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RIP Strava???
Okay so it isn't about to die, but this is surely going to put a lot of people off using it in the future. After all, for a lot of the Stravisti, seeing where you rank on a leaderboard is one of the main attractions/addictions!
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/05/strava-cuts-off-leaderboard-for-free...
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
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29 comments
Has anyone tried to subscribe? It's asking me for £6.99 a month. Thought it was meant to be £4. Has anyone else found this?
It's £47.99 for a years subscription, so £4 a month.
Monthly subscription is £6.99.
Ahhh I see. Thanks.
My gut feeling is one of being a bit miffed at this.
This was always touted as being a free service, with additional features available for those willing to pay for it. Is it worth the money... I'd imagine it absolutely is, however that's kinda not the point. As already pointed out, the deal on the table was that we got something for free, Strava got data we generated that they were going to monetize.
The have failed to sufficiently monetize that data, and they have failed to produce compelling functionality to entice enough of us to open our wallets willingly. By retrospectively taking core services and features away, they are now essentially admitting they have failed in their original strategy.
That's fair enough, adapt or die, but now, when weighing up whether the whole segments thing is that important that I'd be happy to pay for it (and as already pointed out, segment features will lose its appeal as overall partipation lessens), I can't help but factor in that the business has up until this point failed. It hasn't enticed me in, there hasn't been enough to get me over the line... as I say, a bit miffed at having my arm twisted.
For segments to be a premum feature, I think (personally) that a lot of the bugs need to be ironed out. As touched on, its annoying that a pro race passign through can leave KOM's effectively redundant.
This actually a good debate!
I think though people are getting emotions involved though on both parties and not seeing it logically.
1
:£4 a month isn't a bad price for a app, it's cheap.
But and big but, your not paying for a service really as strava never has been particularly good at keeping up with updates and actually listening to community.
Issues that have never been fixed or sorted sinse start to name a few are leader boards in particular the openness to them to cheating and the fact that if your a local rider and your local segment gets a pro team roll through claims KOM you basically have no local segment as you go from top 100 let's say to 1000.
Same applies to group rides or sprint trains claiming Koms.
I have no issue with this as always good seeing clubs and pros on local segments but community for donkey years been asking for separate leader boards for pros and club rides ie not solo effects.
Basically various KOM titles not a single one to appreciate various ways to getting fastest time
2:
Other features that strava puts into app, and like other apps people don't even want nor use, but sinse it's free people kind of ignored it. When people paying for a app they expect, whether rightly or wrongly to have their voices heard.
I cannot see how strava can forfill its claim of listening to people and developing a good app when they themselves have said their team too small to do other means of advertising. Why would paying for the current app help? Basically they want to make a profit and this a easy way of doing same with 0 legwork, or some may say lazy way of easy money.
Personally, I used strava sinse start as brought fun to cycling local area but with 0 effort been put I to fixing the multitude of segment issues sinse start I can't see how paying for the app with 0 increase in development will fix this.
It's a good app as a free app, but it's nothing special to make it worth the money, sadly money talks and hopefully people not paying will wake them up to fixing the major segment issues within app for example.
Plenty of other apps out there that will gain from this. It's a competitive world. How much you willing to pay for a KOM to stick on insta?
The debate is interesting.
It proves, what psychologists know, that we value something we lose much higher than things of equal worth we never had.
Loss Aversion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
Strave free users will feel a loss greater than the value to them of the features they lose.
Not sure how you could make a solo vs group leaderboard tbh, as a mainly solo rider myself it'd be nice - but how do you stop someone bagging a KOM if they're the only one in their group of 10 who's on Strava. i just don't care that much about the leaderboards generally, if I'm in the top 10% as a solo rider I assume that's half decent
Personally if a pro team rolled through and took my KOM then I would accept that as it is, it would have to be a pretty big team though to take me from 100 - 1000 ;), just as I have no interest in age related stats (and I am getting old) I also have no interest in whether it is a local rider or not. Thats me though.
Personally I've had paid Strava subscription for many years, even back when you didn't really get much extra for it, although back then it was only £2 per month. To me at the time it seemed only reasonable to pay something for a piece of software that I actually enjoyed using and felt I was getting some value from, and really nothing has changed there. There are however a lot of users that won't want to pay for something they've been getting for 'free' for so long, but the hidden income from ads and data sell off are clearly not sustaining the platform. Let's hope that the move away from a free service (in all but it's most basic form) will encourage or at least enable the developers to improve the service and get some consistency to the platform. The past few years they have constantly changed so many features, and not always for the better. They seem to still be struggling to find a way of making it work as a business. At least the whole summit nonsense is gone.
