Chuck M 

After the last Strava price increase, I decided to not renew when my subscriptions expired in December. Most everything I subscribed for I wasn't really using except for very rare times I wanted to create a route or for the beacon function. I liked the ease of creating routes with Strava over Garmin's site and for some reason, beacon always works where Garmin's Livetrack rarely works. I have had two emails thus far that said this was my last chance to get a discount on resubscribing and I suppose they may send me more last chances like Kiss farewell tours. Map my Ride and Ride with GPS seem a bit better than Garmin for creating routes, but still not as good as Strava IMHO.

So have any of you found something you liked better than Strava and not went back, or did you go back due to not finding a better option? I'm probably leaning toward not going back but I'm interested in other's experiences?

Barry2 

Mine also expired in December. Their price hike from last year was so excessive I haven’t renewed.
yes they are offering discounts, but they are going to expect me to pay full price eventually.

bandaid ripped off

Barry

staehpj1

I mostly want to track my data so I have used free mapmyride/mapmyrun until somewhat recently. About the time the free account wasn't useful any more I quit them. For quite a while I was trail running a lot more than riding so it was mostly mapmyrun for a long time. Then my dog got too old to run and I went back riding as my daily workout. About then I switched to Garmin. I tried it when I bought a Garmin watch and found it met my needs fine.

I do let garmin send my data to my free strava account, and I guess it is still active because I get kudos now and then, but I never actually use the app.

Koyote

I had to go into Strava to see what I'm paying; it's $79.99/yr. That's a rounding error in my finances.

Bald Paul

I stopped using Strava a few years ago. It really didn't offer me much more that what I got using Garmin Connect and Ride w/GPS.
Garmin Connect gives me all the stats after a ride - with cadence, speed (average and maximum), heart rate, power output, etc. If I need to plan out a route, I just use the free version of Ride w/GPS, create my route, export it, and bring it into Garmin Connect to upload to my head unit. Connect even has segment leaders, if you're into that stuff.

tomato coupe

Cancelled. Didn't go back.

base2 

I cancelled. Rolled everything into Connect and really made an effort to like Connect. It turns out that I just don't like the interface. Eventually I went back to Strava and had to manually edit every ride since the switch to preserve continuity.

The people I know are all on Strava. I still keep my rides private with rare exception. That being if we actually see each other in the bike trail it's nice to chat in person & post selfies to the world.

I'm still not sure what $80 gets me besides a fitness/freshness graph and an idea of cumulative training load.

mschwett 

22 cents a day. It’s kind of amazing to me what people who can afford internet, bicycles, internet devices, food and shelter feel is worth griping over. it costs money to run companies and websites, especially one with a hundred million users.

terrymorse 

• your complete personal history on segments
• segment leaderboards by age & gender

Barry2 

I started paying for Strava in 2019 long before their push to convert free users to paid.
I like the product and felt I should.

Then last year they bumped the price. I feel like this was milking the paid users to cover the masses of free users.
This price model is unfair.

Just charge EVERY user ~$10-20/yr and enjoy all the additional funding that comes in.

Barry

mschwett 

i wonder if they considered that model - as I understand it the problem is that the social aspect of the platform requires a very, very large critical mass, and if everyone had to pay there would simply not be enough users for things like KOMs and many aspects of segments, the heat map based routing, route sharing, clubs etc to work well outside of a handful of very densely cycled areas of the world. At this point Strava is a pretty huge ecosystem, with an API and device partnerships and all that.

A ride tracking platform without any social aspect would be simpler and easier to implement, and many exist but have not been nearly as successful as Strava. They are correspondingly cheaper, although even RwGPS is now $60/yr or so!

100M users sounds like a lot, but that’s globally…

Koyote

And the ability to follow friends' activities. I've lived in three different states in the past seven years, and Strava is a nice way to keep up with cycling friends.

On what data do you base that conclusion? I'll bet that Strava knows more than you do about how best to maximize their profit.

PeteHski

I like Strava for ride logging and keeping in touch with what my friends are doing. The paid features are a bit meh, but I just pay and forget. None of the alternatives really appeal. I have Garmin Connect too but I don’t like the UI and so hardly use it.

