We live in the age of the subscription, and those prices are going up all the time. If you’re not careful, you can end up paying out loads of money for a bunch of services that might not be worth it, and that got me thinking… Strava, are you worth my cash?
Strava, a brief history
The year is 2008. Up until this point, most cyclists have recorded their bike rides through the medium of a pen and paper in training diaries. I remember filling out Cycling Weekly’s mileage calendars, or, people simply went for a bike ride, armed only with jam sandwiches and a rough idea of when they’d be home.
After launching in 2009 as a phone app that would drain your battery faster than a Cav sprint, it quickly became the way many of us log bike rides, runs, swims, hikes and all sorts of other activities. But then Strava paywalled a lot of the features people loved in May of 2020 and since then, the price has risen quite a bit.
What does it cost?
Let’s start by looking at what Strava costs. In the UK, you’re paying £8.99 per month or £55 for a year, which is what I do. If you’re a student, the price is quite a bit lower and if you and three of your ‘family’ go in for an annual plan together, you’ll be paying £25 each per year.
> How much does it really cost to be a cyclist?
Because Strava acquired the Runna brand recently, you can pop your accounts together for £120 per year. There was a time where I was training for a half and was paying for both Strava and Runna separately, so this combined deal is nice to see, especially for hybrid athletes.
But, you can still use Strava for free.
What do you get for free?
With the free version, you can still upload your rides, join some clubs and importantly I think for everyone, you get the safety features where you can hide the start and end of your ride so that people can’t see where you live.
If you record your ride through the app, people you select can get a text to track you in real time, which can be helpful if you have a problem.
Once you’ve uploaded a ride, you get your basic stats, a map of where you went and you can keep tabs on your annual distance in the Training Calendar. But the main thing that I think made Strava popular, is something you now have to pay for.
Kings & Queens
Sprinting for imaginary finish lines which offer little more than a vague sense of self-worth has been my entire personality for many years now, but Strava’s KoMs and QoMs are out of reach to all but the fastest riders.
The people at the top of the leaderboard are ridiculously fast, but you can still keep track of your best time, and race your friends.
> How to use Strava to make you fitter
Chasing your local segments is actually quite good fun and Strava has taken, what I think at least, are good steps to keeping things interesting for a wide number of riders.
If you get a premium subscription you’ll get access to more than just the top 10 for any segment with additional leaderboards for the year and by age and weight.
I understand why Strava put most KoM results behind a paywall because that’s a lot of data it has to store, but doing this, added to most KoMs being out of reach.
Mapping
Strava’s route builder is one of the things that keeps me renewing that subscription each year. For planning road rides it is the best that I’ve used, and I’m not surprised.
Strava now has a huge database of where people like to ride, so if I select a start and a finish point, its algorithm has a good idea of where the nice roads are, and it generally does a good job of routing you on the good stuff.
I don’t use my personal heatmap that much, but I’ll sometimes turn on the global heatmap to see if a road is well-used by other riders. I’ve found this especially helpful in the mountains or when planning a gravel ride as sometimes you’re just unsure of how suitable a road or trail is. If loads of other people have ridden it, then generally it’ll be ok.
It is also very smooth to use on the app, which I found myself doing quite a bit this year, but Strava does have some competition.
Garmin Connect is free to use, even if you don’t have a Garmin and, on desktop at least, the route builder is pretty good. Komoot is also an excellent option, especially if you’re a bit more adventure-orientated.
And then if you use a Wahoo, you’ll probably already know, but creating a route on their app is dead easy.
AI (Athlete Intelligence)
One feature that annoys me so much that I’d consider cancelling my subscription is Strava’s use of AI.
This is, for me, one of the clearest examples of a company shoehorning AI into its service, probably in an attempt to provide customers with a sense of value. But I think they’ve got this so incredibly wrong.
