Today Strava announced two changes to their platform. One change makes little sense, while the other makes plenty of sense. The change that makes no sense will have no meaningful impact on you as a consumer, but will cause all heartache for companies in the cycling/running industry. While the change that actually makes sense may make it more appealing for you to give Strava your cash.
Also, they’re onboarding a million new users per month now. With that, let’s dive into the details.
Reaching for the Stars…Err…Summit:
Assuming you read the headline above, the first change on the docket is the switch from calling Strava’s paid tier ‘Premium’ to ‘Summit’. Because they want to help you reach your summiting potential. Or something like that.
This change is because…well…I couldn’t get a super clear answer as to why they’d rename it from Premium. Officially the answer to my question was as follows:
“When Strava dug into why people became Premium members, it was always tied to a goal and getting the tools they needed to reach the goal or their “Summit” (Race PR, first marathon, etc). Regarding the change to Summit, it’s really about the associated Packs (Training, Analysis and Safety). Each illustrates the added features and function Strava provides more than a single “Premium” version. Premium doesn’t clearly relay the value gained in going Premium. Strava wanted to make that more clear to athletes coming into the community from day 1….For example, you pick an Analysis Pack you get XYZ tools to help you reach your specific goal OR you’re worried about safety, the Safety Pack provides Beacon, etc.”
Which, I get the underlying concept, but I still don’t get how they ended up with Summit, of all the ways to brand this.
Of course, the real impact here is on all the 3rd party platforms that leverage Strava Live Segments – they too have to change their branding and other platforms. Strava Live Segments required Strava Premium, but now it must require Strava Summit. Except, it’s not as easy as that.
As I talk about in the next section, Strava Summit actually has three peaks – or lesser levels. Mini-hills basically. These levels are, according to Strava, all part of the same Summit: “Whether an athlete chooses one Summit Pack or all of them, each member is a full-fledged, bonafide Summit athlete.”
Thus, companies like Garmin and Wahoo need to now change their prerequisite wording to denote something akin to: “Strava Live Segments requires Strava Summit membership, either the $7.99 a month tier for which there is no distinct name, or the cheaper ‘Analysis’ Summit pack.” – No problems, I’m sure that’ll fit on the side of the box in the small print.
If there’s any good news in here is that the pricing remains identical. If you pay for Strava Premium today, it remains the same price for new or existing users ($59/year or $7.99 a month). All other local currencies I checked also remain the same. So ultimately this is just marketing churn for the sake of marketing churn. Just don’t forget to Give kudos while you’re at it.
All the Summits:
So here’s the news I actually think might be valuable to some (albeit, probably a very limited some). Strava has broken apart it’s Premium tier into three smaller summit ‘packs’. Each of these packs costs $2.99/month (or $23.99/year). The theory being you can pick the specific Premium Summit features you want, you know, so you can peak however it is that you peak.
The three tiers are as follows, as described by them:
Now Strava’s logic behind this actually makes a lot of sense. As part of my attempt to find out why they changed from Premium to Summit, they noted the following, which gives a bit more insight into the new levels being offered:
“Strava is adding a million new users every 30 days now, and the information Summit provides as people join the community makes it easier for them to pick and choose what they want out of Strava’s features and understand it’s not just a “paid” version, its specifically providing a set of tools that will benefit you in your training. The word Premium on its own really just signifies an upgrade or different from standard with no overview of why you would subscribe. The hope is the new packs show new members, “you care about data, the Analysis pack is for you.”.
And I actually agree with all of this. For a lot of people, yet another $10/month subscription is just too much. And certainly the vast majority of those one million new users per month aren’t going to pay $10/month. Not a chance in hell. But $3 a month? Maybe, just maybe.
Update: Here’s an additional quote from Strava’s CEO, James Quarles, on the breakouts:
“92% of Strava users who set a goal are still active 10 months later, and the obvious response to that data is to make it easier for people to set individual goals. The new a la carte method should make this easier. Another source of inspiration for change was the Strava community itself. Strava spoke to over 10,000 of its users – a mixture of paying and non-paying members – about their thoughts on the service as it stood. A lot of them I’d say were a little bit confused about what Premium entailed and I think they felt it was overdesigned. They thought it was too much or I don’t need all those features. So what we’re doing with this launch of Summit is we want to make that subscription product simpler and more accessible to a broader group of athletes.”
The challenge will be whether or not Strava got the breakouts right. And looking at them…I’m not quite convinced it’s perfect. Close yes, but not perfect.
The Safety Pack: This is the one I think they nailed – and probably the one most interesting variant to split out, which gives you Strava Beacon. It also gives you personal heatmaps, but let’s be honest – nobody cares about paying for that anyway. It’s Beacon that’s interesting for the majority of phone-focused users. I say phone-focused, because anyone with a Wahoo or Garmin device already has live tracking anyway for free. So they’re unlikely to pay Strava for it since the overlap is significant.
Training Pack: I think most of this is logical, except ‘Race Analysis’. Why aren’t Race and Pace Analysis on the pack titled…Analysis Pack? I mean, I’m no expert on this – but that seems like a logical place for it. If the idea is to have Analysis be rolled into a single pack, and you named such a pack after that word – then I’d put it in that pack.
Analysis Pack: Inversely, I don’t understand why Live Segments is in the Analysis Pack. This is the capability to use Strava Live Segments on 3rd party devices as well – so you can compete against others on your Garmin/Wahoo/whatever. This should be in the ‘Training Pack’, because that’s all focused on doing things out on the road – such as the ‘Live Performance Stats’ listed in the Training Pack. Same goes for ‘Heart rate’, which is now in the Analysis but not training pack.
Again, I think they got kinda close – but perhaps they got to the point where they didn’t want folks paying the full $7.99 to drop-down to $2.99. Perhaps someone ran the imaginary numbers and realized that might result in a drop of memberships. Unfortunately, I suspect in the pursuit of trying to entice new sign-ups they might have skipped over those existing non-premium users that would be willing to pay $2.99/month but not the existing $7.99 – thus, there may be some missed opportunity for the right aligned packs.
Note that all the packs include Strava’s ‘Perks’ access. I’ve written about these deals in the past, and they’re actually pretty good if you can take advantage of them. So it’s nice that they included that at all levels.
Going Forward:
Of course, the entire point of this is to continue Strava’s aim of making money. It’s not entirely clear if they’re in the black or not yet, but last I heard they were getting pretty close. The shift started about 2 years ago when they first partnered with Garmin to introduce Strava Live Segments and do it as a premium feature. That started driving significant Premium memberships. Since then Strava has gotten better and more focused on actually making money.
That’s likely because they have to. They’ve gotten too big for anyone to purchase, or even want to purchase (except Apple, but even that might result in overall failure). Thus, as their investors come to terms with the fact that there won’t be some typical Silicon Valley acquisition, they’re going to have to continue to tweak offerings to start making money the old fashioned way.
Their challenge will be to do so without upsetting the apple cart (no, again, not that Apple). Today’s announcement is, in my opinion, a very good way of doing that. I think they’ll find a way to convert a significant number of those 1-million per month new sign-ups with these lower levels. Well executed. But at the same time they’ve also started to upset their cycling industry hardware partners. Two well-known cycling GPS companies in the last 30 days have put the brakes on Strava integration due to insane per-device licensing costs Strava wants to implement for new devices, one of which is actively pulling the Live Segments feature out of just announced devices that are set to start shipping in the days ahead. It’s a trend that’ll only continue unless Strava realizes that trying to burn the candle from both ends means you don’t end up with a candle anymore. Plus, it reduces consumer options and competition (or will significantly increase your device cost even if you don’t use the features). But more on that later.
As I said, I like the new licensing change – especially since Strava has promised in writing that no free features have gone away here. Everything remains as-is on that front. And the existing annual cost is also the same for users unless you step down to a new plan. Good stuff.
With that – thanks for reading, and I’d definitely be curious what folks think of the new levels and if they’re stacked correctly.
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Interesting…
Will route planning using community heat maps still be free? For years I have been paying for premium for no reason. Got it for live segments which I have since realised is annoying so have had it off. This might be the chance to just cancel premium/summit that I have been waiting for. 7.99 is 7.99 you know.
As an aside, have you ever noticed that when you update your FTP on strava it retroactively changes fitness and freshness for all workouts you have ever done. This makes no sense if when you did those workouts your FTP was significantly lower/higher. For me that makes Power analysis completely and utterly useless. Or has this changed in the last couple months perhaps?
Thanks for the update!
Nope, tracking FTP changes hasn’t been added. It doesn’t make sense. Of course it’s been a feature request on their forums for years. Having a long-term “fitness and freshness” graph while having FTP changes affect everything retroactively is laughable.