One Wheel

I've tried the free trial of Strava premium, and the free version does everything I need. It's not worth it to me to pay for it, but because of the social aspect I add value to the platform for people who do pay for it.

Bald Paul

Connect has that as well.

Barry2 

I use Wyze home security cameras. When motion occurs they store the video clip in the Cloud for 14 days.
On most of their models, this Cloud storage is included in the purchase of the hardware. No monthly fees.... Free.

Some months ago they asked their Free customers to "pay what/if you can" and IIRC suggested $3/month.
I thought $36/yr was a fair price and chose to pay the recommended fee.

Strava could adopt a similar approach by offering a Contributing Membership along with one of the paid only features to encourage signups.
It has to be better than alienation (and loss) of existing paying customers through the adoption of excessive price hikes.

Barry

Rick_D

Since I already pay Garmin for their gizmos I'm comfortable using their Connect, Explore and Earthmate apps. Don't even want the added complexity of a 3rd party app avec subscription.

Not to mention already having more subscriptions than I can easily count--suckers add up.

Chuck M 

I too thought the increase was excessive. That is why I evaluated if I thought I really needed it or not. I started to pick at the bandaid, but when I clicked subscribe, it was going to subscribe me to all the features. I seemed to remember when I initially subscribed there were a la carte options.
still have mine connected. Between My Fitness Pal, Strava, Fitbit, and Garmin Connect, there is some hoodoo that gets data from them to my Apple Watch and I don't want to break that. And I look at

I have a Garmin Edge and a Forerunner. Garmin does a good job of collecting and presenting data to me if I want to see it. But the cost of it over a year just to plan one or two routes doesn't make the $0.22 a day worthwhile. There was a time obviously that I didn't mind subscribing to all the features. When I was running with the youth group. I did like the trending feature to track the improvement of my youth I paired with but it wasn't important to track my trends. Heatmaps were good to find routes when I traveled quite a bit, but my job now doesn't require travel. The Flyby feature was really neat when I was running marathons but since the privacy settings changes people don't turn Flyby on that much.

datlas 

I use the free version which is good enough for my needs. I use ridewithgps for route planning, Strava just to track my rides and what my friends are doing.

That said, I predict later this year they may get rid of the free version. I hope I am wrong but they are under pressure from investors to become more profitable.

One Wheel

If they get rid of the free version there may be a slight temporary uptick in revenue, but they'll be bankrupt within 5 years. That's my prediction.

AE86Trueno

For me I find Strava and Garmin Connect features overlap a lot and also tried the subscription but the paid features I don't really use it so I went back to free member in Strava.
One feature that I miss was the weekly distance I can quickly glance from the main page, this was available for free member but recently (few months back) I think they removed it. It still there but did not show any distance.
The social part of Strava I think is the biggest difference as its brand agnostic so naturally it will have more users compared to Connect.

chaadster

Geez, Strava says I’ve been a subscriber since 2013, so I’m pretty anchored. I have user profiles with Garmin Connect, RidewithGPS, TrainingPeaks, SRAM AXS, Wahoo, and lord knows what else, but Strava is the thing I appreciate more than any other, and by a huge margin. Strava is peerless.

datlas 

Sounds about right for Private Equity controlled company.

Again, I hope both you and I are wrong in these predictions because I think it’s a good product, but they are under pressure to show better numbers in advance of monetization or whatever you call it when VC/PE wants their money.

Barry2 

As of December 2023 Strava has a new CEO (Michael Martin). I so hope he does something to monetize the Free users and stops the milking of those that pay for the product.

Barry

One Wheel

Non-paying users add value to the product. There are other options that I don't use, simply because there aren't as many people to compare to. As a non-paying user I miss out on some features, and that is reasonable. I just checked the segments that I have KOMs on, and, not counting the one that only has 3 people recorded as completing the segment, only 17 out of 40 users in the top 10 are premium users (some overlap between segments, obviously). I'm not mooching, I'm contributing to critical mass.