I believe Strava’s AI, or Athlete Intelligence as they call it, is just dumb. It will take the basic data of your ride and give you a very general synopsis of what you did, which I think is useless, because you just did that activity.
It will also feed off your title and description giving further unintelligent insights. My real issues with this feature boil down to two main points.
Firstly, the AI feedback lacks any sort of real purpose. For a newer rider it doesn’t offer any helpful tips about, for example, pacing a climb more effectively.
For an experienced rider, I’m getting no helpful insight into how I could be faster, or where my weak points are.
And secondly, this feature is being advertised as a benefit of my subscription. If it isn’t telling me anything useful, and I don’t want it, why do I have to pay for it?
While we’re on the AI subject, Strava has started providing you with performance predictions and they’re mostly aimed at runners. Unfortunately, once again, I have found them to be a bit useless. While I was training for a half marathon earlier this year, I did some 5km and 10km tests to try out my race day pacing.
During this test I set a 10km pb, yet when Strava adjusted my predicted 10km time, it was slower than I’d just run, which makes no sense. Then when I did my half, I ran something like 5 minutes faster than my Strava predicted time.
If you’re not a big runner, that might not sound like a lot, but that’s a huge chasm when it comes to pacing, so I really wouldn’t follow its guidance too closely.
Thankfully, you can turn the AI stuff off if you have a premium subscription. You just go to a ride, tell the AI to say more, then you just tap a button and it’ll turn off the AI on all of your activities.
Alternatives
If you see a ride-sharing app like Strava as another social media platform, then I think Strava is the best. It has good chat functions and being able to export a little data overlay of your activity so that you can brag on Instagram is great.
It’s also the best for those of you who love chasing segments or just comparing climbing times.
For gravel riding and mapping adventure rides, Komoot would be my choice, especially the free version. It has a whole community around it and I can’t describe how useful I find the notes feature where people can describe trail conditions and give pointers. Finding decent gravel riding is sometimes a bit tricky in the UK, so having this info is incredibly useful.
The best free alternative for road riding, however, has to be Garmin Connect. The mapping is good, the amount of data available is way better than in Strava, its training tools are decent, if a little messy in their layout, and Garmin’s pre-made coaching plans are good too.
This works best if you have a Garmin, but there are services like RunGap which you can pay for to integrate any device onto Garmin Connect.
But, I don’t think Garmin can really match the community elements of Strava, so it’s probably one for those of you who simply want to analyse your data and track your rides.
Will I pay for Strava next year?
There are some things that really frustrate me, but for the amount that I use it, I think the price is alright, so I’ll leave my Strava subscription rolling.
That said, I really want Strava to go back to focusing on some of the central features that people sign up for. So can they bring the data analysis up to the level of Garmin Connect, can their mapping adopt any of what maps Komoot great for adventure rides and can it improve some of those woeful AI features?
Do you pay for Strava, and if not, why not? Let us know in the comments as always
50 thoughts on “Is Strava still worth paying for? As the price of cycling continues to rise and rise, we weigh up the pros and cons of Strava’s Premium tier”
I cancelled my Strava
I cancelled my Strava subscription last month because they’ve lost sight of their customers. They take weeks to reply on issues. The app keeps sending me obsequious messages: “Wow! Nice work”, Way to go”, whether it’s a strong ride or a 1km walk. Most importantly, they don’t have any interest in fixing bugs or adding features that subscribers ask for.
I’ve reported three really annoying bugs over the years. They respond to me after a week or more, and I eventually find out, over a month later, that they’ll get round to fixing it when they can be bothered (probably never).
I will miss the subscription features, especially fitness and freshness. Mind you, fatigue is only available on the desktop browser version, despite more than a decade of people asking for it on the apps. Disappointed all round.
As someone fully embedded in
As someone fully embedded in the Garmin ecosystem, watch (I run as well as cycle), cycle computer, radar, I’ve never bothered with the fitness features as the Garmin versions seem better thought out and are available on mobile, web, watch and cycle computer. When I tried the free Strava subscription I couldn’t find anything that was useful to me.