This actually saves me a little cash, because I’m currently Premium, but have absolutely no use for the functionality in the training pack. Of course, what that then likely pushes me to do is see if I’m willing to live without the safety pack too…
You can subscribe to two packs
Sure, but my point was more that I may very well end up just going with one. So in my case, this could definitely cost them a bit of cash.
Maybe the “Analysis Pack” makes sense for people who are running or perhaps doing multiple sports?
In my mind (and I am speaking as primarily a cyclist) I have found the analysis capabilities on Strava to be very poor. Change your http://FTP…. oh we are gonna re-calculate your entire training stress score history. Really level 101 stuff to fix.
The new “Relative effort” metric that is used for calculating stress scores also don’t match up very well with perceived effort of my rides (especially on rides with many accelerations). Probably easier to compare across sports, but less relevant for me as cyclist.
I’ve only ever gone Premium when Garmin has a free trial. I really see no value in it when I have Garmin Connect and if I want to pay for training software it’d be Training Peaks.
Training peaks is $19.99 a month or $120 if paid at one time. That seems like expensive data that they download from your device to them and to gop it off, it’s not personal to you. It’s an algorithm that’s generated so that appears lots of profit with not much giving out to the athlete
A lot of athletes would seem to disagree.
No Strava Summit Triathlon package I see. Still crazy that they have triathletes advertise Strava and yet they can’t bring the functionality that ensures any brick/multi sport workouts are one cohesive workout on their site/app.
Do a brick workout and you end up flooding your friends feed with each run, ride and transition coming up separately. This also makes analysing things a real pain the the behind.
One day…
Speaking of Tri’s, they still can pull in HR data on a swim to calculate the fitness/freshness. I’m done paying for a social platform. Once it becomes a more mature analytic platform, then perhaps I’ll open up the wallet again.
Are they still missing separate heart rate profiles for cycling/running? A L3 effort running is mid-150s for me but the same effort cycling is low 140s. I logged this as a bug/feature request years ago and occasionally get emails saying people are still requesting it.
There is literally no value in Strava’s analysis, for all the reasons given above.
Strava is absolutely full of empty profiles. I am quite sure that most of those 1 million new members a month never log a workout. What matters is active monthly users (AMUs).
Strava’s utter failure to meet the needs of regular users with any new features or enhancements means active users just don’t sign up for premium. Still, at least it gives plenty of room to the likes of Training Peaks.
Given the millions in vulture capital they received, can they ever have a chance to pay it all back and become truely profitable?
What do you mean by “pay it back”? It’s not a loan. If Strava becomes profitable, their valuation goes up instantly. The VCs can either sell to other private investors, or Strava could IPO.
I suspect what Sasche is indirectly implying is that while you are correct on it not being a loan, most VC are looking for a sell-out. That’s how they make their money.
But with Strava, there’s no-longer a viable purchaser (again, except Apple – and that’s of questionable value). The days of viable purchasers (such as Garmin) are long gone. Garmin for example has zero interest in purchasing Strava, since they get everything they want out of it want for free, without the overhead of dealing with that business directly.
Beyond that, there’s really nobody else that Strava would appeal too – except perhaps a Chinese enterprise buying it in the same manner that GoPro has been discussed, or how WTC was bought, etc… Strava’s valuation is simply too big for those left in the fitness realm.
Nike?
Google? link to google.com
Ray, this suggests that you have some idea of what Strava’s current valuation is. Can you share this info? I notice that the latest round was a Series E, but I don’t see any valuation info. Thanks.
For the love of Jeff, I sure as hell hope not. That will get me to ditch Strava immediately.
Valuation shmaluation. 🙂 What is their expenses and revenue and where does it come from more interesting, especially w/ so many revenue channels it’s a bit surprising they’re pushing the B2C side.
You can do some pub over a pint back of the napkin estimates on company size, and conversion rates looking at 1M signups a month (cough, vanity metric) but I’m surprised they aren’t profitable after 8 years?? I guess if twitter and other socials can get away with it forever, essentially.. more power to em. VC funding keeps the customer cost down, lol, but Peaks has been making money for decades and has enough to spin off new verticals like music software…
I believe Strava’s last round 18 months ago was in the $15M range bringing them to $56M ish, so, VC would want $100+M back. Some of those early investments were in 2010, geriatric in venture timelines… can’t go on forever… can it?
My understanding is that Strava’s costs are very high — they need thousands of Amazon EC2 instances to power the service, with lots of expensive fast and slow storage on top.
The problem with adding more VC money is that it’s quite explicitly earmarked not for paying existing running expenses, but for investing in growth. This translates 1:1 into hiring more people whose immediate and only definitive effect is moving the goalposts to profitability further out, while it’s an open bet wether they will actually succeed in bringing growth or wether they will just ruin a previously successful product in a desperate chase of unrealistic goals. Staying lean seems to be the privilege of organically grown companies.
My biggest problem with Strava is that they shave off random minutes from every trail run I do. Even worse when hiking. Their moving time calculation only work when going really fast. This is extremely annoying and makes Strava unusable. You cannot use any of the comparisons or other stats or analysis as every run I do have bad data. I’m sure manydont even realize their numbers are inflated. Maybe on purpose? Strava want people to feel good?
I never stop on my runs, but still Strava removes several random minutes. How is this acceptable? How do eopke still use Strava? The only work around would be using elapsed time instead, which make much more sense anyway. But Strava doesn’t support that. You cannot compare runs with elapsed time and so on.
What can we do to get some attention on this? There are hundreds of people complaining about this on Strava threads but to no avail. Strava just ignores this.
I’m absolutely not saying it is perfect, far from it, but to get it to show elapsed time just change your workout to Walk instead of run, or leave it as a run and list it as a race.
Indeed list it as a race does the trick on the data (but not on the annoyed-ness)
Have you tried shutting off auto pause, then manually pausing it if you stop mid run? I’ve found that even on a mountain bike my speed can sometimes get slow enough for auto pause to kick in, which ends up shaving time off my moving total.
Marketing bullshit… along with the push to becoming more of a social media platform. I’m currently a Premium member. I will not renew.
Any recommendations for another application to track my rides? Once upon a time, I used Endomondo… until they sold out to a brand I refuse to support.
Try Training Peaks. It’s different and more expensive, but it is more valueable in trrms of training.
There’s SportTracks (http://sporttracks.mobi), which is a platform with zero social media.
One more for SportTracks. They are purely focused on Analysis, and they do it well. They even still support cloudsync to their desktop application which has limitless capabilities using plugins. (Even though that feels quite dated by now). The .mobi platform is good and well worth the price.
Yeah, I have already stopped paying for premium and decided to remove my account.
Strava is becoming a ‘facebook’. All those spam emails with ‘suggested friends’ etc… Come on, I have friends, don’t need to get system recommendation for it (especially its not realistic at all).
Mixing with social media platform is something I don’t need. Will stick to more ‘dry’ product platforms.
-M.
I’m not sure which specific settings I set, but I don’t get any emails from Strava.
I love sporttracks.mobi and have been a user from the start. The platform is excellent, and the support team are great. Just today I had a lengthy discussion with them about concept2 rowing analytics. Very responsive, powerful yet easy to use analytics, and none of the social nonsense. Just wish you could attach photos to an activity… Aaron!? Any plans?
Does SportsTracks have a free tier?
Not that I’m aware of, their mobile version which I use is about $60 Canadian, and is much more useful to me than the basic or premium Strava, mind you I’m not chasing KOMs anymore.
I have over 10years of data I think at Sporttracks.
I decided to not renew once they went to non-chronological ordering on their feed. The announcement of that “feature” garnered over 600 down votes and multiple tickets have been opened about it but they have their heads so far up their own ass that they can’t see how horrible a decision that was.
I am about to cancel my Strava Premium as the “algorithm” that they use changes my stats so much its pointless to think Strava is accurate in any way. I take it as a Social Media Platform like Facebook and its free….
I would pay if I had the option to import raw data from my Garmin etc
Could you be more specific? What algorithm? What stats?
@M8tey: You can manually import Garmin .fit files into Strava via their website, even at the free level. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My guess is that this is mostly to enable increasing the price without upsetting the current premium users.
New features will end up in new packs that you have to add to your subscription.
As you said the current packs don’t make much sense as you kind of need Training and Analysis Packs together to have the full functionality.
And you can’t even replace it with a 3rd party provider like Xert, because you might still want to have the live segments or filtered leader boards.
I might cancel the Safety Pack and I can just use the Garmin Connect functionality instead. But then it is only 1€/month difference, because of the all packs discount.
I expect new packs to show up not later than in two months.
Hi Christof, did you already find out how to downgrade from “Premium” to individual packs? I didn’t…
No, my guess is that they don’t have that functionality quite ready 🙂
Yep, and when it’s ready the process won’t be easy or it will be “hidden” somewhere.
