Another occasionally subscriber here. I paid for years but finally got so pissed off during the wilderness years where they screwed everything up, did not fix bugs and only released stuff that annoyed the whole community. I was glad to see the founders come back. However, I think they need to be very careful, if they take away too many features then they run the risk of the free users walking away. Strangely the free users are actually providing a great service. How else are Strava going to get the data they need for the paying users? Without the free users then you lose lots of important things like the leaderboard, the route popularity and crucially the direction they have taken themselves with the social element. If lose the ability to 'compete' with your friends or clubmates then you will also think about jumping ship. I don't actually see how the by cutting the leaderboards to free users saves them money as the AWS computing still needs to be the same to cater for the paying users.
On top of all this I don't think Strava are monetizing the significant dataset that they own. If the Sales guys at Strava actually behaved properly and talked to interested parties they could sell a lot more of the insights they have. Not just the obvious data such as where people ride and when but the other stuff like, what they ride, how long their equipment gets used for, what is popular in different areas of the countries, a huge amount of health data this stuff is a mine of information. The dealings I had with Strava in my working life were laughable.
Overall, for sure they had to try and turn a profit, that is the point of a company, but I hope they don't suffer too much for this, after all they hold the most comprehensive data about my cycling history. I won't be a paying customer again until they sort their development team out and fix the terrible bugs and features that people have been crying out about for years.