I’d shut my account down except that I do have some friends on there and seeing what they are up to is of interest.
lesterama wrote:
I use the desktop “Elevate” app for this (link: https://github.com/thomaschampagne/elevate?tab=readme-ov-file#desktop-app)
Available on Windows and Mac. Link it to your Strava account and it will keep itself in-sync. You can even point it at a “close my account” export of all your Strava data and it will chew on all of that rather than being rate-limited by Strava’s API.
It also has Chrome/Edge/Opera/Brave browser plugins but I don’t use them so can’t comment on their feature set.
yep, these cheesy
yep, these cheesy “motivational” notifications are highly annoying. There’s probably a setting to turn them off, I’ll have a look.
What is also annoying is the random pop-ups saying “look what you’re missing” by not subscribing (I’ve not been doing enough serious training to justify it).
I find the Garmin Connect app gives me all the stats I want. I use RideWithGPS for route planning occasionally and I have an app called HealthFit (iOS) for extra stats and Apple Watch workout syncing.
The route planning was the
The route planning was the only premium feature of Strava that I had any interest in and when they put that behind the paywall I moved over to Komoot.
I find the route planning of Komoot a better experience particularly for offroad gravel riding. Even if it was free I wouldn’t go back to Strava.
Personally I think that £55 a year is stupidly expensive for what it provides. A lot of folks seem to be blind to subscription costs, but they all add up.
Komoot only works with people
Komoot only works with people crowd sourcing the routes for you, if people arent creating routes in areas you want to ride or not taking the really local knowledge only style routes, then Komoots no better at route planning than google maps. (which is why when any of those social media influencers use it to plan a route, theres always a why has Komoot sent me this way moment)
at least Strava is combining its heatmaps & segments of routes people ride into usable routes.
Komoot is way better than
Komoot is way better than Google Maps for route planning, and leagues beyond it in accuracy of time estimates.
The ability to quickly source decent loops in a completely new area is icing on the cake.
Conversely I’ve always found
Conversely I’ve always found Strava better for Road route planning and RideWithGPS and Cycle.Travel better for Offroad. Komoot only when I get desperate.
Strava’s off road routing is weighted too much towards the global heatmap and includes too many footpaths.
I’ve never had a premium
I’ve never had a premium account.
Garmin Connect gives me all the info I want; and when I want something deeper, then Veloviewer does just fine.
I have no interest in segment bashing or KoMs … I just need something that tells me how far I’ve riden this year compared to last year.
Oldfatgit wrote:
Indeed, me too, but I think Strava stopped synching with Veloviewer unless you have a premium Strava account.
Short answer, NO. I stopped
Short answer, NO. I stopped paying for premium in Apr-25 and haven’t missed it. I can get MUCH more information, once I know where to look, from my Garmin Connect account. I create courses in Garmin, don’t chase KOMs and don’t care about anything else that Strava Premium tries to give me. The ONLY annoying thing is that I can’t update my FTP without a premium account (amazingly it went up but not by enough to really matter!)
I too am a long time STRAVA
I too am a long time STRAVA user (2012). For a while I didn’t subscribe..but as a family of cyclists, (daughter, Grandson, nephew..who all use STRAVA) it’s nice to keep abreast of their current activities..I decided to subscribe because in the early days I had a lot of self induced disasters..and the (then) tech support was excellent. Now I now realise everyone doesn’t have a great pension like us, and needs to earn to eat.
Finally as an ex n+1, MTB, fatty on the beach, cycle camper, and occasional audaxer I used STRAVA to monitor my equipment.
I’m no longer MTB riding in the hills, Audaxing, cycle camping.. and have pared my cycling quiver down to just 3 bikes, but I’m still swimming, (open water and pool) and recording swims..so I’m hooked..
If it’s not on STRAVA it didn’t happen.
