STRAVA Free – Fit for purpose in 2021? We know that STRAVA needs to make money before the VC cash runs dry. Yet they also need to keep accumulating our data to ensure their service remains meaningful to everyone using it. STRAVA’s historical strategy seems to have been to accumulate a critical mass of users and their data at a cost. Going forward the strategy now seems starkly clear: FREEMIUM – ie a FREE service to retain a critical mass of fresh user data combined with a feature-rich PREMIUM service delivering analytics, plans, routing and more. Gone are the nuanced and confusing premium packages, gone is any pretence to want to capture real performance data in the STRAVA app. I am positive that we will see more new PREMIUM features like running power support, I suspect that we will see more features slipping from what is currently FREE to PREMIUM, and I’m just hoping that there will be more general bug fixing, tidying up and presentational improvements. Same old, same old. As Dory once said, “Just keep swimming.” Looking ahead, I just can’t see that great new WOW feature popping its elusive head over the dimly lit horizon – something like a dedicated STRAVA bike computer, for example, probably isn’t going to happen ie something that could deliver a big chunk of new paying customers. Thus, in the absence of several nice juicy carrots to entice people to pay, STRAVA will have to use the stick method to force some of us to pay which means paring back the capabilities of FREE-STRAVA to its bare bones but… What are those bare bones to you? What would be just enough to keep you uploading your data for STRAVA to use? In my mind, I see the free STRAVA service giving us: Sports data glue and sports social glue – it’s just a handy place we can all share regardless of whether or not we use smartphones, Garmins or something else. It’s inclusive and it can get our data somewhere else relatively easily too. Segments – This IS the essence of STRAVA. Few of us are likely to be good enough to get meaningful KOM/QOMs, so segments just show us microcosms of personal progress or that we are better than all our mates up a nearby hill. Except group leaderboards are going premium and so are many of your personal segment-specific insights. STRAVA countered this to a small degree with the addition of Local Legends. Route sharing – STRAVA is a nice way to get a route to your bike computer or share to friends’ bike computers. Yet Garmin themself, Ride With GPS and Komoot are all trying to play in the route sharing game too. Plus, creating routes in STRAVA and leveraging the STRAVA heatmap is going premium and there are plenty of route plotting alternatives. Post-ride stats – STRAVA’s basic post-ride stats are highly similar to those on your bike computer. If you want to look at summary ride stats then look on your Elemnt, look on your Edge or on Garmin Connect or Polar Flow. Simple stats are easy and everywhere, more advanced analysis is also available for free elsewhere (eg ELEVATE/STRAVISTIX). Club leaderboards – great to compete with club members and see how you fare. Again the leaderboards are now mostly going premium and if one or two key club riders haven’t got STRAVA premium then where is the incentive to compete? Answer: behind the paywall. Social – STRAVA is good at showing your followers/mates a quick map of where you’ve ridden today. Maybe you can demonstrate your exotic trips to various Pacific Islands and famous cities on Zwift. If not then at least there are the new FREE leaderboards for LOCAL LEGEND status. I’m struggling to see the point of what free-STRAVA is increasingly becoming. Is it really just super-simple activity recording on an app, links to other sports hardware devices and the social network? FeaturesFreeSubscription Activity RecordingYY Device SupportYY Social NetworkYY Route PlanningY Segment CompetitionY Training DashboardY HR & Power AnalysisY Advanced MetricsY Goal SettingY Training LogY Compare EffortsY BeaconY Personal HeatmapsY Partner PerksY Premium SupportY Where is the big picture that will keep FREE STRAVA relevant to TENS of millions of people? It looks like STRAVA could well become stuck between a rock and a hard place and end up getting squashed if the cash runs out and if the free data also starts to dry up. Then the corporate fun and games would start. It’s been said that STRAVA is too big and too unnecessary for Garmin to buy – and that’s likely true; yet what would happen if, say, Google wanted to buy STRAVA to make Fitbit even more social? Would Garmin be commercially forced to bid for it for fear of being cut off from Google-STRAVA? Interesting times may lie ahead in the not-too-distant future. Hopefully, that was thought-provoking and a distraction from the normal question to determine what it is worth paying for STRAVA premium. Question: What makes FREE STRAVA worth using or what needs to be removed to just make you stop using it…period.? Bring on the ads… Lots & LOTS more STRAVA-Related Content here: list of STRAVA posts. ← Back to the Strava Hub