Yeah I agree I think part of it is a way to increase fees for new features (which have been extremely lacking) without a big backlash.
Which is sensible enough.
“My guess is that this is mostly to enable increasing the price without upsetting the current premium users. New features will end up in new packs that you have to add to your subscription.”
+1 It’s very smart how they do it.
+No, my guess is that they don’t have that functionality quite ready ?”
+1 Hehe
Xert just launched their Segment Hunter app which uses Strava segments but doesn’t need Strava Premium to use. Need to test it out. If it works, I likely won’t need any of these new packs.
Yeah, it’s notable that this announcement was heralded by Strava as exciting new reasons that premium would be more appealing. Not one new feature. I dropped my premium years ago when feature requests and bugs were ignored (and still are). Stuff like enhanced privacy – like let me hide my HR and power if I choose), or actually being able to effectively filter out people driving up climbs.
There was no reason to pay for the service before this change, and no reason now. I wonder how much time nad $ went into this plan.
Previously, my perception of Strava premium was it being more of a tip than a transaction, a contribution for them keeping up the good work. You would get almost all of Strava on the free tier, plus some “thank you” goodies when contributing. It just felt *positive*, from all angles.
Breaking down that goodie bag into modular packages completely reverses that perception, now suddenly every little bit seems to have it’s own price tag. Instead of handing over your money and feeling good about it, we are invited to constantly reevaluate which subset of “summit features” (what a poor name) we actually deem necessary.
It’s a bit as if Garmin would make exotic data fields paid add-ons: nobody would ever be willing to pay extra (no matter how little) to add sunset time or GPS accuracy fields to their Edge, but in aggregate, the device that has all those options is a much more attractive deal than one without.
The only reasonable explanation (besides change-for-change’s-sake strategical meandering) is the one proposed by Christof: now they can introduce additional modules that would be too big/expensive to just fold into premium, e.g. something with or against Zwift.
Hey Ray,
Just wanted to say that it’s that time of the year when you give hope to those poor athletes with the giveaway extravaganza.
I’ve never been lucky but the dream of owning a powermeter is still alive.
I like the concept. I pay for Strava because I log in every single day so it only seems fair to contribute. I dislike the Garmin analysis on Connect so it’s nice to have an option. It’s a shame Polar don’t open theirs up, they really know how to display data well.
Like you say though, the almost random placement of features is weird. I have no intention of using any live features from Strava. I hate live segments and constantly battle with Garmin to shut them off every time they re-enable them silently in an update. I do like all of the analysis features though, and happy to carry on paying for those, but putting half of them in a different pack is far more likely to alienate me as a customer.
Hopefully Strava are also smart enough to understand that while we’re paying we will be their customer. If they start abusing data like Facebook does, and monetising us they’ll very quickly need to learn about GDPR! I’ve yet to see any signs of abuse on Strava though to be fair, even when I was a free user.
Totally agree. I get so much value out of Strava (mostly the free features) that I am happy to contribute. As a bonus I get a couple of the extra features like downloading GPX tracks.
I suspect this whole price change has nothing to do with current premium subscribers, but rather trying to find a price point that currently non paying customers are willing to pay. There is some number of users that won’t pay because they don’t use all the extra features of Premium. They may feel better about just paying for the extra features they use.
That’s bonkers about the per-device charges! do you have any PR or anything re the Lezyne change? I was strongly looking at the Mega C as a fall gift to myself, and I likely still will – whats funny is that this may now change the desire to buy “premium” and just spend on the unit.
My initial thought as someone who had premium, dropped it, I may look at some of these packs again, but like you mentioned the mixups in training vs analysis are a bit wonky… if heart rate was back in training, I would consider that – but as it stands i’m likely to leverage plugins and Garmin like I do now. – so a total lost sale…
I’ll be covering it in a seperate piece, but Lezyne has confirmed they’re pulling Strava Live Segments entirely from the Mega-C and Mega-XL units. It’ll be effective in the next firmware update in the next few days.
Update – November 2018: Strava and Lezyne have come to an agreement, and Strava Live Segments will remain in the product. Woot!
What a bummer. My Mega XL is arriving in the mail today and I was really looking forward to trying out live segments and the rest of the analysis pack. I might actually return it, although I feel a little crazy for getting so worked up about such a silly feature.
Do you know if the same will happen to older Lezyne devices such as the Super GPS? Are other companies such as Polar considering similar steps? In short, are Garmin and Wahoo the only safe bets at this point for devices that will remain cozy with strava?
Ray, how is that going to work when products were sold advertising that feature are disabled with a firmware update? I’d be pissed if a product I owned had features turned off after purchase.
Exactly. Live Segments is even one of the six highlighted features on the back of the box.
It’s only on new products going forward. The Mega-C and Mega-XL are the only exceptions where they’ve shipped small numbers of products over the last week or two. I suspect they’ll simply offer to refund/return a unit if customers want.
That bit of news just soured my desire for the new Lezyne GPS units. I had high hopes for Lezyne filling the niche between Garmin and zero. I wonder if Wahoo is also considering pulling Live Segments
This has been cooking for a while but this can be seen as the official moment when strava stopped creating value for users and switched to squeezing as much cash out of their current product as possible.
It’s been a while since they spent time creating new features that no one else had. Basically they’ve spent the last 18 months on this and their non chronological feed that is very poor while neglecting basics that are annoying (ever notice that running outside they use moving time but inside its elapsed time?).
This is the moment they’ll regret when looking back 5 years from now and another competitor is eating their lunch.
If there’s one takeaway Strava leadership (or anyone at Strava) should remember from all of the comments here, it’s this snippet:
“It’s been a while since they spent time creating new features that no one else had.”
They should print it out in one of their country-named rooms in gigantic font and talk it through for an hour. And then put together a plan to address it.
I agree. It is a very eloquent way to state the situation with Strava,
Stravistix added more useful metrics and functionality than Strava has been doing for a long time. Even if it felt a bit like a ‘hack’ it worked well.
Just checked my Premium Subscription and it was actually up for yearly renewal in 2 days! Instead I decided to cancel my Premium / Summit subscription.
We will see if I come crawling back 😉
Well said.
Ray, I’d like to paraphrase that quote from my particular perspective.
“It’s been a while since they spent time creating new features that people have actually been asking for”
about 4 years ago I joined Strava, liked it and soon found myself looking at the forums where equally excited people were requesting features. It usually took weeks or months for a Strava representative to offer a a vague non committal reply. Android Ant+ integration took almost… 3 years!?!? from memory.
The last feature that I actually cared about was strava segments in 2014. Since then they have burnt effort and time delivering non-sequential timeline, updated suffer score/exertion which is just stupid – just licence HrTSS and TSS and be done with it!!!
4 years is a long time to burn delivering pretty much nothing from an end user perspective.
They just need to look here
link to support.strava.com
Almost all 4 to 6 years and very few completed.
Do they have no developers or do they have lots who are just doing no work?
Their investors need to be looking at that feature voting list and ask management what is going on in the company.
Their whole value depends on them retaining “KOM” position, if that’s gone it will be obliterated within a year.
My bet is that now they have an effective way to charge individually for things, that list will start being implemented much more quickly. They probably have half of the features ready and waiting to prove “value” for the subscriptions. As others have said though, that price isn’t going to stay where it is for long!
I hope you’re right Dave.
The Strava Engineering blog on Medium is very interesting reading. A lot of (most of?) their engineering budget goes on redesigning the service to keep up with ever-increasing load.
They seem to have laid some solid foundations in the last year; perhaps they’ll now start adding features people would actually be prepared to pay for!
Not sure what the point of Safety is?
The GPS units and watches are already using background connection to phone to provide that in their own platform, and since it needs a phone anyway there are other free apps which provide it.
I suppose ok for groups to all be on a unified platform.
The split between Training and Analysis seems more about trying to get people to have both rather than logical placement.
The reduced price is sensible since with their long feature freeze and annoying shortcomings I know a lot of people are walking away from the subscription so the business is under threat.
All they have is the fame at the his point, other platforms are leaving them behind if they lose #1 place they will die unless big feature overhaul.
An awful lot of the leaderboards are not premium, people are just using it for leaderboard “racing” and using the linking with other platforms for analysis.
Wahoo shows positions of your friends and frenemies on the bike computer. I guess Garmin has something similar. No need for a phone.
Unless the GPS has a sim card in it, it is still using the phone as it’s internet connection.
I have been a premium member for quite a while and this has prompted me to look at why I should stay a member. As other comentors have mentioned I felt that Strava was a useful training tool and one I wanted to see develop. So I subscribed.
Unfortunately new features and more importantly refinement of features feels to have stalled for a long time.
