What's with all the complaints about Strava not giving it for free?

What's particularly rich is people saying "I was about to buy a subscription but, after THIS, no way I'm paying now". Yeah, right.

I'm just listening to the lastest 1609 Podcast episode, and the lady there is particularly annoying.

Btw, if someone is moving away from Strava, where to? Is there a worthy alternative, free or otherwise?

Wildhorse wrote:

Btw, if someone is moving away from Strava, where to? Is there a worthy alternative, free or otherwise?

Garmin connect is fine for keeping a training log.

It's free, although I'm not sure whether it's easy to get your data in there if you don't have Garmin device.

It's a little bit bigger problem than not "giving it away for free".

There were a lot of 3rd party apps built around Strava, which are effectively broken now with essentially no advance notice to most 3rd party developers.

"Out of all the things they’re doing here, this is one of the most irritating ones. Mainly, because of how they’re doing it. Effective today at the exact same time this post publishes, Strava will break some portion of those 44,000 apps. The same app developers that have furthered Strava’s business and reach, Strava has decided to give zero notice to."

DC Rainmaker explains it better here:

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/05/strava-cuts-off-leaderboard-for-free-users-reduces-3rd-party-apps-for-all-and-more.html

Since the announcements, I figured out what bothered me about what Strava did.

Its hook is being a community for runners, cyclists etc. It's the interaction between people that makes it what it is. Other apps are there to log your training.

But the point of all community-based clubs / organisations is that everybody is doing their bit and no-one's getting a profit from it see parkrun for example. There is a small paid team at parkrun but it's not the 180+ employees of Strava and the events are free for anybody to run at.

Facebook is also based on a community and rightly or wrongly they use ads and sell data to keep it free for everybody. Twitter probably the same. Wikipedia asks for donations every so often.

But now Strava wants to charge people for certain features while still getting people to contribute and keep the community alive. If the 90% who don't subscribe stop giving Kudos, don't comment or even all left; I suspect the remaining 10% wouldn't enjoy it so much and it would crumble.

Egalite, liberte, fraternite

Is this why my run data from my gps isn't uploading to Strava automatically like it used to? I took the bait and did the free trial to see if that did the trick...nada

Wowwwdude wrote:

Is this why my run data from my gps isn't uploading to Strava automatically like it used to? I took the bait and did the free trial to see if that did the trick...nada

What app do you use to get the data from your watch?

Strava has never been free. You trade your personal data for use of their service. In normal times, they should be able to captivate pretty effectively on that information by providing advertisers with an audience personalized by precise and current location, detailed demographic data, clear interest in specific activities, and known connections other like-minded people.

But lots of companies and services have had to jack up rates in one way or another recently, not just Strava. The economy's in the tank and if these places want to survive, they've got to earn real money now. With Strava, the changes could have been a lot worse.

You're a couple weeks late on this "controversy", but I've complained about the changes some (I use it for cycling and running).

My biggest issue is people complaining about people complaining.

Strava's business model for years has been to try to get a huge, critical mass of users to sign up and use the app, to build leaderboards (more important than cycling than for running) and make it the place to be. Having it be free (for most functions) was a good way to do this. It was nice that people weren't being excluded based on cost. And to be clear they were/are selling your data, although they claim this wasn't their main revenue stream (supposedly that is their Summit/whatever it was called subscription service, although they have taken in something like $45M in VC).

Strava has had 10 years at this point to make their business profitable and set themselves up with a decent business model. It doesn't sound like they've done it, and then the solution to their problems was to go to users and threaten to take features away if they didn't subscribe. They didn't add features to entice user to subscribe, they just took them away.

Strava is free to do what they want with their product (and certainly should be a sustainable company), but I refuse to be hassled and shamed for saying that I don't like it and it is a lame way to do business. Don't blame your base of "customers" for your poor business decisions. If they lose that critical mass (and less and less people are populating those leaderboards) their product becomes a LOT less valuable to many users and they will continue to stop using strava.

