Strava puts popular “Year in Sport” recap behind an $80 paywall
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From my point of view as a software engineer.
This is bs. They profit off selling users data, they profit off of subscriptions. The choice to suddenly lock more behind a paywall when it was free previously shows that the company is in its end cycle where it starts to cash grab everything it can.
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OptimusP83
Ars Praefectus
Because there have been quite a few rollbacks of features that used to be free getting the "now its a subscription feature" in the past year or so. Strava gets all your data, same as before, but is getting MORE stingy what they let you see. And their Corporate Marketing Speak is getting to the point where its freaking insulting how they continually try to reframe their attempts to drive subscription revenue over inhancing the product.
And their athlete intelligence crap was bad. It was such useless garbage, it added negative value and was often just wildly incorrect.
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RideWithGPS doesn't scratch the itch of the only Strava premium feature I actually find useful, which is partly fed by the larger user base. I like to benchmark my rides against the other Strava users. Until another service has a substantial population of users, they won't be able to offer that. Garmin certainly doesn't. I created a segment on Garmin Connect that duplicates one from Strava and on Garmin Connect it only gathered 90 rides in a year vs 1000s of rides on Strava. It's a network effect.
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OptimusP83
Ars Praefectus
While I agree with you, I have a point of contention here. Strava isn't spying on its users. We (I'm a Strava user) are willingly giving them our data because they do provide meaningful value and analytics that the vast majority of people would be wholly unable to do themselves.
What the issue here is that Strava keeps grabbing previously free features and plopping them behind their subscription service. So users are continually getting less and less value from Strava without a subscription.
But yea, this is also classic "shoot yourself in the foot" behavior from a money-grubbing company. These year in review things are pure marketing, and nothing else. In fact they're really excellent for building brand recognition, and is essentially free advertising. Why you'd restrict users from even seeing these things is baffling when they were previously free.
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Once I started using the Coros app to track activities I stopped regularly opening the Strava app. Coros uploads my data automatically to Strava (for all activities since I can't tell either app not to do that), but every time I've opened Strava after my membership expired it's an assault of "resubscribe" ads. It's an annoyance to open the app at any point now.
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I'm a longtime Strava subscriber and occasional corporate Kool-Aid drinker, so grain of salt, etc. It's an interesting decision. Presumably they're after recurring revenue targets and trying to boost subscriber numbers. I guess one lever you have to pull is moving features behind a paywall. If the marginal increase in subscribers from users who want that feature enough to start paying for it offsets any brand damage, and the value of data from people who may leave the platform, it's probably a good business decision. Are there better things they could do to increase subscriptions? Maybe. Presumably they aren't complete morons and the low hanging fruit has already been picked. It does feel pretty crappy to be charged for something that was once free, but things are always more complicated on the inside. Given all the internal company context, some of us might make the same decision. As far as I'm concerned, their route builder is the only paywalled feature worth paying for. I'd pay for it as a standalone product.
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This is a lot of whining about people insisting that Strava owes them free stuff. This is a for profit company and they have investors who made it possible for them to exist and have a very reasonable expectation of ROI. Strava needs subscribers to continue to exist.
What annoyed me as a free user is that they sent me an email 2 days ago saying "Your Year In Sport is ready" and when I followed the link I smacked my face right into their paywall. It stung.
What annoyed me as a free user is that they sent me an email 2 days ago saying "Your Year In Sport is ready" and when I followed the link I smacked my face right into their paywall. It stung.
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No, that’s not a lever you have to pull. It’s a lever you can pull, and only in a kleptocapitalism economy where you can give users less and demand more payment without losing users because so is everyone else.
In a functioning economy, you would come up with new features to add to your subscription tier, and if you can’t do that, maybe that’s not a good business model. But investors don’t care about any of that as long as line potentially go up, and they are the real customers now that Strava is hunting for an IPO.
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???
I'm really confused by that question.
