature is the social element, but they are not really maximizing the leverage they have with install base.
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?
Ah right, yep that makes perfect sense and I agree on the comparison with Zwift too.
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.
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.
Funnily enough, it pretty much broke apart our weekend riding group. That was a mountain bike group, and in my city there were about 20 of us on those rides depending on a season. It didn't matter who was the fastest uphill or downhill, or who was the bravest to go on some scary drops and jumps. It was always just about having fun whatever your abilities are. It was always damned fun on those group rides. Ride a lot, talk a lot, enjoy the greenery and fresh air, beer at the end, what's not to like?
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.
What features of Strava have helped with that? Did you find a local cycling group on Strava and met up with people via that? I seem to be a cycling (or at least group riding) dead zone, because there don't seem to be any active groups near me.
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.
Use the flyover feature and segment leaderboards to identify users active in your area, then check which clubs they have joined. Some of those clubs might have a weekly group ride either listed as a Strava event, or on a linked web site or Facebook group.
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.
Flyover also helped me connect with groups that I would see riding in other directions. Since flyover was made opt-in, I haven't gotten any use out of it.
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?
I think the bigger problem is that their users all have accounts on competing services by this point.
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.
The endurance athletes who care about data use Garmin Connect, TrainingPeaks, and WKO for tracking and analytics. Strava's analytics and workout planning features are basically useless.
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.
Yea, I "left" the app when they started forcing me to pay. After a year of paying for it, I just couldn't justify paying that much money just to compete, racing along the inherently flawed timed segments.
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.
It's a classic story of a startup with a loyal userbase paying a reasonable fee for stagnating features for years, misjudges customer loyalty, doubles the price, then makes some PR mistakes, and comes out behind in the end.
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 mean for me, just.. not using strava. I’m also in a triathlon club in my area, and some people use strava together, but a bunch of people don’t, and you aren’t really missing out on much by not having it.
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.
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.
What features are you looking for with a running app?
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.
Garmin Connect actually has all the useful (to me) features Strava has.
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.
Yeah I’ve done that, I’ve had the scale for a couple years and the issue was never resolved. If you check the garmin forums for the 7% body fat bug you’ll see it’s an ongoing issue for a lot of folks.
TrainingPeaks, Xert, ... there are a number of sites that cater to professional training analysis. It's a niche they tend to do much better at than Strava since they don't have the social thing to go with it. Meanwhile, if all you want is the social part, why are you paying for Strava.
> It's a classic story of a startup with a loyal userbase paying a reasonable fee for stagnating features for years, misjudges customer loyalty, doubles the price, then makes some PR mistakes, and comes out behind in the end.
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.
> 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).
I’m not their target user so I’m pretty ignorant but I have to wonder - what else can they add? Would people complain just as much if they were “moving fast and breaking things”? Maybe they need to raise the price to avoid layoffs many other companies have been doing.
Seems like they haven’t improved and still lack incredibly basic features like providing a current pace estimate for runners. I gave up after years of wanting it to improve and much prefer Workoudoors as a one time fair priced alternative that crushes strava on features and posts everything to strava automatically if you want the social side.
Old Twitter was and current Strava are about as good as they can be. You can't complain about no new features when you haven't articulated what's missing.
Yikes! As a starting point, I'd love for Workoutdoors to add a valid SSL and not index their HTTP site to Google. I tried this once on my Apple Watch Ultra and found it a maddening experience. I'm hopeful though that investment in these space improves because, to your point, Strava has not been contributing all that much.
Like sibling, I'm a little confused about the issue with no HTTPS. I rarely even view the site, and no user data is on there AFAICT. And do the data even leave the watch/phone? I don't see any traffic that isn't just synching iCloud data.
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).
I'm a little confused, are the concerns with SSL and indexing related to your experience using it? I use it on Apple watch ultra, and was not aware of security issues, but the find the usability to be excellent in most cases.
Yeah, it's such a weird thing to gate behind a paid subscription too. It’s not like I get anything useful beyond minor feel good fuzzies from yearly recaps of that nature.
So were most of their mapping features. And their leaderboards. Their approach to monetization of late has been to sprinkle a little glitter on existing features and then put the entire feature behind a paywall and raise the price later.
If one has Garmin Connect, go to Reports/Progress Summary, choose date range (including "last year") from dropdown: more stats than you'll know what to do with.
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.
If someone is going to shit on your company, and you're in the same sports category as him, you do not want it to be Ray. This is going to blow up in their faces. To me he's kind of like the face of running, Strava, Wahoo, etc. Yikes.
Considering the cost of tubes, tires, etc these days.. So what? Maybe a runner sees it differently, but for a cyclist the value is there, and the cost is justified. I can't think about needing an inflation adjustment in salary and get mad when merchants do also.
Good on them. If people will pay it, it's the right move. Can't spend internet points anyway so hit me.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Strava is being massively greedy here without showing innovation over the last years.