Haven’t used Strava as
Haven’t used Strava as anything else than a hub for other services for a long time.
A combination of TrainerRoad, my cycling computer and intervals.icu is a million times better, and since Strava’s crackdown on third parties, I was finally able to get rid of it completely.
Nope.
Nope.
Don’t have a Strava account, never had.
Don’t have a head unit, and only ever had a cycle computer in the early 90s, because that was the thing to have back then. Took it off my bike after two weeks, because the performance was a bit dissapointing – my performance, that is 😄
Why would I want to come back from a fun ride, only to have the numbers show me that it really wasn’t that good…?
I just ride, and don’t care about the numbers and statistics.
If I had fun, it was a good ride.
I pay for Strava and really
I pay for Strava and really enjoy using it.
I am now in that annoying mindset that everything I do has to go on Strava; I cannot help it.
I also work with a cycle club, and the premium version allows me to create competitions giving all club riders another incentive to get out, improve and share experiences.
I used to subscribe for anout
I used to subscribe for anout 6 years rhen stopped about 2 yeats ago as thought it was poor. Metrica are a joke, never tally with GPS / powr meter etc and just useless for anything apart form if you wqnt to awe hqee toh havw heen (o alresdy kniw this as ive just done it).
i use and aubacribe to Training peaks and ise my wqhoo with ride with agapas for all mapping that is instantanoua wirh waho.
wont be subscribing again and not missed it. Dont also miss the people that bang on about Strava either, injuts shut them down by sayubg i do t use strava, next conversation please.
Garethhall74 wrote:
say that again this time with spell check?
I’ve never had a problem with Strava altering either the GPS track or the metrics like power.
Why no mention of Ridewithgps
Why no mention of Ridewithgps? It has great route planning, integrated Google Maps to check road surfaces, easy creation of collections of routes etc etc and all for free.
Absolutely – Strava basically
Absolutely – Strava basically exists to capture rides for me, that’s it. RWGPS is great for route planning. And – as someone who’s moved towns recently – it’s also great for finding local rides.
Komoot…not so much. Never got on with it. And don’t start me with Wahoo’s app, which replaced the Elemnt one. It’s absolute garbage.
Quote:
And would have been my choice too until they ruined it all by selling to bendingspoons and consequently firing all their staff. How can I recommend it to someone when new accounts have to pay a monthly subscription for the very basic functionality of syncing a route to a bike computer. Any community they did have has peaked and will dwindle here on out.
Is that completely correct. I
Is that completely correct. I don’t have a Komoot subscription, but I did buy the global map pack on offer for about 30 euros maybe 4 or 5 years ago. Any route I plan in Komoot appears in Garmin Connect automatically.
I think the key part was ‘new
I think the key part was ‘new accounts’ – people with existing accounts got some stuff grandfathered in (for now) that new people don’t get.
Long may that last then…I
Long may that last then…I seem to be pretty incapable at route planning on Connect.
I don’t have a Komoot
I don’t have a Komoot subscription, but I did buy the global map pack on offer for about 30 euros maybe 4 or 5 years ago. Any route I plan in Komoot appears in Garmin Connect automatically
I was even luckier- I only looked into Komoot and bought the global maps in February this year, just before they began the subscription system. It does suggest excellent routes which are easily transferred to Connect and the Garmin gadget. It even routed me through the National Arboretum near Grasmere for a wonderful section – I didn’t even know the arboretum was there, and was walking from the Langdale Pikes to Ambleside to catch the bus. Komoot chose a brilliant route – although that’s not so entertaining if you have to subscribe every year
Yep, i loved Komoot – it was
Yep, i loved Komoot – it was so easy to use and the route suggestions (even for a road cyclist like me) were great. But the Bending Spoons takeover and subsequent layoffs has finished it for me. I’ve switched to RideWithGPS and I’ll see how it goes. It doesn’t seem as good, and some of its route suggestions have been, erm, interesting.
