Strava Is Building A Better Platform, But It’s Going To Cost You
Strava — that fitness app I’ve written about a couple of times — made some big changes this week. Strava has been around since 2009 and most of its best features like leaderboards and routes have been free. Strava kept their more premium training, safety, and analytical features under the paid tier, Summit, but that won’t be the case anymore. Strava’s founders, Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath, penned a letter to the Strava community last week announcing their intention to lead the company with a renewed dedication to the Strava community. There’s only one issue — the community is split on how that dedication is being carried out.
Social media platforms have always been ad-supported and free. Basically, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and whatever other social media apps the kids are using these days are able to keep the lights on because they sell user-data and serve up ads. The entire economy of the internet is predicated on capturing user attention and selling it to advertisers. Strava does it differently though. Strava’s feed has always been ad free and they’ve even removed their Sponsored Integrations — which they admit was the closest they’ve ever come to putting ads in the feed. So if Strava doesn’t sell ads, how do they make money?
Strava has a couple of different revenue streams. They have Strava Metro where they sell anonymized and aggregated data to cities to help improve infrastructures for bicyclists and pedestrians. There’s also Strava Business where they partner with brands to help create engaged fitness communities and create brand sponsored challenges instead of just being an interruptive ad. Lastly, they sell subscriptions. Strava’s subscription service, which used to be known as Premium or Summit, is now their main focus for users. Before last week there wasn’t much of a motivation to subscribe to Strava’s premium tier — unless you wanted to subscribe to support the platform, or really wanted to dig deep into the analytical side of Strava. This wasn’t because the premium tier was bad, but rather that the free tier of Strava was so good. That’s all changed though.
Subscription is now at the center of Strava, and in doing so they’ve simplified the branding around it. You either use Strava for free with a pared down feature set, or you subscribe and get all of the features. This is where people start to take issue with Strava’s new direction. In addition to actively developing new features for the subscription, Strava has also bundled features that were previously free into the subscription — chiefly leaderboards. This move is motivated by trying to create a sustainable business. To date, Strava is not a profitable company because they’ve been giving away features that are complex and expensive to maintain, like leaderboards, for free. At times, Strava hasn’t always been the quickest to listen to the community, like that time it took 3 years to bring back the chronological feed, but they promise that won’t be the case anymore. Strava has released over 50 updates in 2020 like the return of the chronological feed, improved routes, Apple Health syncing, and I’m sure there are many more to come.
Strava’s subscription price varies based on region, but here in the US it’s $60 for a year. That boils down to $5 a month — or about 1 coffee. Personally, Strava is worth way more than $60 a year to me. I’m far from the top of most leaderboards, but I love being able to go through my training log and see my progress on matched rides over time. More than that though, I want Strava to be around a decade from now, and if giving them $60 a year helps keep the lights on, count me in. And yes, it is disappointing that Strava is removing free features to add to the subscription feature-set, but think about it this way: Strava has given us all one of the longest free-trials ever, but it’s time for us to pay up. And if Strava puts their money where their mouth is we’re just going to end up with an even better platform to use long into the future.