The free features (social tracking) are good but I am now looking into platforms such as link to strivemax.com which provide better activity analytics. These complementory platforms will be taking my money moving forward.
I can’t help but think that a large % of Premium members are more data driven yet seem to have been ignored for a push toward becoming a larger social platform.
We’ll said @James Turner. This announcement has prompted me to evaluate why I subscribe to Strava Premium. My cancellation is eminent as I get most of what I want from Garmin Connect. Although, it seems that I’m one of the few who doesn’t mind live segments but can certainly live without.
The only feature that was inconsistent for me from Garmin was live track – beacon was much more reliable. That was a long while ago that I last tried it, perhaps it’s better now…
I feel exactly the same. If you look at the request ticket board, there are some basic features that have been requested more than 6 years ago! That is just insane. I’ve been paying for a long time because I like the tool and I thought it was nice to support them, but they have not been delivering. What a shame.
Are they still “looking into” a night mode as they said a few years ago?
“I feel exactly the same. If you look at the request ticket board, there are some basic features that have been requested more than 6 years ago! That is just insane. I’ve been paying for a long time”
That’s why I dropped my Strava Premium account a while ago and even don’t do the free version any more.
Still haven’t seen the value in paying for anything they offer. I can do analysis with Trainerroad or Garmin Connect just to name a few. I do like their basic, free version, but not enough to pay for it.
I am currently a Premium member but outside of forcing people to pay up, I do not understand how you can logically separate Leaderboard, in Training, from Live Segments, in Analysis. It just makes no sense.
If I chose to downgrade to Analysis, I can compete in a Live Segment, but that competition will only be against myself?!?! I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when that was printed out on a PowerPoint deck and passed then passed around the conference room….
As if they wanted everyone to subscribe to the two plans, or none at all.
In any case, per-month subscription price dropped from 7.99€ to 5€ (all three packages) for me, which is nice. Or rather, would be nice if I didn’t cancel after updating my FTP and weight to then see it applied to all my previous rides. ?
Aren’t you missing the little asterisk that says “(when billed annually)”? The annual subscription had always been that cheap.
Actually cheaper than that, because my annual back in May was 59, not 60, and USD, not EUR. Are they trying to pull a secret 1:1 EUR instead of USD price hike here?
My annual premium back in May was 59$,
SportsTracks is $59 pa; you get a lot more for your money there.
In 6 years of Strava usage, I have had the premium service in two periods. My last one ended with a refund due to them not supporting run power meters (Stryd). Coupled to that the long and stagnant product line up; no run cadence data on mobile to name one of the worst, and this Summit is really just BS to squeeze more $. I still recommmed people to use it but only as a social platform, the Club feature I use heavily. And that’s a good point, I would hand over $ to support the Club feature, but the training analytics are gimmicky and poor. And also… #bringbackchronological
Run power support, and particularly run power data messing up cycling metrics, is one reason I don’t use Strava for analysis. For me it’s also mainly a social platform, to see what my friends are up to.
ANY type of power (e.g. from Concept 2 devices) messes up the cycling metrics.
I cancelled because of the running power mess – the new trainer road analytics fills some of the gaps for me
Interesting. I have had a premium membership for many years but have increasingly found myself using the new analytics in Trainerroad as I do more inside than out these days. I used to use segments for training but now outside rides are for enjoyment and inside are for training so again why do i need premium. I have now made all my rides private as the social side of things was just getting too much. (getting kudos on a 30 minute commute???)
I think I have jus saved myself some money.
I got kudos for a five-minute check on my larger screen TV Zwift setup…
I got kudos for a five-minute check on my larger screen TV Zwift setup… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just tried to cancel on the app and it brings me to Google play in an endless loop….
i just went to settings and downgraded my account effective from my next renewal
I just cancelled so it doesn’t renew at the end of the year. It took a few attempts until I got to the right place in Google Play. Not easy, but possible if you’re persistent.
Strava is getting a little too out there for me- I just want to look at the GPS map of my rides, record power/cadence/hr and transfer file to trainingpeaks or trainerroad. I don’t need all these extra gimmicks and it sounds like I will need two of the three packs to continue my existing routine.
Any rumblings of a wahoo ride platform? I feel like my ELEMNT app on my phone does what I need but I can’t get to it on a PC!
I learn something new every time I read one of your posts. I’m not a huge Strava user, so I almost skipped this one. But now I know that Garmin Connect has LiveTrack that will work with my watch. I had been using the RoadID app for that safety feature. One less moving part to worry about at the start of my rides. Thanks!
The only reason for me to use the premium is that I can download the gpx files from other people to learn new routes or to re-ride interesting routes. I don’t see any review of that option on your article. That is still possible in the future with the different packs?
I know this is an old comment now, but I signed up the for training pack, and it lets me download GPX.
TrainingPeaks costs something like $9.00/month with the USAT discount, and beats anything Strava has to offer. If I could turn off their Kudos feature, I would do that in a heartbeat. I DO NOT want yet another “social platform”.
Someone else said it, I can’t recall new features released by Strava, where is their innovation? And one of the most important features for me (track search) has been disabled because US soldiers decided to share their locations on social netoworks.
Not being able to search for rides really blows. I believe it was turned off well before the issue of soldiers uploading their runs came out last year. When I travel it would be nice to find rides and not just look at the heatmap for an area. There are many requests for this feature and I get an email every time someone requests it or comments on it using the open support ticket. Strava seems to have zero interest in finding a solution.
Ridewithgps (free version) least let’s you search for rides that people create in a given area and I use this, plus you can usually download the gpx file if it is a public route.
Training Peaks free version also seems better for analysis then Strava.
Bye bye Strava Premium, just downgraded now.
After reading this, I can’t remember why I’m paying for Strava premium at all. It may have been back in the old days I just wanted to make sure they succeeded. I don’t need to worry about that anymore. My inclination is to drop back to the free version, see what, if anything I miss, and then just pay for that.
So did they get around to actually providing accurate data analysis? When you change your current FTP setting, all historical data is adjusted to reflect this newly updated FTP!! What!!! TP licensing me thinks, and not likely to change for $$ reasons, so very much an amateur app for an amateur-novice athlete.
link to support.strava.com
Just tried to cancel, which works.
Mostly to try the packs.
Then I tried to renew, which doesn’t work 🙂
Oops.
I was a premium user for a year around two years ago. Maybe things have got better but I doubt it.
The supposed Goals feature was a joke. I could not add races to my calendar – only races that they recognised.
The analysis features offered nothing of interest. Fitness & Freshness – again a complete joke.
It just seemed to be a collection of a few half baked ideas thrown together.
Wow, talk about confusing. First, I couldn’t find the chart that lists the differences between the “packs” that you have shown above. Drilling down to each one on Strava’s site makes it really hard to compare. And when you do drill down, the features in each one don’t make sense, as you mentioned. Heat map in safety? And then there are features in Premium, that don’t show up in any of them, like downloading GPX files.
So not only are the pack features confusing, the role out itself is confusing.
I can’t live without Strava, but I won’t be a premium member beacause of their terrible altitude correction alghorithm.
It is pitty that my yearly membership just got renewed yesterday ? I could have paid less with these new pack by leaving features I do not need.
The live segments are fun except when you follow some elites living close to your neighborhood. Then all those segments let youbrace against times you cannot beat. I wish I could switch and race only my own PRs…
I think the Wahoo Bolt allows you to race against your PR on Live Segments.
@Marrin: The updated Strava live segments on the Garmin 1030 and 130 are much improved.
You’re in luck! You can change live segments so that it’s your own PR you are racing against rather than anyone else.
I must be in a guinea pig group of users because these options became available to me about a month ago. Its probably because I’m constantly cancelling and renewing my Strava Premium membership because I’m always on the fence about the pricing.
As far as the change goes, I might drop down to just purchasing the Safety Pack, as TP and Trainerroad cover all my analytics needs, although I do like Strava’s Run Analysis tools interface better than TP and the Relative Effort metric is neat to look at. Only reason I need Beacon, is because I often have issues with my Wahoo Bolt and Garmin 935 automatically starting a Live Tracking when I start an activity.
I mostly just feel bad because the free features on Strava are the ones I use the most, and honestly I’m ok with paying for other stuff if not to support the core feature set. I completely understand a social platform needing that Free option, as far fewer users are likely to test out a paid service.
Strava have turned into the Facebook of the training market. It has become more obvious over the last couple years that they have been trying to please their investors more than their customers. I cancelled my premium account after the algorithmic feed was implemented but now I think it’s time to delete my account and all my data from their platform.
If you want the “Old Strava”, before the algorithmic feed, try out Stravini. You click a few paramaters, and the old Strava feed comes back. And as a HUGE bonus, you can filter out Zwift crap!!!. link to stravini.com
I had a premium membership, at the annual level (mostly b/c I missed a renew date in December). Strava should have, but does not appear to have a way for those with existing annual memberships to break them into the 3 bits of the new “summit.” plan. That’s enough for me to pull the trigger and cancel now.