Most ‘local’ KOMs around the
Most ‘local’ KOMs around the country are just pointless nowadays. An ever increasing number of the top ten are folks on ebikes. Glad to see ebikes are increasing the inclusiveness of exercise but Strava has been woeful at responding to this phenomenon. I’m not sure what tech is required but I can spot them with about 5 seconds of analysis.
I upload to Strava from Wahoo but could happily live without it and I certainly wouldn’t pay for the subscription features.
bobbinogs wrote:
And on motorbikes and in cars and occasionally aeroplanes (the KOMs underneath the Heathrow flightpath are littered with 300km/h+ speeds). Presumably many of these are from people who have simply forgotten to stop their recording device before moving to another form of transport, but none the less annoying for that. I used to pay for Strava in order to access the age group/weight-related data for comparison with my own efforts but the amount of such false data on there made that pretty pointless. I did write to Strava and said there was no point in continuing to subscribe if they couldn’t find a way of cleaning up the leaderboards; they didn’t bother to reply so I didn’t bother renewing my subscription.
If folks in your area are on
If folks in your area are on e-bikes and getting the KoMs … how unfit are people in your area.
I ride an e-bike, I’m in Central Scotland where an average ride is around 4000ft climbing – and I don’t have a single KoM.
In fact, I can’t even beat the PBs I’d set on my normal bike, 7 years ago.
Oldfatgit wrote:
I’m guessing that you ride a legal ebike, it’s easy to procure illegal electric motorcycles with 750W+ assistance, these would beat pro riders on climbs. Why on earth people buy these and then put their rides on Strava I’ve no idea but they do.
On the subject of e-bikes on
On the subject of e-bikes on Strava… you KNOW you’ve had a good ride on your road bike when you post it to Strava and the app says ‘Was this a ride or an e-bike ride?’ Don’t have an e-bike so it made my year…!
Chapeau! Weird though that
Chapeau! Weird though that the app can ask that but apparently let these times/speeds I noticed yesterday on a segment I happened to ride through in Balham stand…(it’s a slightly uphill 450 metres through several traffic lights on an always-crowded road)
Hey, I’ve been a strava
Hey, I’ve been a strava premium member since 2015, until they announced they were increasing the price a couple of years ago. When they did increase the price they did nothing for current members, eg. A couple of months free, if they did, I may have continued paying. But since only using the free version. I’d reccomend others do the same, because I’ve found that I’ve started using strava as a bit of an excersise dairy and if I want anymore stats after that I look on my garmin app. The only thing I miss is the heat map of where I’ve riden, which I enjoyed looking at. There at risk of trying to do too much, being to techy and need to go back to their roots, in my opinion.
Jamo537 wrote:
Sounds like you’re really milking it.
Rendel Harris wrote:
Sounds like you’re really milking it.— Jamo537
No more cheesy puns please.
mark1a wrote:
Oh you just wish yoghurt there first.
Rendel Harris wrote:
I know, what an udder failure on my part. I’ll be churning that over for the rest of the day now.
mark1a wrote:
Gouda.
Strava – which means road in
Strava – which means road in Italian, is WELL past its prime. It’s gone in a direction that’s rediculous, it was stripped back, data centric – the best route builder is Hammerheads, I also like the ride summaries from HH also but I understand Garmin are super good for that too. Wahoo are great to as well!
The main thing about Premium on Strava is just circling an area and be able to save then ride it – that’s it, ok you get the fact a rides broken down into graphs etc..but it’s not unequal to checking figures !
I only have the k3 uploading to it out perfunction, if I didn’t I couldn’t be bothered otherwise.
I always say, a good ride is a ride not uploaded to Strava imo.
They basically got greedy and stopped being good, same as RwGps + Kamoot
leedorney wrote:
No it doesn’t. That’s “strada”.
The name Strava is derived from “sträva”, which in Swedish means “make an effort”.