Does someone punching a random baby affect you directly? Unlikely. But you aren't likely to stay friends with them. In the same way they let me know that their corporate leader isn't worth giving money to any longer.
As for indirect, the most popular bike computers are Garmin. Meaning that ruining the relationship risked Strava screwing over many of their own customers if Garmin decided to cut off compatibility.
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VCs are perfectly happy when their investments take the Marie Antoinette attitude of getting to have your cake and eat it too.
If you start your business model with "free to users" and "monetize the data", then people seem willing to accept that model. But when it then gets converted - without agreement from the users - to "monetize your data" and "monetize you" then that's pretty much a picture perfect representation of enshitification.
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Not sure why anyone is shocked that a company took your free data and then is charging you for the privilege of seeing the results. I mean Strava did have to buy software and pay developers to compile the data and make pretty pictures.
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I'll bet $10 that the YIS data is posted outside the paywall soon enough. It's the interewbs people, nothing stays behind paywalls for long.
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Interestng that Strava thinks that "accessible as possible" means charging $80. Intersting that Strava thnks an $80 tab in order to find community is acceptable when very few social meida platforms charge for access. Intersting that Strava thinks double dipping (scraping free user data + charging for the YIS) is going to fly with users.
I guess we'll see if Strava doesn't take a large enough user hit over this.
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Strava does not sell your data.
https://www.strava.com/legal/privacy
(Neither does Google or Meta. The data they collect is used to power their lucrative targeted ad networks. However, the advertisers using their services do not get any of your data.)
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It's been at work for a while now. I don't use the app often but every time I do I realize I can't access some features I'm sure I used to have. Now behind a paywall. Slow death gives me time to stop caring, at least.
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I gave up on Strava a couple years back when the enshittification really ramped up. Granted I’m also not that much of a Fred, so Garmin’s system met my needs.
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I've been wondering WTF Strava is doing lately? Seems they desperately want to forsake their existing business and move into some new market (as a platform or something)? Unfortunately for them, they're making loads of own-goals and enshittifying at the same time.
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Though tone is easily misconstrued in forums like this where hostility is the frequent product of anonymity, my question was asked with earnest curiosity.
I'm totally on board with voting with one's dollars, but it seems that if I canceled my relationship with every company that committed acts inconsistent with my sensibilities I'd find myself living in Ted Kaczynski's cabin in the woods.
It seems that Strava's value to you must have been tenuous to begin with else you would likely have continued paying for their service whilst holding your nose. That weak value proposition is the reason I was never interested in paying for their app, so when I learned that I could not access my Year in Sport I shrugged and moved on.
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Given the push to get explicit payments, perhaps not as valuable as you might think - maybe the “personal info” they have isn’t either personal enough or useful enough to advertisers or whatever to get much in exchange for it.
Perhaps it’s because I’m old(er) and have concerns about privacy, but I am pretty limiting in what I provide identifiable info to. When you don’t have a choice, you don’t, but I tend to not use apps that require identifying info from me if I don’t view it as necessary. I rarely use Google’s services, but I never log in to Google. Services I want to use that require a login or whatever but that don’t inherently require actual info (like a vendor that needs to deliver something to me) don’t get real info. I don’t use “social media” and have zero interest in sharing almost anything with the public (like my fitness activities, diet, hobbies, purchases, etc.). Companies may still manage to deanonymize me, but I’d doubt they’d get that much value out of it. All this might make me antisocial (and perhaps a bit extreme) - I think it just makes me prudent. But if more acted this way, there perhaps wouldn’t be a personal info economy.
For the services I use, I’m happy (well, willing) to explicitly pay for those I find valuable enough (for example, I subscribe to Ars and some other info and news sites) or will accept (non-personalized) ads - I don’t expect to get things for free. However, it appears my willingness to pay (in cases, with non-personalized ads) along with a desire for privacy may mean that I’m out of the mainstream.
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I can see both sides here.