It's a company that needs to make some money to survive! It costs money to maintain the infrastructure and build new features. If you enjoy the features then pay for it. It doesn't cost much when you compare it to carbon wheels, carbon soles shoes and tyres at £50plus a pop.
I have never paid for Strava and no I don't use it either but if they need to charge subscribers to survive, what is a very small amount compared to all the other toys you buy to go riding, then why feel outraged?
Like other platforms that are transitioning to paid subscriptions to keep the lights on, it means that the subscribers that fit the feature set will stay, in fact they are probably paying already and the freeloaders will go, which suits them as the hosting cost could be reduced too.
KOM/QOM chasers, you are so boring! 🤣
Pay up you stingy gits! 😉
Reality is that segments are, for most people, pretty worthless. The vast majority of people won't be troubling the top spots that much and they got devalued as soon as they started being duplicated.
Hill, bottom to top. Fair enough. But then a rider comes along and isn't KOM so he sets up "Hill, bottom to third lamppost" just so he can claim a KOM. Next thing there are a dozen, increasingly ridiculous, segments all over the same hill . Three laps of Richmond Park and have a look at the 18,000 segments you've done.
It's good for routes and for tracking what you've done though, I like it for that.
The main thing that annoys me is the lack of respect for the user base. Even those that are not using the subscription service, it is far from being free to use. In exchange for using strava, they are sharing their data, location privacy which is then monetized and used to enhance their product.
I do currently pay for strava and have been an on and off subscriber for a few years. Each time I have signed up I am always a little disappointed as you really need to have all the gear (power meters, HR monitors etc) to get the most out of it. I'm not sure if I will renew
Segments are what's important to me, I have the same commute I do when I cycle to work, and some of the stock routes that I ride a lot and I always look for some of my favourite segments when I get home to see how I compared.
I can't see this having the effect of encouraging people to sign up. I don't have many "friends" on strava, and about a third pay for it. I'm not sure whether the rest would use it if they had to pay, which is a shame.
I'm mostly annoyed by the changes to other parts of Strava rather than the segments, like routes etc. and since Strava have decided my data isn't profitable enough for them, my rides will only be in the "everyone" setting for as long as it takes to lock in a new trophy then its back to private/follower mode which withholds it from their money-making metro and heatmaps.
Lack of respect?? You signed up under their terms and conditions. You agreed to share your data. It costs money to host, maintain and develop the app. Just stop using it if you feel so offended.
Yes, definitely a lack of respect. It's the users that create the community that make the app thrive. Without the user base, it's worthless. The communication and timing of this change have been poor, hence the reaction and general reporting of it.
Most people are aware of what they sign up for and agree it's a fair trade for their data in exchange for use and advancement of the app. However, they are no longer getting what they signed up for.
Like many people, I'll consider whether to re-subscribe or not when my subscription comes to an end. I have years worth of data and rides in within Strava but no company has a right to my money, they need to provide something worth it in exchange and for me.
It will reduce my enjoyment of the app if friends I know stop using it because they are being asked to pay for what was previously available.
Then leave, simple! They need to monetize the platform which will lead to changes. All tech companies go through the same strategy which is to gain market share then charge for premium features. They are not alone. Investors will want a return at some point and money doesn't grow on trees (unless it's the Tory magic money tree 😉). This is natural progression of all tech companies. Any subscription based business has the same problem which is to how to grow and maintain the customer base. They've looked at the numbers and made some assessments of how the numbers will look if X number subscribes and X number leaves. Look at all the newspapers for an example. The FT is behind a paywall and doing well to grow and maintain a smaller number of customers, but ones that pay for the service.
Strava are doing the same. Get over it and move on. Pay your subs or not. The value you receive from the platform will vary from user to user. Optimising it for a 'good fit' customer and supporting features that those users want is the only way any subscription model works (retention). Maybe you are just not their ideal customer and so you'll just leave.
To be profitable I bet they don't need may of the free subscribers to start paying. I also bet they don't need a huge market share to become profitable either. Looking at the potential market for cyclists, runners, etc... is huge. Its just how tech companies work.
The sad thing is, I am one of their ideal customers as I enjoy the app and do pay to use it.
I also do think they need the free subscribers to start paying for it as they aren't turning a profit at the moment. I just don't think the way they have gone about it is correct. I'm all for making it better for those that pay, and they can do this by improving the product or service not taking away what the vast majority of customers signed up to use.