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.
Somewhat small complaint, but this bit me. Did a half marathon and got a PR, stopped when my watch hit 13.1. Strava didn’t record this as a HM because it had the mileage at 13.09 or something. Very annoying and still irks me.
My first organized marathon I kept running after the finish line, through the crowd of stopped runners, until my watch hit 26.3mi just so I could be certain It'd show up as a PR in Strava/Garmin.
I think the point is that effort is not tracked as a 10k, so you don't see that in your PR history, etc. Plus it is just annoying to do something big for yourself and have a tool publicly shortchange you.
Is Strava really being greedy here? Last year at this time, software developers were jumping ship in every company to get huge raises at other companies. Salaries went through the roof. Now many tech companies are laying folks off.
What other options are there when you staff demands huge raises or leaves for greener pastures?
They don't need to show innovation when the product is complete. Twitter with the new innovative "For You" tab is much worse than when it was coasting with nothing new. Same with electron 1Password 8.
electron 1password 8 would be ok. if it worked as before or better, I mean enthusiast would've cared, but most people not. I mean they did not have a linux app before which they now have. but what is so stupid about 1password 8 is the new search, its just stupid.
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.
Prices should not go up for hosting and development. Prices should go down per user as there are fixed costs. Same with development.
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.
> Prices should not go up for hosting and development. Prices should go down per user as there are fixed costs. Same with development.
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.
I think it is always the case that it leads to reduced hosting/infra costs. But that doesn’t mean it leads to lower prices as these cost savings aren’t passed on to users.
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.
Even then they may have been able to attract a lot more revenue by keeping the old price, or god forbid, offer a discount. If you grow your free users by 100%, and your run costs are only 5-10% of your business, you do not need that much to absorb those incremental costs. However, if your business model requires 20 dollars profit per paying user, then of course your business model needs looking at. Just like Netflix is trying to say.
If you go on /r/strava there have been threads about it all week and a large percentage of posters say they are cancelling. It seems like this is blowing up in their faces a bit.
I'm in the "still shows original price" boat for now. If/when my annual renewal comes due and the price is $80 instead of $50, I'll probably cancel as well.
> And oddly, they refuse to tell journalists what the official subscription fees will be
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.
WOW. Ray / DCRainmaker is a huge voice in the endurance sports world, you don’t want this kind of publicity from him.
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.
I wonder if their infrastructure costs are getting too much. Having all that backlog of data that has to be processed to do the high score boards and such must cost a fortune.
I’m shocked they still have such bad route management on desktop and mobile.
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.
I’ve found sometimes the OSM data is to blame. The Strava route planner refused to take the rail underpass because someone had marked it as bike access: no. Rather than access: dismount. So since I was route planning a bike trip, it just wouldn’t use that path.
That makes sense, at least. The examples I'm thinking of are running routes where the tool can follow the path as long as I place an excessive number of waypoints to force its way.
Strava has turned into a social media and comparison platform. Ironically some of the highest performing endurance athletes I know don't even use it anymore. TrainingPeaks + Garmin is where it's at.
> Strava has turned into a social media and comparison platform
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.
That's what I stated: the "amateur -> pros" level athletes are using the social elements to build their brands (aside from TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, etc)
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.
> 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
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.
trainingpeaks haven't seen proper dev since like 2017, except for a little css facelift i think. The only reason athlete uses it is because coach uses it and coach uses it because tp sugarcoat them.
I'm in the same boat: Strava is just for cheering on friends (and occasionally looking at segment PRs). My only gripe with Garmin Connect is that it unfairly negs some runs, e.g., calling my slower runs after recent snow/ice storms Unproductive.
Training Status such as "Unproductive" is calculated on your Garmin hardware device. Garmin Connect only displays what the device calculates. (I think that is a flawed approach, but Garmin is primarily a device company so that's just how it works.)
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.
I haven't used Garmin in two years. How does it sound like Garmin is eating Strava's lunch? Back then, Garmin didn't offer me anything for cycling that Strava didn't have. Has this changed?
I guess the question I have is what features did Strava have for cycling which Garmin didn’t? My main sport is running so I’m coming at it from that angle.
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.
Garmin devices require a power meter to calculate training status for cycling. They can calculate other metrics like training load without 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.
The messaging here is absolutely terrible, but I suspect most premium users will keep their subscription.
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.
I started supporting smashrun.com a few years ago. Tiny team, passionate updates, and it feels good to support people living the life they want vs giving some VC a 10x return.
I love Strava. It's a shitty app. It's missing many simple features. It doesn't even do GPS reading right (segments are often cut out extended at the end/beginning of the activity). It does segment matching incorrectly (matches to the first recorded activity of the segment creator instead of matching to averaged matched runs). Route creator is terrible. You can't even change the place the circular route starts at. There are many more little quirks, some straight up terrible programming and failure to implement obvious cool features.
