How it happened, I really don’t know, but pretty much everyone I know has ended up using Strava as their fitness tracker. There’s plenty of competition, but Strava seems to be the one we’ve all ended up using.
We don’t pay of course. No, that would be mental.
That, though, is a bit of a problem for the 180 Strava staff, so Strava has now removed the following free features and made them subscription-pnly..
- Overall segment leaderboards (Top 10 view is still free)
- Comparing, filtering and analyzing segment efforts
- Route planning on strava.com, with better maps and support for segments
- Matched Runs: Analyze performance on identical runs over time
- Training Log on Android and strava.com
- Monthly activity trends and comparisons
They’ve ditched the “Summit” branding and now offer either the new free tier or a subscription costing £4 per month. You can have a 60-day trial if you fancy that.
Strava basically isn’t very profitable, so things have got to change. The founders – Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath – dudb’t want to make money by selling data or inserting adverts into the feed. Instead the “complex and expensive to maintain” parts have now been removed from the free version.