You cancel you newly converted triple-pack, let it run out, then resubscribe only to those modules that you want. I don’t see anything sneaky about it, because that’s exactly the same set of options I except new subscribers to the triple-pack (who were never converted from premium) would get.
Whenever I am dealing with changes with a product (or reading the directions, for that matter), I try to do it two different ways:
1. As the lots o’ years IT mind-melder interpreting the intent and/or piss-poor documentation of a thing
and
2. The “I just want to use the damn thing” user.
My propensity to use some thing/device/tool is usually inversely proportional to the effort I put out in either or both efforts. My initial reaction after reading your finely-crafted (uh-oh, that’s a hint) overview is, “Ah crap, why can’t they just clearly spell out what the hell the effect is on me? I’m currently a Premium user. Do I need to add on “packs”, or does my current dole cover them? Oh sure, you explained it, but I don’t see it covered in any of the graphics/pictures you’re displaying (I’m assuming) from Strava. Good god people, we want to ride a bike, run, or something, not read a online brochure to figure things out. Why do we think the pictures are next to the prices at fast-food joints?
Put more succinctly, it’s called “gratuitous change”
Ok, I feel better. 🙂
When was the last time Strava did something that the community actually liked and got behind:
Non sequential news feed
Stories/posts thing
#givekudos (I still don’t understand it)
And now this
I cancelled premium a year ago and see no reason renew. veloveiwer.com offers great analytics at a fraction of the cost
Ha ha yes, the give kudos thing is absolutely bizarre
#givekudos seems to be what happens when you hire too many fresh out of school creativity experts who want to leave their mark on your product, any mark.
Or maybe it’s again something about runners, like every change in Strava now seems to be about runners (that’s where they don’t already dominate, and the market is so much bigger). For cyclists, Strava has changed the way we talk without even trying. But that’s the only way it could ever work, if they now actively try to force similar patterns down runners’ throats it will just make them appear disrespectful of their users.
Based on comments here I’m cancelling Strava. I just thought about my days. My fitness pal to track my food intake, training peaks free version, strava, ride with gps, HRV4, sporttracks, garmin connect,for my step tracker, my stuff is everywhere but nowhere in one place and duplicated in others. Tapirrik trying to keep it all synced, i’m a wahoo guy wahoo doesn’t connect to sporttracks directly….just ugh
I’d pay 20 bucks a month for one spot that will just take it ALL…..
Doesn’t exist yet i guess but training peaks at least connects to wahoo so i guess i’ll go back there. Training peaks at least collects MOST of it
Strava makes me have a premium to be able to measure myself against others and see the information but other than hill climbing what value is it. I can compare my performances against myself on other apps and any other segment is almost totally useless to compare against “others” because i’m running solo and all the segment leaders are all group rides.
I can’t stand the social aspect of Strava anyway
In fact thinking about the “value” of what i spend time on and pay for. I spend more time here than Strava and I’ll take some of that now saved premium and subscribe to Ray for 20 bucks a year. FAR more bang for the buck…..light years more
“Strava makes me have a premium to be able to measure myself against others”
How so? Leaderboards have been free forever and live segments are more nuisance than helpful.
I’m with you on the value of my $2 going to Ray being way more valuable! I’ve never paid for Strava- maybe that’s why I don’t really see much value in it. I can see the leaderboard/segments, but frankly- they just aren’t that interesting to me most of the time anyway. I mainly use it for when I join group rides and the group has posted the route on Strava.
That should have been $20, not $2!
SportTracks has had direct sync support with the Wahoo ELEMNT since 2016, and it’s been integrated into the BOLT and MINI since they were introduced – link to sporttracks.mobi
I stand corrected about that. Any word on any sort of nutrition sync with anyone? That has been a request since 2015 at least
I was upset a couple of months ago when suddenly my HR data was no longer showing. I inquired about it and was told that if I wanted to see MY heart rate data, I had to give them permission so they could show me all kinds of health related metrics.
My feeling is that I am paying for the premium service and I resent their changing the “contract” as far as what I get in the middle of my billing cycle.
Based on this, I decided that when my premium membership was up, I would just drop it. After all, I am paying for them to not give me what I already had but do not have now.
I guess this finales it, I will no longer pay for their service.
BTW, all of my stuff is private as I have no interest in the social platform.
It’s a requirement of the new data privacy act in the EU to get the consent of an user before collecting health related data.
They did interpret it wrongly twice. For one, by just collecting/receiving the data anyway. Then, by not realizing that if someone signs up consciously and without being forced to a site whose stated purpose is to collect and show such data – the user has already given his/her consent to do exactly that.
For example, the regulation prevents Polar from collecting data if the user doesn’t want that and just wants to use his/her HRM gadget. Only that, in this case, Polar doesn’t ask and doesn’t unbundle. Which, unlike with what I’ve described for Strava, here is non-compliant.
A couple of thoughts on this.
I am not in the EU so their requirements are of zero interest to me.
More to the point, I am subscribing to their service and paying money for it. Doesn’t the act of signing up, and paying, count as consent?
My point is that for a very long time, the HR data was recorded and displayed. Suddenly it isn’t. IOW, I am not getting what I was getting even though I am paying for it.
I don’t want or care about having them “manage” the data, just display my data (which I keep to myself) on my page.
Like I said, I am through with them.
Surprised no one mentioned that they continue to add stuff no one asks for and refuse to add what everyone wants back. The chronological feed has been begged for, filters so you don’t have to see rides/runs under certain distances, race warm ups, etc. The ability to hide daily commutes. And the ability to categorize your rides (Road, MTB, etc).
My guess about the non-chronological feed is the invested interest fallacy. They put so much into it that they can’t see how unwanted of a feature it is. All the New Feature requests have been for filters on feeds, not the latest buzzword AI we make the decision for you mess they made. It does warm my heart to see so many others who express the same dislike as I’ve harbored for the feed change.
How many complaints about Zwift would go away with a filter? How many complaints about seeing commutes? How many new features would be taken care of from having filters? Like filtering rides by bike, duration, date, selecting followers you are interested in at that moment. But all of that isn’t fancy buzzwords but is technology that has been around since the dawn of the database. Really, it’s literally how what databases are optimized for, not AI algorithms failing to learn that you want to see different sets of data at different moments, even minutes or seconds from the last click.
A bit of a marketing mishmash.
I’ve moved to training peaks.
Much more useful particularly for coaching.
Except for the re-branding wasn’t this added a few weeks ago? I already had the option to choose and pick 3 packs…
But you are right Ray, this smells like they just sprinkled the most valuable options around, so as to avoid people cherry picking too much.
As for the “Summit” thing I can almost hear them talk in the meeting room:
“Let’s rename it to something that appeals to people trying to better themselves, getting out of a plateux, help them peak…
“We can’t use Peak because you know… that other training plataform…”
“Let’s google for synonyms… Apogee… Pinnacle… Summit, that’s it!”
Conveniently my membership is up for renewal just next month, I’ve cancelled that renewal, for a number of reasons people have mentioned above. This is the feedback I gave them, I hope they listen to their customers and change some of the policies.
“The change to Summit is confusing and doesn’t have the value, the different options being split across the different packs. No new features on the Strava platform for a long time. Also charging (the smaller) GPS manufacturers for live segments is just wrong!
Strava seems to have lost customer focus, instead deciding to chase money. It’s a real shame as I have been a premium member for a long time :(”
I can answer why the Training and Analysis packs have odd break ups. Basically they want you to feel you have to buy two packs to cover what you feel you want, and then when you add the cost of the two together, they hope you’ll say “I might as well get all three”.
This break up of packs has not been done in consultation with users, it has all been done with marketing and psychologists. It is simply to increase the number of people giving them money.
Eg for me I would like a pack with:
– Custom Goals
– Filtered Leaderboards
– Segment Efforts
– Live Segments
– Fitness & Freshness
I think it might be better to have a 50c per item, i.e. a la carte of what suits you exactly. This would have been dead simple to do, but again they want to extract money for what you do need lugged onto what you wanted.
Oh and seriously how long has it been since something new was added to Strava?
“This would have been dead simple to do”
Not really how software as a service works… they’d be creating too many edge cases…
Even if you DON’T say “I might as well get all three”, two packs now is more expensive than Premium was previously, isn’t it? $66/year compared to $59?
No, because an annual pack is only $23.99 – so $23.99*2= $47.98, which is less than $59.
If you buy all 3 it is discounted to $5 a month, billed annually, so that is $60 vs $59 previously for myself for 10 years now. If I pick two packages it is $4 a month or $48 a year, not much of a savings over the $59. I would be happy to just go with one package if Segments and Filtered Leaderboards were together but they obviously split them up to make you buy two packages.
