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Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

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Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#51

Post by SwagGrocery »

Strava's co-founders, who recently returned to run the company, sent a fairly transparent email to users about the changes. The rationale is clear: Strava needs to achieve profitability. They've been around for over 10 years and have completed 6 rounds of fundraising. They see three paths to profitability: 1) ads, 2) sell user data, 3) subscriptions. They're all in on option #3.

The biggest challenge they face with subscriptions, as mentioned by other posters, is that the majority of features that users want are available in the free tier. Most of the subscribers I know (myself included) pay the subscription fee because they want to see the platform survive, not because the subscription tier is dramatically better than free. This model works for non-profits (kind of), but probably doesn't work for a company sitting on $42M in venture funding.

Therefore, they quickly need to a) make the subscription tier much better than free to pull free users over and/or b) pull free tier features behind the paywall. Both are very challenging. If 'a' was easy, you'd think they would have done it years ago. And 'b' is going to risk user churn, which will ultimately erode their network effect. This makes me wonder why they're not considering advertising to free-tier users? Haven't most people accepted the "ad-free for paying users" model?

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#52

Post by ck2 »

aka how to become the "myspace" of athletes in a year

their whole attraction is segments and leaderboards

maybe the guy who makes stravistix (and maybe also the veloviewer people) can now just make his own data storage and a full replacement service

but someone will

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#54

Post by ssorc »

chihuahua wrote: post #31

Over the past 5 years, Strava has aquired the reputation of not fixing any bugs and not adding any useful features. Instead there was just a little bit of churn in the UI, annoying most users. A better way forward might have been to keep existing features for everyone, but add a number of useful new features for paying subscribers.

To be fair on Strava, they have made some effort to addressing this over the last few months:

https://www.strava.com/subscription/whats-new

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#55

Post by nradov »

gamblor956 wrote: post #47
jhrmnn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Strava is reasonable about getting your own data out of it. Not sure if this applies just to EU users, but it's easy to download a full archive with the original uploaded gpx/fit files (whether they came from a manual upload or a 3rd party). Last time I checked (which wasn't too long after GDPR was introduced), Garmin didn't really support a bulk download of the raw data, and neither did Fitbit.

Garmin Connect (website) > Activities > Export CSV Exported several years worth of activities with all data collected by my watch.

CSV export is very limited. It lacks the second-by-second data in the original FIT file which you need for real analytics.

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#56

Post by supernova87a »

markus92 wrote: post #18

Cyclists are going to revolt, everyone wants to beat their friends on their favorite hill. It was one of the features I loved most about the app as I could see myself improving compared to people I have a good reference to.

Given what you just said, isn't it logical that Strava would want to monetize that?

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#57

Post by pedalpete »

nsteel wrote: post #2

Giving zero days notice to your 3rd-party developers is one way to anger a relatively powerful bunch of your users. Many people will find today that their hobby/side-project is now dead in the water. I hope nobody was relying on any income from software using these APIs. But the 'best' bit: "We realize these changes could be especially challenging for some of you, so they’ll be non-breaking for 30 days, returning emp…

Is this affecting your app negatively? They reached out to us a few months ago, and didn't directly state what they were doing, but strongly suggested we be prepared for changes to the API.

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#58

Post by gregoryl »

heynk wrote: post #6

As a non-paying user, this seems to be mostly fair. I used to do pretty remote trail running, and the route building feature was great for putting together a route and exporting it to my watch. If I get back into that type of running, then I'd probably be willing to pay just for that feature. Hiding the "friends only" leaderboard seems like a bad idea on their part. That feature definitely drove engagement and friend…

The route builder has improved a great deal in recent times; they leverage the data they have to pick common routes for runners/riders. Have discovered several interesting places to run locally that I wasn't aware of, and its also fantastic for planning a commute (i.e. bike riders tend to on aggregate, avoid dangerous/unfriendly routes, so the planner ends up doing so as well).

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#59

Post by llamataboot »

I totally understand wanting to push more people to subscriptions, honestly I find it a way more user friendly model than selling data, or doing other weird behind the scenes stuff. If you like this, pay us for it, and we'll keep making it.

Shutting down an API makes sense of course - I mean an API doesn't come for free - someone has to maintain it, upgrade it, etc, but I just hate it. More walled gardens and data that I can't really move around in real time (yes, I know you can export data, and I know entire apps like rungap can move everything around everywhere)

But god what I wouldn't give for an alternate world where so many of these things are open-source software that only needs to generate enough revenue to pay for some salaries (and not pay back 17 rounds of VCs) and have open APIs.

[Thinking right now specifically about Home Assistant. In my mind it's far better than any proprietary home automation platform, now that there's enough revenue to even pay a few devs to work on it full time, it's rapidly getting UX improvements that make it better even for non-developers to use, it's completely open, etc etc etc]

Re: Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

#60

Post by kingosticks »

pedalpete wrote: post #57
nsteel wrote: post #2

Giving zero days notice to your 3rd-party developers is one way to anger a relatively powerful bunch of your users. Many people will find today that their hobby/side-project is now dead in the water. I hope nobody was relying on any income from software using these APIs. But the 'best' bit: "We realize these changes could be especially challenging for some of you, so they’ll be non-breaking for 30 days, returning emp…

Is this affecting your app negatively? They reached out to us a few months ago, and didn't directly state what they were doing, but strongly suggested we be prepared for changes to the API.

No, I don't use the leaderboards/segments at all fortunately. But I am concerned the APIs I do use will stop working next week. It's really nice they contacted some API users about incoming changes but outside of this inner circle it will have come as an unpleasant surprise today.

Out of interest, how did you prepare for unstated API changes? What if their change had crippled your integration, or did they contact to inform you it wouldn't?

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