W

[Specialeyes]

OTOH, they're not a charity and don't sell advertising space on the site, so how will slightly reducing the feature set for people who don't pay them anything in order to focus their efforts on improving the service for those who do, affect them in any way?

 

[DRM]

OTOH, they're not a charity and don't sell advertising space on the site, so how will slightly reducing the feature set for people who don't pay them anything in order to focus their efforts on improving the service for those who do, affect them in any way?

By upsetting long time users, getting a bad rep, everyone drifts away bye bye strava, anyone remember MSN messenger, BlackBerry's etc, people stop using them, now they're gone

 

[DCLane]

The price appears to have gone down to £4 a month. That's not bad if you're interested in performance tracking. However things like Training Peaks do that much better.

I'm guessing their investors want returns on their financial investment and Strava's burning through their cash.

 

[Specialeyes]

I think the comparisons with Blackberry and MSN are not relevant - they didn't lose their customer base by suddenly starting to charge for things - they got overtaken by competitors who had different or better products - which cost money to develop. I rather appreciate their honesty, and committment to not sell data or ad space: generally on the internet, if you can't see what's for sale, it's you.

As the company themselves say in the email, they've never made a profit. Not making a profit and draining the company's coffers would be 'bye-bye Strava' and £4 / month is good value for money imho. I hope they've done their modelling correctly, will retain a critical mass of users and start to turn a profit. I'm sure they calculate that the sort of person who is interested in segment leaderboards is the sort of person who would be prepared to pay for them.

 

[Stephenite]

Some of these comments remind me of the people who complain about newspaper articles not being free. 😄

There are 180 people working for Strava. They need paying somehow.

 

[R_nger]

I don’t mind paying for stuff that works well. I won’t pay for anything on Strava, because it doesn’t work well, most of the time.

Out of interest, what doesn't work, most of the time ?

 

[R_nger]

Garmin is my main account anyway, so I've lost nothing. Whereas Strava have lost a user and some time subscriber. No one strong arms me.

Garmin is my main account too, but Strava's API is open to the world and allows thousands of third party apps to thrive. Garmin charge thousands for access to their API, hence few third party apps...(while Endomondo have no API (last time I looked)).

Oh, and the Strava plan I use strong arms me for around £1.58 per month. Not sure it's their greatest move, but I'll live with it and couldn't care less about leaderboards.

 

[Dogtrousers]

Fair enough.

I already pay for premium RWGPS and don't use Strava other than as a landing ground for other apps that sync to Strava.

Hang on a minute. Will the bits of Strava that I do use still be free? ... I might have to have a fit of righteous fury.

 

[PaulSB]

I've been a Summit member since June 2017. Why? During a ride I asked a friend why he paid for Strava, his response was simple:

"I want it to be there in a few years time."

I went home and signed up. It's only recently I've started to use some of the features Summit offers. I've enjoyed them.

I pay for RWGPS for exactly the same reason. If Strava has improved it's Route Planning I may begin to use this, never have done to date.

We get what we pay for and I see no reason why my subscription should fund other athletes who chose not to pay.

To continue @Roger Longbottom comparison how many people pay Sky and others significant sums of money for a vast range of content? I don't understand how Sky subscription works but gather Sports + Entertainment us £55/month - so that's £660pa to sit indoors doing nothing? The amount of content Sky offer is so vast no one could ever possibly use it.

We should not be unhappy at paying less than 10% pa of the Sky cost for something dedicated to our sport.

 

[PaulSB]

I don’t mind paying for stuff that works well. I won’t pay for anything on Strava, because it doesn’t work well, most of the time.

I'd also be interested to know what doesn't work. Occasionally I find it's slow to upload my ride.

This weekend Zoom had an outage. That was inconvenient to my household and four others as it interrupted our plans. Are we upset? No. Do we pay for Zoom? No. Will we use Zoom when lockdown ends? Highly unlikely.

If we paid for Zoom we'd have a right to be unhappy with the outage.

 

[shnjmsn]

I've paid for a long time now and will continue to do so. As above, happy the £48 a year goes towards my main hobby. I don't smoke, don't have Sky, don't do other forms of errrrr.......... 'social media'........ Strava gives me lots of info and as others have said above, I'd like it to still be there in the future and to see them start to make a profit so they can improve the platform and add more nice bits to it Just changed my mobile phone contract and saved £12 a month so I'm covered !

 

[Racing roadkill]

Out of interest, what doesn't work, most of the time ?

Route recording, without it crapping it’s pants. Route planning, without it crapping it’s pants. Pretty much the only things I give a monkey’s about really.

 

[R_nger]

Route recording, without it crapping it’s pants. Route planning, without it crapping it’s pants. Pretty much the only things I give a monkey’s about really.

I agree about the route planner, which has been in "beta" for ever - but don't most people use a dedicated device for recording rides?

 

[PaulSB]

Route recording, without it crapping it’s pants. Route planning, without it crapping it’s pants. Pretty much the only things I give a monkey’s about really.

The route recording you refer to is this using the Strava app on a mobile phone?

I've only done this once by way of an experiment to compare three different devices - my Wahoo, Garmin watch and Strava app - and see if there are significant differences. There was a variation of 0.1 mile and 37 feet of ascent.

I use a paid for application for recording - my Wahoo or Garmin watch. I pay for a service which works.

 

[wafter]

Well, that royally sucks and is just another little kick in the nuts to add to the pile

I can still see the leaderboard entries for segments on my last ride (and probably previous), but I guess from now on they just wont be updated for new rides for those of us who don't subscribe. A real shame as this was one of its most attractive features IMO.

I don't necessarily think this will create a Photobucket situation as their actions were a lot more mercenary and costly, while the site was also slow, glitchy and festooned with ads. At least Strava remains ad-free and retains its bare-bones functionality; although tbh I now have far less incentive to use it over and above the basic Polar site associated with my GPS unit.

Maybe if I had more money I'd subscribe as £4/month isn't enomous; however as things are currently I simply can't justify committing to any more regular / un-necessary spending and I think it would grate paying throughout the year for something I'm potentially unlikely to be using at all during the winter when I pretty much hibernate.

Fair point that you don't get owt for nowt and it's probably not fair to spit the dummy over this since they're still offering some basic functionality for free; I do think the timing sucks though.. I wonder if this timescale has been on the cards for a long time or whether it's been hastened by concerns over running a profitless-investor-cash-burning-unicorn heading into the post-Corona financial trainwreck.

It'll be interesting to see how this affects the service's userbase and how many free users this actually pushes into subscribing.

I guess the results from today's ride (later) will confirm to what extent the service has been gutted