On the one hand, providing a service like Strava doesn't come cheap. There's the software development: parsing the FIT, TCX, or GPX files; mapping; routes; segments; etc. There's the web hosting. The database backend. All of that. They have to pay for all of that somehow, and historically, Strava was free - and when I look at the front page, I don't see any advertisements.
Subscriptions are the obvious pathway. The other is to partner with companies and find ways to get them in front of users: sponsored challenges with fitness equipment companies.
But the other side of the coin is that as others have said, the Year in Review is a marketing thing. "Look what I did!", helping drag more people into the environment. Locking it behind a paywall seems to run counter to that. Realistically, knowing that I did more or fewer kilometres on the bike this year compared to last, or whatever else the Year in Review gives me, doesn't really give me any particular value.
Everything Strava is doing at the moment screams to me that they're hard up for cash and trying to get it wherever they can. That doesn't encourage me to invest in a subscription. (They've actually given me a free trial subscription; I look at it, and it doesn't really seem to give me much that's of interest that I can't easily get elsewhere - eg, my Garmin Fenix will quite happily give me recommended workouts on a daily basis, so I don't really need to see the metrics Strava gives me after the fact, and the training plans on offer don't seem to be particularly useful to me.)
All in all, it feels to me that Strava is trying to figure out exactly what their niche is, and how they can make money out of it. "Social media, but for athletes!" isn't much of a market, and I don't see there being much money in it - maybe enough to sustain a business, but not enough to grow.
On the one hand, providing a service like Strava doesn't come cheap. There's the software development: parsing the FIT, TCX, or GPX files; mapping; routes; segments; etc. There's the web hosting. The database backend. All of that. They have to pay for all of that somehow, and historically, Strava was free - and when I look at the front page, I don't see any advertisements.
Subscriptions are the obvious pathway. The other is to partner with companies and find ways to get them in front of users: sponsored challenges with fitness equipment companies.
But the other side of the coin is that as others have said, the Year in Review is a marketing thing. "Look what I did!", helping drag more people into the environment. Locking it behind a paywall seems to run counter to that. Realistically, knowing that I did more or fewer kilometres on the bike this year compared to last, or whatever else the Year in Review gives me, doesn't really give me any particular value.
Everything Strava is doing at the moment screams to me that they're hard up for cash and trying to get it wherever they can. That doesn't encourage me to invest in a subscription. (They've actually given me a free trial subscription; I look at it, and it doesn't really seem to give me much that's of interest that I can't easily get elsewhere - eg, my Garmin Fenix will quite happily give me recommended workouts on a daily basis, so I don't really need to see the metrics Strava gives me after the fact, and the training plans on offer don't seem to be particularly useful to me.)
All in all, it feels to me that Strava is trying to figure out exactly what their niche is, and how they can make money out of it. "Social media, but for athletes!" isn't much of a market, and I don't see there being much money in it - maybe enough to sustain a business, but not enough to grow.
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I let Strava scrape my data from Garmin Connect. As soon as it stops providing the same data to groups I manage that Garmin does for free, I'm just moving my groups over to Garmin, with nothing lost from a user perspective. This means I'll be driving fewer potential paying users to their full product stack. If they're fine with that, so am I.
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Lol this is great; another episode of When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong. Refused service because you're too intoxicated? Just start a fight! That'll show those idiots how sober you are.
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On the other hand, growth manager, exactly the sort of bad steering Strava have indulged in lately.
They lost my sub with the LLM shitposting, didn't get it back with the Garmin lawsuit. Are they circling the drain?
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This is fine. Strava is a service. It does a very good job at what it does and miraculously on the free tier is devoid of most ads. It's such a pleasant social media service with absolutely no algorithmic bullshit- just 'hey! here's a timeline of the cool activities your friends and other athletes have done!'.
All companies move what services they offer to different tiers based on the economic needs at the time. Yes they offered more free services to build a critical mass of users and now are moving some of those services behind a paywall. That's OK! it's not an essential service and its not a nonprofit. It's not remotely enshittification. We should honestly encourage more companies to prioritize stable revenue over data mining and addictive algorithmic nonsense.