Strava backtracks oncharging hardware makers when Garmin says bye bye in 3…2….1…
Garmin (and Wahoo) apparently get a pass…
Hmmmmm, is this some Russian hack
I have tried a free Premium with my Garmin purchase but couldn’t justify it given what I see in Garmin Connect.
And a few months ago came the non-chronogical feed, huge disappointment and very poorly implemented.
At that moment I actually considered getting Premium if it offered the chronological feed.
Today, I won’t be a Summit member but if they create a “Clean Feed” pack with chronological feed and ability to filter what is shown I will pull the cash and climb this Summit.
There is a free chrome plugin called stravini which restores chronological feed and has the option of filtering all the annoying rubbish. Its great. Sadly it only works on a desktop browser. The phone apps remain broken.
Thanks for the info davie, unfortunately I predominantly use Android app.
Weird choice. The only thing the name change did for me was to get triggered that stuff got changed.
Currently on a year subscription of Premium, simply because I have been leeching off free trials for several years before that.
I used to go for Premium to set my week goals and year goals, but since I’ve been meticulously keeping my runs logged in a simple sheet I don’t really look at that anymore.
HR analysis is interesting when it’s there, but not worth paying for just to get that. However, does this mean that with Free, there is NO HR data at all? Because that would be a weird miss. I’d expect at least the graph containing the data I measured…
I don’t use the Perks, live stuff, Relative Effort is meh (StravistiX does it better anyway).
Heck, I got Premium mostly to get rid of the annoying “Get Premium” buttons everywhere, and then they replace them with “Give Premium”… Wut?
I do use Strava for some of the social stuff. I have joined a few groups of people I know, either digitally or IRL, and enjoy the little bit of interaction.
However, for getting my daily fix of graphs and stats, I use Smashrun (free option). Simply love the dashboard full of stats, and that’s it.
Add to this the ever decreasing amount of interesting challenges (segment based and/or US only, that’s just useless to the majority of users. Or NYRR… Really? Register ANOTHER account just to join challenges?) and the simple fact that “Summit” does NOT sound like there will be more focus on running… Premium was at least sports-neutral, when you say Summit I think of cycling, or perhaps hiking or mountaineering.
Strava is at a hit-or-miss point here. I believe they made it into a miss.
Perhaps they should have used a different name for the Premium change, and had packs by sport, one with runner analytics, another with cycling analytics. Sure, it’ll piss off the Tri’s who then have to purchase multiple packs, but we’ll give them all of Strava’s swimming features as a bonus for purchasing both :-D. The division seems more fair as features need to be implemented on a sport by sport basis anyway.
Reading through the comments today, there’s a very clear theme to all of the messages. Strava don’t engage at all with their users. I can accept not posting here, but looking at other contact points like their own forum and their own feature request page it’s like they don’t even care.
Compare and contrast that with Wahoo who watch these comment sections like hawks and respond within seconds and it’s easy to see why people are excited to buy from Wahoo and mostly “meh” about paying Strava. If Strava wanted more subscribers they could have just engaged with their user base more. It’s not a pricing issue it’s a user engagement issue and if they continue to work this way I can see subsciptions going down instead of up. This thread has certainly reminded me that they’ve been ignoring some pretty basic requests. I personally asked for time zone correction years ago because summer time meant half the field in a large race were an hour out so couldn’t compare tracks or do a flyby. Trivial to fix and still nothing.
Ignoring all the points listed above, a key one for me is “Did I miss the email?” As someone that’s been a premium subscriber for 5+ years, how come I found out about this from some web forums? Why didn’t they email their customers in parallel with the marketing channels?
My renewal happened at start July, so I’ve 11 months to see what happens. I guess I’ll keep it, but to be fair I’m not sure why. Between Training Peaks, WKO4 and Garmin, that’s where I do my analysis anyway. To be honest I had no idea it was this expensive, I thought it was $20-30 a year. So this has been a bit of an own goal.
That puts paid my idea of getting the new Lezyne Mega series. I had high hopes for these new offerings as something less expensive than Garmin, but more sophisticated than the CatEye units I’ve been using since the late 1980s. My current CatEye Strada Smart will give power, speed/distance and cadence data — it just lacks GPS navigation. Currently if I run into navigation issues while out on a ride, I stop and use my phone to find my location and plan my route….no turn by turn directions to be sure, but the head unit is USD 200+ less than a stripped down Garmin.
Bye Bye Strava Premium…..since the company refuses to address a years-long list of feature requests, and now effectively kills of GPS unit competition, why support them?
Jim, to have your avatar shown here you need to register it with Gravatar. Yes, that’s another site. Cheers!
What a bizarre company Strava has turned to be. I’ve been a premium user since 2013 but this might be the nail in the coffin. I can’t recall one notable improvement in the last few years and I feel vindicated by reading that others feel the same.
As a platform that was/is built off its users, I’m really perplexed as to why these changes were made without soliciting the input from the user base. Maybe I shouldn’t be, though. What was once an exciting and innovative tool has turned into yet another social sharing app. And I still have no idea what “Points in the Red” means, ffs.
I am a PREMIUM subscriber, and I think that basically the main feature I use is the ability to download GPX versions of routes which I either like of have seen from other users…I do *not* use the training features etc. I am paying 3.99 GBP per month – is this price likely to go up, or which of the summit packs would allow me to download gpx files from user routes?
I will downgrade. But my reason is only that still I cant filter out certain activities like indoor-training (winter is comming real soon here) and commutes. Been a member since 2014.
I know why the Race and Pace Analysis is not in the Analysis Pack and Heart Rate is not in the Training Pack:
People not willing to shell out the money for the full summit membership will only take one of these packs. When they are used to it they will miss something essential. Now, you can decide:
Pay a second pack or just skip this step and get the full abo?
In my opinion this is no mistake but a decision made by marketing people, not by sporting guys.
This is a great idea. I’ve already signed up to one of the packs. $2.99 per month is just fine, my chosen pack is what I need. $10 per month was just too much – no value for money IMO.
I’ve not pulled the trigger yet, but I could see myself taking a similar step. I use SportTracks, but adding the strava analysis pack is cheap, and curiosity could easily see me signing up. I never saw value in the full premium for me as a runner, but could be tempted in with a very ‘light’ package such as this.
I’m confused, if heart rate analysis is part of the analysis pack, and I have heart rate sensor collection on strava non-premium android now, do I still have it without a summit analysis pack?
The analysis split between two packs is also a bit silly – they would have been better off having only two teirs, drop the price overall for premium (earn kudos and swell feeling form existing subscribers), and leave the two packs at 2.99 and split into analisys and beacon. I think this would drive a lot more takeup and get them further in the black.
Now I feel I want the two packs for analysis and feel ripped off I need the both despite the overall price being less than the, (never entertained as value by me), previous premium product.
This from a Garmin Fenix user who apparently is part of their growing market share and profitability…
Swing… and a miss… for me.
With Garmin Connect Live Track not working 90% of the time, at least not for me this summer, even for a brand new Garmin device, it may be worth getting the Safety option just to get that support. My son and I often ride together and sometimes he or I rides alone. My wife likes to know we are ok, so the live track is a worth while option.
The silly Garmin app is not working on Android for me and my son. To get the live track to work, We have to re-install the Connect App every ride. it may or may not work even doing that.
BB
The taxonomy is slightly confusing. On the “Summit” joining page (link to strava.com) they still use the word “Premium” extensively (Premium Perks, Premium Support). It’s even capitalized: “Get discounts from top brands, exclusively for Premium members.”
So either this is so confusing even Strava didn’t get it right or Strava will still continue using Premium as a description of the service; if that’s the case, the downstream impact of the change on manufacturers could be small.
I’m cancelling my premium. The live segments on Wahoo are not great. They just do average speed. I’m always 1 minutes up at the base of climb then behind by the top. Useless
I had a similar experience with Garmin, but luckily it was in my favour.
It also meant that I pretty much killed myself for no reason 🙂
I feel the same as several others have expressed that Strava ignores the multitude of requests to correct simple problems. I just finished a free trial version and decided it was definitely not worth the money.
Any idea how can i downgrade to the specific pack only? My Strava Summit profile page shows only option to downgrade to free level.
Dammit – I wish I’d have seen this yesterday. My subscription (through Google Play) auto-renewed yesterday for the full boat. I’d have much preferred to only do one or two packs.
The more I think about this, the more it makes me cranky. I think they could (should) have communicated this better.
I went back and looked at my Dashboard (which I don’t really visit daily anyway), and there is no post there about the subscription change. There’s not even a reference to the blog post announcing the change. I have push notifications enabled on the app, but I didn’t see any notification there, either.
