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.