So TL/DR: Strava has had the potential to make money with their free model, but they've bungled that, so don't be surprised that users would be annoyed when they take away free features that the users have strongly contributed to the success of.

The way I see it is: Strava owes you nothing.

It's a private company. You don't like what they now give you for free, then pay or go elsewhere.

That's what users are entitled to. Not getting free features, regardless of whether they used to be free or not.

This controversy just highlights the entitlememt that permeates the hobby runner community.

This happened with flotrack when they went to a subscription model.

There has been transitional woes in the Information Age.

At first, 1996 to 2004 people were driven to bring content to the web. We see a great example in distance running. People were motivated to make all this possible. But then that awesomeness became a consumer expectation and/or basic requirement. In 2005 to 2010 the web industry grew. From 2010 to 2014 the web became the mobile device web. These features all in one on today's web demand high aptitude skillsets, human labor and time. Standard production scale economics and also the endeavor commands a form of rent a la the hosting providers (i.e. Amazon, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, Linode) which keeps going up...

Simple apps like letsrun probably cost $240 per month. Things like Strava, Spotify or Soundcloud in the tens even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

The lay person doesnt want to understand this at all. The lay person is used to "free" from the early internet and may use large corporate production "free" as a compelling argument in their mind for small micro niche business production to be "free". Here there is a disconnect for the lay person when it comes to understanding why one may cost money and the other not and why one company may be more efficient at producing a similar service.

But the lay person as a consumer has every right to be a guardian of money especially in distance running. They pay for their cell phone , the pay the internet service provider and now they are expected to pay you just to read the websites that were once free?.

You should get the point now if you have read this far. If not this website is a great example:

1997-2014: Brojos made money through Google Adsense

2014-2015: Lay people protest unfairness and call out "evil monopoly" Google. Google slapped with US and EU antitrust lawsuits for murky corners of search, shopping and advertisement ecosystem. Required change.

2014-2016: Google restructures Alphabet. Puts out "hot fires" in previous divisions and tightens faucet on ad payouts to web publishers.

2016-2020: Brojos dont earn as much money, users upset with Ads because there used to be less ads. Users would never pay for this website because it used to be free!

In retrospect, Google was a major backbone to the online industry and were benevolent to pay publishers (websites) money to help support the web. But then we, as a set of first world countries, barked up their tree and they said, "Fine, bite the hand the feeds and figure out how to eat yourself."

1997-2014

User => Letsrun => Google Adsense == $$$

2014-2020

User => Letsrun XX Google == Not a number

User to Letsrun: We hate ads! Long live ad blocker! We will never pay! It should be free.

The parable here is that most of you lay people here are just too stupid to understand and form valid opinions on what is fair. Most of you got a free ride on the good nature of human exploration and endeavor but then when it comes time for you to pay your "tax" to keep it going you throw your arms up and try to dump it in the Boston Harbor!

Webmasters everywhere wedged between the Google Adsense Fallout of 2014 and Users Refusing to Pay.

No offense, but why should anyone expect each consumer (a layperson) to be a historian of internet ad revenue? If customers don't understand why the services they enjoy cost money, it's because the world has become hopelessly complicated. It used to be a little easier to understand the costs of the thing you were paying for. It was a physical object like a brick or a fish or a slab of meat. Most people could grasp the work required.

Strava has would-be customers who do not accept Strava's value proposition, that's the problem. And Strava has had this problem since the beginning. Could just be consumers' sense of value for something like an online training log - they like it, but they feel weird paying for it. It's consumer psych. They aren't idiots, they're regular people.

Also, how could you expect people to not at least mildly complain when learning that the service they use is reducing its free features? They don't value Strava enough to pay for it, but as of yesterday they had a training log they enjoyed... I don't think they're idiots for being disappointed, and I also don't think studying internet ad revenue dynamics would make them want to pay for Strava.

I wasn't a subscriber but now I am. It's $5 a month. That's less than a beer in most cities. Imagine if people demanded what you did for a living was free. The outrage is amazing to me--just dont use the platform in that case. They gave it away for years now they want to make money, why fault them for that?

