If Strava Live segments is important to you, be aware that Lezyne, Wahoo and other small players in the cycling GPS market may not be able to deliver on their promises to have that feature on their products. This excerpt is from a recent dc rainmaker review of the Stages Dash
But then there’s the bigger problem: Lack of Strava Live Segments
See, the original Stages Dash didn’t have Strava Live Segments either – but the company wanted to roll it out with these new products. Up until this point in time, that was largely a company-specific (Stages) thing, not a Strava limiter. As long as they had Strava’s blessing to roll out, it was merely a technical implementation item. Garmin, Polar, Lezyne, Wahoo, Mio, Sigma, and probably some others I’m missing all have done so on a variety of their devices.
But when Stages went to get said blessing they were essentially told to pay a per-device fee. Without getting too far into the specifics, that per-device fee is massive – almost as much as retailers would make. Of course, for any company, that’s a non-starter. Stages was apparently the first company to be caught in this new Strava policy of making money on the device side of Strava Live Segments (as a reminder it already is limited to only paying Strava Premium users).
Now both Stages and Strava say they’re still working this out – and thus, for the time being, I’ll sit a bit longer on the sidelines while they do so.
But let me be clear upfront: I’m not a fan, and let me explain why.
This is effectively a Garmin device promotion fee. There’s really no other way to frame it. See, Strava can go to smaller players like Stages, Sigma, Lezyne, and Polar (and probably even Wahoo) and force them to pay this fee (or not have the feature). Whereas if they go to Garmin and say the same, Garmin will tell them to ‘take a flying leap’ (actually, they’ll use other four-letter words).
Strava will have no choice of course, because Garmin commands about 95-98% of the cycling GPS market. But more importantly – it drives people to actually subscribe to Strava Premium. Without Garmin, Strava’s back to losing boatloads of cash (which investors don’t like). It’s the much tighter partnership between Strava and Garmin over the last 3 years that’s increased Strava’s previously non-existent revenues. Strava knows this, Garmin knows this…and everyone else knows this.
Plus this:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2018/08/...ing-model.html