As a monthly subscriber, the lack of notification would cost me $7.99 USD if I were to miss the announcement by a couple of days. But I’m an annual subscriber; this is where the advanced notification would have been nice. Instead, the quick change has cost me $35 ($59 annual renewal via Google Play vs a $2 pack x 12 months) since I only really need (or even use) the Analysis pack’s features.
Say what you will about Zwift’s price increase, but at least they gave existing subscribers plenty of notice it was coming.
In the interest of full disclosure:
Shortly after writing the above posts, I opened a support case asking for a refund of my Premium membership subscription payment. It took a few days, but Strava did refund my subscription and reverted me to a free account.
Good on them!
Wow. You know your company has image problems when you announce that you are lowering your prices and all you get are complaints and people dropping your paid service in response.
But they haven’t lowered their prices? They’ve increased them?
From the article:
“If there’s any good news in here is that the pricing remains identical. If you pay for Strava Premium today, it remains the same price for new or existing users ($59/year or $7.99 a month).”
And they broke premium into 3 different sets of features, so if you only care about features from one or two of the sets then you can downgrade and pay less. Or am I missing something?
No..you haven’t missed anything. Lower options for less money. Simple as that.
Never considered premium because of the price, but now I’m interested in the Analysis pack. Anything else similar elsewhere in that price range?
Hmmm…interesting!
Made me realize how far Strava has been drifted away from “it”.
I’ve been a premium member since 2012, but they obliterated the feature I needed most, namely the option to download specific courses directly from the “search tracks”-menu.
All the other stuff I once thought top-dog-killer-features remains pretty basic, e.g. training analysis, differentiation between only three kind of running types (long run, training etc.), post-run visualization and many others.
This whole summit thing is just confusing and mirrors their loss of focus towards their loyal customers’ desires.
Therefore, I’ll drop my Premium and return to Strava Free.
For further analysis, I’ll use runalyze.com…completely for free, huge ammount of stats, Kudos-free, comparable to TP Premium – just recently implemented automatic upload with Garmin and Polar and open to all other portals. You can even decide if you want to use it cloud-wise or local on your desktop.
https://runalyze.com (I’m not connected with them in any way!)
To add to chorus of people not impressed by this, just on the off chance anyone from Strava reads here more than they read their own feedback forms and message boards.
Cancelled my yearly subscription today due to this. Was prepared to put up with some of the Strava faults on the basis that at least maybe they were focused on fixing things, but apparently a (poor) re branding exercise has been their priority and so that has turned me off them. They should be focusing on the following *instead* of this nonsense:
1. Sort out their auto ‘cheat’ detection on segments. A whole bunch of us losers try hard to get KOM’s and it’s bloody annoying when they’re out of reach due to obvious eBike or Car rides. I shouldn’t have to and don’t want to spend time flagging rides when a simple comparison of w/kg over time vs a baseline set by a pro would safely (99% of the time) do this accurately and automatically.
2. Fix fitness/freshness so as it doesn’t backdate yours chart when you update your FTP.
3. Give me power PB updates when I hit them, don’t make me hunt them out in power curve graphs…
4. At least give us the *option* of returning our dashboard to a chronological feed.
Interesting reading these comments. I have been a “fan” and indeed “Premium” subscriber to Strava since 2012 and use it mainly for “social” (i.e. to see what my friends have been up to and even to see who I might want to become a “friend” of – e.g. fellow competitors in a race) and segments (to see how I am doing and who might have done a little better than my previous effort that I might now need to go and beat). It irks me that I have been spend “forever” flagging rides uploaded as runs and Strava’s recent “solution” to this was not too improve their algorithms but to impose a daily flagging limit on users! However other than that there is really nothing else that comes anywhere close to this. If you want detailed analysis of your activities then no doubt there are other better platforms but really the usual “analysis” I do of 95% of my training is a quick glance of how far, how long, average and max HR and, if relevant, maybe average power. For that it does of course work fine. “Summit” really changes nothing for me but clearly it was never meant to. So I think I still get some value from my subscription and I don’t see it as a huge investment anyway. As such will hang in there for now but for sure it is disappointing that Strava now focus largely on marketing and just keeping it going which, as an IT consultant, I do not underestimate the relative difficulty in so doing. However to remain a viable business in this space that clearly is not good enough to hope to continue to exist forever.
Good, this will save me money. I don’t get it why strava keeps adding features that are much better covered by other software (competing with facebook??? flawed power analysis???), and is not able to fix basic features at the core of the offer. For example route planning: the community heatmap is a unique asset, but why is it so difficult to add basic features like filtering of routes (by distance, by location, by elevation, by name) or routes tagging? why not implementing a route reverse features? Try to ask on their forum for implementation of these basic features…. they don’t even care answering.
So many haters. I use Garmin data if I really want to drill down, but for me the general data Strava presents to me is enough to keep me heading in the right direction. I happily pay annually, who cares this is not a lot of money for an incredible platform I use daily to keep up with my friends activities and track my overall performance. I’d gladly pay more honestly. Strava provides a ton of value for me.
I would refer you to a quote earlier
“It’s been a while since they spent time creating new features that no one else had.”
I feel a bit guilty using Strava a lot with the free version,
and hoped that there would be something more.
They might do well just with a ‘donate’ category at 1/2 of premium $.
I loved Strava when it first started, happily subscribed to Premium for a few years.
But loving a bit more in depth analysis for cycling, I found VeloViewer. And since I’m not in the kind of shape that gets KOMs, some of the more obscure challenges like the Eddington score, visiting tiles on a map, and my favourite challenge of trying to enlarge your Max Square (basically, every time you visit a tile it changes colour, but what is the biggest square of tiles, no gaps allowed, that you have ridden).
I did feel bad for cancelling my subscription to Strava a few years ago, but I get what I need from the free content. If they introduce some new features that interest me then I might return, but there hasn’t been anything that enticing. Beacon came close, but my Garmin 800 said no.
I am pretty shocked at how many comments here reflect the notion along the lines of “glad to support Strava by being a premium member… even if I am not using the features”.
Do you people not realize that YOUR DATA is what supports the platform. Just by being a (free) user you provide Strava way more value then their p̶r̶e̶m̶i̶u̶m̶ Summit fees.
Strava has existing revenue channels that are entirely dependent on user data. People here are comparing it to Facebook (with good reason), but you don’t see FB charging users a premium. That’s because they want the most amount of people to..(duh)..USE THE PLATFORM!
I am not saying to stop using Strava; I find it great for keeping up with the activities of my friends and family, and for some light analysis. I don’t find even $2.99/mo of value in any of the packs, and I would rather give my money to a company that provides things that aren’t available for free elsewhere (TrainerRoad). If you find additional value in the p̶r̶e̶m̶i̶u̶m̶ Summit features, for sure buy them. But don’t pay for a premium membership out of some weird sense of obligation or loyalty!
Strava should be doing everything in its power to acquire (and keep) users. There are lot’s of things mentioned here and in their feature request list that seem so obvious, simple, and frustrating that they won’t or can’t implement (I’m looking at you power/cadence in mobile). This Summit announcement is clearly a marketing strategy, but it’s also shocking how many people are up in arms about it. Literally nothing has changed, except for the opportunity to buy less features at a lower cost.
As far as charging some device makers and not others for live segments. Good God that seems like a dumb business move. This is probably the most obvious reason for people to want a p̶r̶e̶m̶i̶u̶m̶ Summit membership… To see in real time how hard they need to push to PR or KOM. They should want as many devices as possible to be capable of this. Again, anything that keeps users engaged and using their platform will add to their backend data revenue streams. They can (and already do e.g. Zwift) display ads. More users = More money. There’s a ton of ways for them to leverage more money. Gouging some device makers and not others seems odd.
This is further complicated by the new Xert announcement of Free Strava Live Segments. I really don’t understand this. Why is Strava charging device makers (other than Garmin and Wahoo), charging users, and then allowing Xert to implement this for free (and free for Xert users even without a strava p̶r̶e̶m̶i̶u̶m̶ Summit membership)? I am genuinely confused about this. Can anyone explain?
The xert live segments has a 5 segment limit, and it’s not really doing live segments like garmin/wahoo do live segments. There is no “ahead/behind”. Basically xert live segments just give you a power target to hit so that you put in your best effort on the segment (based on what xert thinks you can do based on the power data from your past rides that xert analyzes).
The in comparison to what people expect of live segments these days the number of segments is severely limited and you aren’t competing against anyone else on the segment (which is what I think most people want out of segments), you are just being told how hard you can go for this length of segment based on past performances.
IF you own a Garmin Edge 510 or better, you do NOT need premium/summit to do live strava segments. However you will need to manually re-create (using several steps) what Strava and Garmin have automated.