Strava has also added a bunch of features that have been really great. Their route making at this point is super intuitive and top notch and just a cool feature they don't even need to offer. I also pay for ridewithgps and komoot because they both have relative strengths (ridewithgps for advanced route plotting with stops, and komoot for Europe maps). Ride with gps has stagnated a lot in my opinion, but it's still a service worth paying for if you do group rides.
now their moves against garmin, those were fucking stupid and counterproductive. Garmin if anything has been such a good neutral player in this space. Every other company is lucky that garmin doesn't actually invest in user experience because they could crush the competition if they did. They're just happy making very expensive but very good hardware.
All companies move what services they offer to different tiers based on the economic needs at the time. Yes they offered more free services to build a critical mass of users and now are moving some of those services behind a paywall. That's OK! it's not an essential service and its not a nonprofit. It's not remotely enshittification. We should honestly encourage more companies to prioritize stable revenue over data mining and addictive algorithmic nonsense.
Strava has also added a bunch of features that have been really great. Their route making at this point is super intuitive and top notch and just a cool feature they don't even need to offer. I also pay for ridewithgps and komoot because they both have relative strengths (ridewithgps for advanced route plotting with stops, and komoot for Europe maps). Ride with gps has stagnated a lot in my opinion, but it's still a service worth paying for if you do group rides.
now their moves against garmin, those were fucking stupid and counterproductive. Garmin if anything has been such a good neutral player in this space. Every other company is lucky that garmin doesn't actually invest in user experience because they could crush the competition if they did. They're just happy making very expensive but very good hardware.
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I don't know how many of their users had to call support to turn off the "AI" crap, but this is probably them trying to milk the colossal waste of adding "AI" integrations.
If I was a betting person, I'd say that most companies will start doing things like these to recuperate the losses from the "AI" B2B costs they're incurring.
If I was a betting person, I'd say that most companies will start doing things like these to recuperate the losses from the "AI" B2B costs they're incurring.
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Ope, well time to start looking for Strava replacements... it'll be all about ads and selling our data as soon as that IPO happens.
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Exactly.
It seems like nobody is content to find a niche and serve it, consistently, year in, year out. Not growing constantly, but reliably making money.
And yet, businesses like that are the workhorses of the economy. Without them, we're in trouble.
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I've subscribed for many years, but quit before renewal this year. I'm not angry that they charge money for their service, the reason I've dropped out of subscription is:
1. The AI shit they plaster all over the UI. The value of the slop-insights below zero and it is taking up a lot of space.
2. They doubled the price (article says from 60 to 80 USD, but for me the jump was from 500-something SEK to 1000-something SEK according to the time-to-renew-notification).
So: A worse service for a higher price. They simply reduced cost/benefit to a point where I'm not interested in being a customer anymore. Especially when the free tier includes almost all the best features.
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Okay. Good for you. What you are actually saying is how weak your morales are.
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WTF is it lately with people saying that if something hasn't happened, it's never going to happen? (Saw this pattern all over Reddit with the Affinity 3 announcement.) Anyone who points out that companies that do X commonly progress to doing Y is called an alarmist because X happened but Y hasn't. What the actual fuck. Go back to downvoting climate change articles.
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There's one thing that was Strava that should be locked away, unfortunately my memory is a bit Hazie as to who.
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As they've put more features being a subscription I've found unsurprisingly I use the app a lot less than I used to and looking through the feed, there seems to be very few friends still using it now. I'd be curious if others have seen the same.
I'm not keen on them removing free features to encourage you to subscribe rather than adding features you want to subscribe for and the fitness data they advertise for subscription has too much of an overlap with what Garmin offers.
I'm not keen on them removing free features to encourage you to subscribe rather than adding features you want to subscribe for and the fitness data they advertise for subscription has too much of an overlap with what Garmin offers.
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