In the modern world, there’s a fundamental truth that is often overlooked – nothing is truly free, and companies need to make money.
Whether we watch YouTube videos, enjoy a film online, read a news article or post a photo to Instagram, it has to be paid for in one way or another. Sometimes we pay up front, sometimes an advertiser pays, and sometimes some far off venture capitalist foots the bill.
Strava has been offering an incredible service to the fitness community, and particularly cyclists, for years. Remarkably, the vast majority of it has also been available for free, while the company itself has consistently been loss-making.
With that in mind, the announcement today that Strava has introduced a new subscription model, and some of the normal functionality of the app will be disappearing, should perhaps come as no surprise. Yet, many lovers of Strava may feel slightly disappointed that the service they’ve known and loved for years will now cost them.
As we outline here, much of Strava’s central segment features will now be available only to subscribers.
For free users, then, gone are the days of looking at best leaderboard efforts, or comparing efforts with friends, or the best riders of the day, week or year.
The upside
Strava has placed segment leaderboards behind a paywall in the midst of updating a host of features on the app in a complete revamp of its subscription offering.
Where previously, users could opt for Safety, Training and Analysis packages, or all three combined within the Summit subscription for £6.99, there will now be only one subscription priced at £4 per month.
The ‘Summit’ brand itself is also disappearing and instead Strava will be a binary choice between subscription and free.
The Summit tab will change to a ‘Training’ tab with detailed training metrics and there will be a combined key Weekly Intensity and Monthly Fitness figures to track broad training improvements.
Strava also hints that it will also be moving away from ranking segments purely on speed and moving toward also including participation rewards. We're yet to discover the details, but expect some further updates in the coming months.
Perhaps the most significant change is a considerable update to Strava’s Routes, though, which will see a far more advanced route-building platform within the app.
With training, route planning and the fundamentally social aspect of Strava all in one place, it’s easy to see the app’s potential as a one-stop shop for the digital needs of the modern endurance athlete.
It’s a bet that the company is clearly willing to make, and evidently needs to. Strava only employs 180 people, yet serves 55 million users worldwide, and still fails to turn a profit. Maintaining complex features such as segments has proved to be an expensive drain on Strava’s resources, but one that offers little immediate potential for profit.
The flipside, of course, of Strava’s switch to a subscription-first model, would be introducing more advertising to the platform.
It’s easy to overlook how ad-free the platform has been, and a glance at the recent history of large tech platforms using user data to make advertising profits doesn’t paint a pleasant picture. It’s a relief, then, that Strava is keen to explore the alternatives first.
‘We don’t want to be reliant on an ad-platform,’ says Strava UK Lead Simon Klima. 'This is one of those decisions we had to make to make sure Strava is around for decades to come.’
As Strava has grown, it’s easy to overlook how niche users who obsess over segment results have likely become.
Strava inflation
While comparing segments has always been at the heart of Strava’s user experience, I can’t help wondering if it has become a far smaller part of the normal experience for the majority of users.
Over the past few years, leaderboards seem to have become increasingly elusive, as we detailed in our in-depth look at the concept of ‘Strava Inflation’.
When I first joined Strava, a quick group ride would often result in a KOM between at least one of us. Even a head-down solo effort along a straight stretch in Surrey could often render a top 10 result. Today, if I sprint out 500 watts for four minutes in a howling tail wind, I usually return home to discover hundreds of users still above me in the rankings.
That’s not a criticism of Strava, but for a platform that has added hundreds of thousands of UK users since the beginning of lockdown, it’s a predictable outcome of volume.
Indeed, at the end of 2019, a startling 7.5% of adults in the UK were estimated to be on Strava. For the majority of those, walking or jogging will be the main attraction, and even for newly joined cyclists a segment leaderboard place of 17,000th will be irrelevant.
Will the changes to the free features in the app end here, though?
For the love of Strava
With the disappearance of the ‘Summit’ brand, and Strava becoming either subscription or free, one can’t help wondering whether Strava is eyeing a full move to a subscription-only model.
Founders Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath seem to suggest otherwise. ‘Rest assured that we will always offer a version of Strava for free, and you belong in this community whether you subscribe or not,’ they write, in an open letter to Strava users.
‘We’re betting all our chips on you, either way,’ they add. ‘We hope you’ll bet on us.’
Like most cyclists, I love Strava. I believe that we’ve seen complete changes to the way we cycle, to the value of the performance cycling sector and redesigns of bikes to improve solo performances against the clock, purely because of Strava.
The first time I put on a skinsuit was to try to nail a segment. I started competing in time-trials as a result of my obsessive focus on increasing my speed on Strava segments, and to this day I frequently receive Whatsapp messages from friends telling me they’ve finally beaten me on a segment, or been ever-so-close.
Strava may well be the most engaging, accessible and purely fun social media out there. With that in mind, I for one don’t mind paying money for it.
Fingers crossed, Strava’s bet that others will too will pay off, and we’ll be enjoying the app for years to come.