Ads poisoned their own well by being unacceptably obnoxious. First it was pop-ups and flashing strobe-light banners that capture your mouse, then it was auto-playing videos with auto-playing audio, and they often drastically slow down page loads. That's why I block ads on letsrun. I did try whitelisting letsrun, but each page took about 50x longer to load. And considering how much time I already waste on these forums... I'm sorry I just can't deal with that much extra loading time. If I was forced to enable ads on letsrun, I would just stop coming here rather than put up with waiting 30 seconds for every forum thread to load.

Another news website that I really love and wanted to support wrote an article begging their readers to whitelist them. So I did, but very shortly after I got an auto-playing video ad with audio. And that's just unacceptable. Playing unsolicited audio is egregiously intolerable. So they got adblocked again.

Ads could be done in a respectful and tolerable way, but as long as ads continue to insist on being intolerable, I won't tolerate them. If a website could actually commit to only showing ads that don't auto-play audio, don't slow down the page loads, and don't trigger epileptic seizures then I would be willing to whitelist them.

A big part of the problem with monetization is the lack of options. For example, there are a lot of news websites that are paywalled that I would be interested in reading the occasional article from. However, the paywall is a single-tiered all-you-can-eat buffet price. That's just not worth it for me to pay an all-you-can-eat price when I just want to take an occasional nibble. It seems like it should be possible for news sites to offer other tiers that would cost less and have a limited number of articles. I bet we could even design the technology for them to charge like 5 cents per article or something. Just tally it all up and bill it to my paypal at the end of the month or something. Display the tally in the corner next to my login name so I can keep track of it. It shouldn't be impossible. Really they need something, anything that's not just all-you-can-eat single price tier.

Wildhorse wrote:

The way I see it is: Strava owes you nothing.

It's a private company. You don't like what they now give you for free, then pay or go elsewhere.

That's what users are entitled to. Not getting free features, regardless of whether they used to be free or not.

This controversy just highlights the entitlememt that permeates the hobby runner community.

So why start a whole thread if you already have your mind made up and don't want to have a discussion?

People can be annoyed/mad about this decision. They also owe Strava nothing.

stravasubscriber wrote: Imagine if people demanded what you did for a living was free. The outrage is amazing to me--just dont use the platform in that case.

Have I been doing my work for free for the last 10 years?

Sorry, but if you set a precedent, don't be surprised when people are upset that you change course to something they view as more burdensome/"unfair".

I'm using the 60 days free trial, but I"m not sure that spending the money over what is still available for free is worth it. The route maker is mediocre (and has no turn by turn for cycling), and StravaLive segments are spotty already. Other than that I guess I lose access to some functions of the leaderboard and the Training log (but not the calendar). Honestly if they really wanted to push subscriptions, I'm not sure that they restricted enough.

Strava user wrote:

Wildhorse wrote:

The way I see it is: Strava owes you nothing.

It's a private company. You don't like what they now give you for free, then pay or go elsewhere.

That's what users are entitled to. Not getting free features, regardless of whether they used to be free or not.

This controversy just highlights the entitlememt that permeates the hobby runner community.

So why start a whole thread if you already have your mind made up and don't want to have a discussion?

People can be annoyed/mad about this decision. They also owe Strava nothing.

Part of having a discussion is people stating their point of view, isn't it? That's mine.

Now, Saucony, where's my free pair of Endorphin Speeds? It's free advertising for your brand.

This is actually a really fantastic idea, I think. Have news sites and consumers subscribe to some third-party payment app that let's you read an article of your choice with a click of a button for like 25 cents. Boom--one time payment goes to news site thru the third party app and I get the article immediately without having to plug in payment info, email address, etc.. At least as a consumer I like it.

When regular people are on one side, saying what they want...

And a corporation is on the other side, saying what they want...

Why are you so sympathetic to the corporation? You are doing volunteer work for them by advocating people pay.

If you're wondering, I'm trying to pick apart your motivations, which you haven't seemed to crack yet.