Just find a strava segment and effort (yours or others) you want to race and download that specific effort as a GPX file on your PC (heaps of plug-ins can do this). Copy that GPX file into the Edge in the garmin\newfiles folder, and the Edge will convert it to a course.
Set up a new activity screen on your edge and add 2 fields. “distance to end of course” and “time ahead/behind”.
When you are near the segment, load the course on the edge. As soon as you hit the start of the course/segment, the race will begin on the Edge screen as per normal.
Yes, it is manual and a bit of effort. Yes it works.
I’m sorry, I should clarify. I understand there are functionality differences, but I was thinking from a business perspective. The model was charge the customer, now it’s charge the customer and the device maker (except Garmin and wahoo), unless it’s xert’s customers, which get a pass. Xert is still licensing strava segment info, and customers are still notified of upcoming segments in real time while even receiving pacing advice. Shrug emoji?
@davie it sounds like if you are doing all that… You should prob just fork over your $2.99/mo and save your time!
I don’t know but whatever license terms that strava has might only require payment if there is live feedback on the segment? Instead of xert’s “here’s the power you should be able to do”.
Xert isn’t licensing Strava Live Segments.
Instead, they’re just using the regular Strava API which is free to all developers (there’s something like 5,000 developers that have access to it).
RE: Davie’s option: Yes, that has always existed (and still does) – but as Mitch noted, that’s a heck of a lot of work to do every single time and to do it anytime a segment leader changes (which you’d have to manually check).
I use a Wahoo Bolt and do my planning using Komoot. Carrying my mobile with me, connected to the Bolt, and with LTE coverage –
I’ve never seen a live Segment popping up on my bike computer. Despite having paid for Strava premium.
Sure, maybe there’s some obscure way (use Strava to plan routes?), but as paying customer I am not open to the idea of jumping through loops. If Strava wanted me to stick with them, they should’ve and should reach out to the bike computer manufacturers to make it super easy for everyone. This in mind I understand why Lezyne and others discontinue and/or switch to alternatives of their own. Indeed, as long as data can be uploaded everywhere (hey, options for arbitrary HTTP POST URLs please!) I’m for it. Monocultures make it hard to re-establish freedom of choice and competition.
You need to ‘favorite’ a segment to have it show up.
Ah, yes, the regular strava api doesn’t let you have access to the gps tracks of other people on the segment (since the changes they made to the api in jan 2018), thus the at best someone using the regular strava api could do for live segments would be just to compare to a constant speed (garmin, wahoo, and strava’s app are supposed to compared to the actual gps track).
@DCRainmaker – If Xert doesn’t need to license Strava Live Segments for Head Hunter, why don’t the Lezynes and Stages of the world just build out their functionality in a similar way? They can provide some guidance on when segments start/stop (and maybe additional info), and then they can still make the claim that they support Live Segments.
Boom! Problem solved.
As someone who doesn’t really care about Live Segment maybe I just don’t “get it”?
I think people generally want/expect a live updated ahead/behind vs a friend/competitor/kom out of live segments. Since competition against others is the whole point of segments.
well could have been my reason to jump back to be paying for strava if i could just select one pack that only included live segments but thats not possible,to do that i need to select 2 packs ???
in my mind all features regarding segments should be in training pack and all form for analysis in analysis pack but strava have intentionally split them in 2 packs so we need to buy both to get the features 🙁 not for me sorry
This may work for us. We will at least try beacon. Carmin tracking almost never works. My wife headed out on her run about 04:30 and no tracking link. We use find my friends most of the time.
The split of information between the training pack and analysis pack seems expressly intended to force a member to purchase both packs. IF they really wanted to make it easier and more affordable THEN they would have arranged the purchase options in a sensible manner allowing a user to purchase what they need in one package.
Even if you have to buy both packs it’s still cheaper than premium was, which was the only way previously to get any of the premium features.
This finally got me to subscribe for live segments for $24/yr. There was not anything else compelling to make me ever have paid $60. I love the low cost option and at least for me, it finally got Strava some revenue for an app that is still tons of fun and motivating alongside trainerroad for more focused work. Kudos Strava… But you’ve really got to improve and innovate a lot more to ever get beyond segments defining you.
This was my first thought as well and is what I expected more people to take from the price adjustment. Not that Strava sucks and I am not giving them my money. At $2/month I would certainly consider paying to enable Live tracking on my Bolt, which I think is what they are going for.
While I absolutely agree that Strava hasn’t done anything too interesting or even in the best interest of the users lately. I think they do what they do quite well (social) and their are plenty of other apps that handle training and data analysis much better. My only gripe has been that all these apps want $10/month all year round and that I have to use 3 different apps to get what I want done.
Perhaps instead of someone acquiring Strava, they could pick up a couple other companies and consolidate things a bit more so we don’t need to use and pay for 3 different services to plan, track and analyze my rides properly. I wouldn’t mind paying one company $10/mo for everything I need…
My premium ended just in time and I moved onto summit analysis as I like to use live segment and power analysis. I can see live segments on my wahoo, but power data is not showing up on mobile. It only works on pc website.
Asked strava why, couldn’t receive solution. Anyone in same problem as I am?
I’m done with Strava. Zero pre-announcement to paid Premium members. No pre-announcement in the Strava dashboard or Twitter or Fakebook. The continued push to becoming another social media site/app is uninteresting and doesn’t warrant payment. MY premium auto-renewed in July. Again… without any communication prior to it happening. Filed a support ticket through Strava for a refund… “Since Strava has made changes that are not improvements… Strava is no longer providing me with a service that I originally signed up for.” Refund processed.
I appreciate this group’s recommendations of other platforms.
Not sure why Strava or any company needs to pre-announce anything, once it’s out there everyone will know regardless of who you tell first, that’s how the internet works. Are you saying that they should send you a special notification before they tell everyone since your renewal is due? They are not taking any features away from you that you had before you agreed to pay and auto-renew..
Strava IS a social media site, that is their core focus. They just happen to have some interesting data thrown in as a reason for people to post their workouts instead of boring comments about your day. If you want indepth analytics there are other companies that specialize in that. But they haven’t drastically changed what they are offering all the sudden, they just portioned it out in smaller pieces…
I’m yet to be able to pick individual Summit packs. It just keeps me on the premium version. I just rolled over for a month and again – no ability to select which packs I want.
Do I need to let this lapse, then re-subscribe?
I can downgrade since the analysis in Strava has been lacking for years, despite many comments in their forum. You can not have separate HR zones for cycling and running, which is really lame. You update your FTP and and it changes for past activities. For this reason I also use Training Peaks and kind of annoyed I had to also be a Strava premium member just to get a few things I wanted like segments on my Garmin. I know the order of what goes in each doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you think about it from a marketing view point. You have to pick two packages if you want live segments and also filtered segment leaderboards. Sure it would seem those go together but I am sure they are hoping to get people to pick 2 packages, since once you get them to do that for only $1 more a month you get the 3rd one and you are right back where you were before (except $1 more a month, since $5 x 12 = $60 and I have previously been paying $59)
I only have the HRM to train by. Is the Analysis package worth it when training only on HRM? I had in mind that they would target the HRM/PM audience only with the ol’premium thingy.
It’s funny they didn’t properly implement the Premium -> one Summit pack path. When I’m cancelling Premium, they don’t give me the option to choose a Summit pack. Obviously they don’t want my money 🙂
For those of us who do post run/ride analysis on a pc vs a phone, isn’t Stravistics for Chrome, which is free, a better option with more useful information? I’ve been using Strava for years now and I want to support them but they’re not really offering me anything more useful than comparing my runs/rides to others but even that doesn’t paint the whole picture so in reality it’s just an mileage/pr tracker which is still free, as it should be.
My Goal is that you make it your Mission to fix this BASIC DANG FUNCTIONALITY STRAVA!
link to support.strava.com
You know, since you’ve known about this glaring problem for >3 years and the F&F graph is one of the centerpieces of your Summit platform.
Their “goal” is to ignore their paying customers. This has been an on-going theme for more than three years now. I don’t understand why people continue to pay. I dumped Strava completely a year ago after the pricing name game bs.
Yes, Strava finally implemented Swim HR, so now swim activities will be included in the Fitness & Freshness index!
link to support.strava.com
As of October 1st, 2019 Strava has begun to parse HR data for swim activities. This means HR data will be displayed on newly uploaded swim activities if recorded with a swim-specific HR sensor.
If they put live segments into the training pack I’d subscribe to it, but the current setup would make me buy two packs, and I can’t spend that much on it.
A useful feature (not in Strava as far as I know) would be the abilty to see % effort of each member of a peloton.
So, for example, when I ride in a group fast ride, who did what % at the front? Would ensure the peloton suckers take a shift!