I had a dormant Strava
I had a dormant Strava account I hadn’t used for years, I stopped using as I felt I was in danger of becoming that Strava wanker on my commute home. I started using it as free to try out again, then Strava gave me a free premium account for a month. The AI insights were laughably pointless and many of Strava segments were full of bikes that clearly must have been illegal e-bikes. It’s good to try to beat your time up hills etc, but not good to be racing on the commute on cycle paths and being a dick.
I’m not into stats that much though to be honest. I had a basic cycle computer, that died recently, which I used for route planning, but now I just use my Beeline Velo paired with my phone for planning journeys I find that does the job. I can easily import GPX trails into it if I don’t like the route it has given me. if I was more into stats that could record all my miles, I guess and it does have a nice heatmap of all the routes I have done.
The biggest problem I have
The biggest problem I have with Strava are the segment and matched ride PBs.
I am inevitably slower than I was when I was a super-keen 40 yr old 12 years ago, and being able to define a default period of say the last 2 years for performance comparison would keep it more motivating. As it stands now I very rarely get close to old segment times, to the point I’ve stopped checking.
I do like it for seeing what friends have been up to. The fitness and freshness function was excellent.
Probably only for paid
Probably only for paid subscribers, but if you pay, the segment breakdowns include by age group and by weight. So there are some secondary ways of consoling yourself.
Where I live there are a lot
Where I live there are a lot of pro and senior pro rides throughout the year so KOMs and QOMs are oit of reach for most. I find the fact that a new segment is now minimum 500m also annoying as there have been a couple where it really only needed to be 300m or so. Totally agree about the AI. It’s just a wordy description of the ride you just did and adds nothing.
Les talk about the price of
Les talk about the price of Zwift soon too please!
OS Maps (£29/year) is the
OS Maps (£29/year) is the best for route planning, because the info about the quality of routes is peerless, and the maps show everything else that’s missing from e.g. Google Maps, like landscape features, scheduled ancient monuments, railways, stations, etc etc. Then I drop the route into Strava to check for cafes etc. The analytics from Veloviewer are far better than Strava, even though as an old person now they are mostly pretty depressing… but I keep my Strava account because I like seeing the photos that others post from their rides, especially the cats =^u^=
Oh, and another thing… I
Oh, and another thing… I don’t run and yet Strava insists on having run related sections in the app.
I do all my route planning on
I do all my route planning on PlotARoute.
There’s a free version as well as a £20 a year subscription.
Paid version unlocks features [as you’d expect], including different map types as well as sending the route to Garmin Connect (unlike Strava, it doesn’t send to the device, so you have to open Connect to do the last bit).
It’s easy to use on desktop, and almost as easy on mobile.
Worth the 20quid … to me, anyway.
I’m still surprised by how
I’m still surprised by how rubbish Strava is for doing overall analysis of historic ride data. VeloViewer is only 10 UKP per year and offers so many better analysis tools. Strava really only seems to care about the social media aspect. I use Strava for route planning because the heat map is so useful, but it frequently makes routing decisions that make no sense and I have to fiddle around to manually correct it. I’ve also asked many times over many years in their support pages (as have many others) for them to add some way to organize routes using folders or tags, but there is still nothing. I have VERY mixed feelings towards Strava, but the benefits are still just outweighing my gripes for now. Adding useless AI functions without fixing their actual problems/shortcomings is a further annoyance.
Chris RideFar wrote:
This is true and I’m a long time user of VV myself, however it relies in its entirety on Strava for the source data. They are very much complementary to each other, and I don’t mind paying for both. VV have built a great product without having to manage the data, and you could argue that Strava don’t need to replicate the analysis tools or reinvent the wheel when they’re allowing VV and others to use the API.
The main value for me of
The main value for me of Strava is the social side.
The worst bit has been their incredibly stupid AI, so thanks for the tip on how to turn it off!