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 can't see this having a huge impact; if you're a cyclist/runner who cares about leaderboards and blasting out your accomplishments, you'll continue to pay; if you don't you probably don't have Strava premium. As I cyclist I find RideWithGPS or Komoot much better for actual route planning / navigation (though I use a Wahoo bike computer instead of the app for the latter anyway).
It's going from $9.99 to $14.99/month in Canada. I'm out. Even at $10 I was considering whether it was worth it. At $15 it's not even close. I turned off auto-renew this morning when I saw the DC Rainmaker video.
I had to check the app and my subscription in the App Store to confirm, but my annual subscription is jumping from $59.99 to $79.99. I’m set to renew at the end of this month.
Not many of my friends use it regularly but it’s sometimes fun to look them up and see how fast they are. A couple of them have PRs where Strava must have screwed up because it says they ran a 3:44 mile or something. I run a PR at a race and Strava shorts me 0.01 miles so my PR isn’t on it. It’s hard to take it too seriously. I’ll just train on my own and keep track of PRs on my own, may use the free features from time to time.
Stravas security breaches have remained off the radar. Private runs and maps are exposed . There have been cases of harassment, doxxing and assault via these breaches.
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
I'm also looking in integrating Apple Health sync data into an app I'm currently working on. However, to be honest, Apple is also being a PITA. Pretty much every other fitness tracker (Garmin, Polar, Suunto) offers some kind of Web API to access and sync data. But of course Apple does not do that, you need to build some kind of app on iOS which the user needs to install on his/her device, which of course adds extra friction.
The industry is moving toward on-device APIs for privacy protection. that way the data can remain encrypted & private on the device and there's less risk of a breach.
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.
I find that a bit hard to believe for the more established device makers (e.g. Garmin, Polar, Suunto). Their device is a watch, if I want to look at analytics, I will need to move the data off to the cloud, I don't want to look at graphs and maps on a half-inch watchface.
Apple is a special case, because they offer a tightly closed ecosystem with watches, phones, laptops...
I’m not a Strava subscriber (I prefer TrainingPeaks for that) but wow, this is a poor way to communicate price increases. Most people can deal with prices increasing. What they can’t deal with is a total lack of communication about that increase.
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!
As it stands, paying for Strava feels like paying for Twitter in terms of the cost/benefit trade off.
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).
I think Strava need to do a better job monetizing their Api. API consumers (other websites) should be charged and maybe even move integration support as a premium feature. They need to cash in on the fact that everyone is using them as a fitness platform aggregation service.
Not seeing a lot of rational discourse here in the thread. The price of Strava has been in continual monotonic decline in real dollar terms. A 35% price increase across the board, if that is the weighted average, would just bring them up to 2009-2023 chained inflation.
People are annoyed because the competitors have got a lot better and because Strava hasn’t improved over that period, in many ways it’s got more annoying to use.
Kinda was waiting for this to happen. Overall I have been happy being a Strava subscriber, but great web app experiences never last. Eventually quality suffers, Ads get crazy, or prices go way up.
I'm in the 500 hour a year set. Strava's analytics don't hold a candle to intervals.icu or the stuff you can do with Golden Cheetah or TrainingPeaks. Ride With GPS is a much better route planner. Every time Strava has given me a free trial, I've been underwhelmed. The segment analysis is the only premium feature I really miss, but it's not worth another subscription.
> For some people, prices will double overnight. For others, it’ll be nothing. Others still yet will split the difference on a wide-ranging scale in between those points. The determining factor? Theoretically a combination of which country you’re in, when exactly you signed up, whether you’re on annual or monthly plans, and finally, exactly what today’s date is, relative to the date of your subscription renewal. I’m not kidding, you can’t make this up.
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.
When you get too many MBAs into a room. Pricing and features are based on an excel model optimizing for revenue with some magic numbers someone picked out of a hat that determines price sensitivity by region. Don’t let your CFO drive. They are a support role only.
I think you hit it dead on. This is design by committee and organizational dysfunction.
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.
SmashRun https://smashrun.com/ if you do only running activities. It’s great. Though while I pay for that, I also pay for strava since 2012 and will continue to do so. Disagree with grandparent post, I think strava has become better and better over time and I find it more engaging and useful than before.
If you're a Garmin device user, the app is pretty good!
I only recently started using their app more often and barring the social aspects, I dont think Strava offers me anything more. HR zones, recovery etc are all already in the Garmin app whereas its paid on Strava.
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.
Eventually taken to its logical conclusion, you end up with something that looks like the terms and conditions and contract clauses seen when signing up for a "promotional" offer price on a 24 or 36-month service term with a famously consumer abusive Canadian cellular carrier like Bell, Telus or Rogers or one of their sub-brands wholly owned MVNOs.
Or for "landline" Telus fiber based last mile ISP service bundled with TV.
To me it sounds more like they have key clients already paying wildly different arrangements, who are going to want to get out of the contract if they learn the new pricing
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
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!