It isn't always rosy going for a subscription model. Sticking with the newspaper example, when the Sun newspaper went behind a paywall, someone else (Mail Online) comes in and took the top spot forcing a backtrack later on.
I'll probably cough up, I've always felt like I should anyway due to the value I find in their route planner, seems so much better than alternatives that I've used.
I briefly toyed with Trainingpeaks and really liked the 'hours spent in zone' feature when I was training with heartrate (too cheap for a power meter). Hopefully Strava has something similar.
I could possibly also save the £10/year I spend on Veloviewer if Strava offers heatmaps (I believe it does?) and details of weekly mileage/hours etc.
Will need to investigate, won't be putting me off anyway.
Finally, a reason to pay for Strava
One of the aims of a 'free' package is as a carrot to paying more for a premium service. If the free package isn't worth using then why pay for premium? This is what DC Rainmaker is getting at - the carrot has been replaced by a stick.
Having said this, I would happily pay for Strava if it had a decent search engine/database. Currently it is woeful - for years this has been documented on their community boards - but not a single attempt to improve it in the last twelve years. Strava, give me the ability to search for a ride/activity easily using various factors and I'm a willing paying customer. Until then...
This is THE most frustrating thing about Strava, all you can do is your activites and then filter by things like distance, time etc but if you filter the list by say distance click on an activity then go back to the list it defaults back to the full unfiltered list. Absolutely useless if you want to find rides of a certain distance that are buried somewhere in a list of 1000s of activities.
I think they're shooting themselves in the foot. Temporarily, some people will cough up the cash if they're interested in chasing down the KOM/QOMs but the fastest people are only going to be a tiny percentage of their total users.
I think they charge too much for the service and this move is surely opening the door to competitors. The difficulty for competitors is getting people to move their data from Strava to a different platform - shouldn't be too difficult.
Personally, I don't care enough about segments to fork out cold, hard cash, but it is fun sometimes to compare my speed with the approx 10 people I follow/am followed by.
I dislike how terribly strava seems to record my gps as well, so In all honesty, I am probably going to work myself back to komoot which is less about the racing and more about the enjoyment of the ride.
I think they've at last realised that the "wow, look at my new PR, faster than Jimmy on my Sunday club run" has the most value overall, and the network effect (gotta be on F book if all my friends are) may have hit a point of no return.
But in bundling that simple stuff (yeah, needs data centers / cloud capacity but the programming isn't all that complex compared with other things they do) with all the analysis of your sensor data and other fancy things, which many casual and new users do not understand, let alone want, for half a Netflix sub?
Could be a MySpace moment.
Personally (and this is just me) I don't use their app on my aged phone, I do my route planning on ridewithgps and would not pay nearly that much to allow others to see how slow I am - and I am part of the product given how much I prop up the leader boards to make others feel better.
Then pay for it. Why should it be free? Do you go into Tesco and say i want these beans for free. thanks.
Super service and a value addition to my cycling life for £6 a month
I used to pay for it until Strava started putting stuff in my feed that I considered amounted to advertising. I figure if i am the product, then I am not a customer.
If strava can return to a feed that is only those people I follow with activities in chronological order, then I will resume paying.
That said, this might be enough of a stick for me to change my mind, but will be sad to see the end of my veloviewer score if 3rd party sites have no access to leaderboards.
I thought theyd fixed the feed to be chronological again if you wanted, and I cant say Id noticed it was inserting random stuff in the feed, it doesnt seem unreasonable to pay something towards its upkeep. you arent obliged to use it, theres still a free option, but lots of the features arent free to maintain, data centres cost money, software developers cost money, theyve tried to monetise the data to councils for planning purposes (hey heres an idea set up temporary bike lanes along the most used routes) but it depends its that cost benefit analysis, how much do you value the service they provide ?
I hate to be the "it only really costs a cup and half of coffee per month" person, but...it does
Not quite - you have to use a setting to override the default and put it back to chronological order, and then occasionally it gets confused and falls back to showing things in Strava-enhanced throw-it-all-up-in-the-air-and-see-how-it-falls order.
They did row back on the 'partner content (don't call it advertising)' in the feed though.
My initial reaction was 'how dare they take away my free access to all my legacy ride comparison data, and my leaderboard positions' . Then I gave myself a stern talking to and decided to pay up, especially now they have simplified the model so you get all the features for one rate.
It's either that or vastly more advertising.