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

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&#x2F;side-project is now dead in the water. I hope nobody was relying on any income from software using these APIs. But the &#x27;best&#x27; bit:<p>&quot;We realize these changes could be especially challenging for some of you, so they’ll be non-breaking for 30 days, returning empty data during that time so you can make necessary adjustments&quot;<p>What on earth is non-breaking about this? I have not enjoyed working with the Strava API myself but thankfully I have not wasted as much time as some poor devs. The thing is a total mess as it is, parts of the API were effectively crippled beyond use following some bizarre privacy-based change some time ago.<p>Get your act together Strava.

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&#x27;d probably be willing to pay just for that feature.<p>Hiding the &quot;friends only&quot; leaderboard seems like a bad idea on their part. That feature definitely drove engagement and friendly rivalries. It&#x27;s not the same if it&#x27;s only amongst your paid subscriber friends, which is not many.<p>I appreciate them doing more to get users to pay. I&#x27;ve never paid for Strava, despite having been a very active user in the past. I generally like them as a network, and wouldn&#x27;t want them to go away.<p>The immediately breaking API changes are pretty bad. I wonder what the impetus was behind that move. Too complicated to have it act as a transition? Maybe they could have announced these changes, but have them start in 30 days, with a small discount for users if you subscribe before then.

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&#x27;ll keep making it.<p>Shutting down an API makes sense of course - I mean an API doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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)<p>But god what I wouldn&#x27;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.<p>[Thinking right now specifically about Home Assistant. In my mind it&#x27;s far better than any proprietary home automation platform, now that there&#x27;s enough revenue to even pay a few devs to work on it full time, it&#x27;s rapidly getting UX improvements that make it better even for non-developers to use, it&#x27;s completely open, etc etc etc]

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.

This is a great example of why it’s important to charge money for things up front, rather than later on. If they’d charged for these features from day 1, this could have been a glowing article about how their revenue model has helped them support feature development and build a third-party app ecosystem. They should have charged for it sooner.

I don&#x27;t much care about these changes one way or another, but it would be very sad if they went away. For better or worse, they created far and away the best fitness platform for cyclists, if only because of the mindshare and network effects. Their analyses are also quite good. It would be a real pity if they went away, and I hope they stay solvent.<p>I&#x27;ve been a paying subscriber since I first joined in Aug 2018 and am happy to support it.

I&#x27;m a long time Strava user, I have a four digit user id. Except for the year I won a free subscription for a year, I&#x27;ve always paid for the service. I&#x27;m a data nerd and cyclist.<p>This change in Strava&#x27;s policy makes me very sad because it&#x27;s clear they are managing it poorly and Strava might die as a result.<p>Who could step in to fill the void? Garmin? No, they&#x27;re just terrible at anything other than collecting raw GPS data and it&#x27;s clear they don&#x27;t have athletes in mind when creating features. Even when they have winning products they find ways to sabotage them. Garmin Connect is full of potential, yet fails to engage users or become a social platform.<p>I kinda hope Veloviewer.com steps up to fill the void. It&#x27;s all about data.

I think the route builder is better in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ridewithgps.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ridewithgps.com&#x2F;</a> - and it seems to work better with my Wahoo Elemnt Bolt

Strava integration with apple watch and apple health is so poor I stopped using it directly, relying instead of stuff like health fit. Having tried Summit I honestly don&#x27;t understand why anyone would pay for such a lackluster experience especially for swimming.<p>If the Activity app would allow for a bit more detailed workout sharing and basic social like likes and comments I&#x27;d be done with it entirely.

This is pretty disappointing. Recently Strava seemed to be turning the corner, releasing new features that users wanted.<p>Totally understand their need to make money, seeing that they&#x27;ve raised 5 rounds from VC.<p>However, burning goodwill like this is super counterproductive. After all, most of my riding is on Zwift, I could also switch to Garmin, etc.

I think this is fair. Strava summit is a cheap subscription, and running a very cheap sport to participate in. Segments in my experience appeal to spreadsheet heads who get a kick out of meaningless drilling down into data[0]. I imagine most casual runners are not that.<p>In many ways I can see this making Strava <i>more</i> appealing to casual runners, as for people starting out on a fitness journey, the last thing you want to see is how much slower you are than other people.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stravawankers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stravawankers</a>

I was a Strava premium subscriber until the summit packs came along. It made little sense to maintain 2 of the 3 available subscriptions to get the 50% of features you wanted from each of the training and analysis packs, when you could just go down the road and pay a single fee to training peaks for what turned out to be a better training and a vastly superior analysis experience.<p>Then Strava ditched the chronological feed (it came back a month or so ago) which made sense only to those for those trying to use it for something other than seeing which of your mates ran this morning. Then came posts, and suddenly your feed was full of quasi-motivational clip art from the bloke you met one time at a park run.<p>And of course Strava&#x27;s route planner has fallen behind those offered by Ride with GPS and Komoot, although they seem to have given it a bit of attention lately.<p>I don&#x27;t want Strava to die, but they forgot who their customers were and went on a 2 year bender chasing casual users. It was already a big task to convince folks you burned to move their money back, but it&#x27;s going to be herculean having taken the torch to them again.

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.

Strava&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re all in on option #3.<p>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&#x27;t work for a company sitting on $42M in venture funding.<p>Therefore, they quickly need to a) make the subscription tier much better than free to pull free users over and&#x2F;or b) pull free tier features behind the paywall. Both are very challenging. If &#x27;a&#x27; was easy, you&#x27;d think they would have done it years ago. And &#x27;b&#x27; is going to risk user churn, which will ultimately erode their network effect. This makes me wonder why they&#x27;re not considering advertising to free-tier users? Haven&#x27;t most people accepted the &quot;ad-free for paying users&quot; model?

Well, I started using Strava last week as a free user. Any good alternatives for bikers?

I&#x27;m a paying Strava user and it infuriates me that there is no real alternative.<p>The website can be slow at times, there&#x27;s a strange difference in functionality and look and feel between the app and website. AND THEY STILL DO NOT SUPPORT MULTISPORT (brick&#x2F;triathlon in single activity).<p>I&#x27;d guess segment leaderboards&#x2F;KOMs&#x2F;comparison is one of their most popular features - will be interested to see if this increases peoples take up of Summit.

I am a paying member, although don&#x27;t really see a point in it. Especially since I&#x27;ve noticed that I am using Strava mostly for the social aspect, even if I normally don&#x27;t care for any of social media stuff. It is really fun to see how my friends, local runners and professional train. For stats I always use Smashrun and Garmin Connect.

well, it was mildly amusing while it lasted.<p>See you all on ridewithgps where all the brevet cue sheets are cross-posted first anyway.

Another classic inevitable bait-and-switch situation where they offered too much for free to begin with and backtracking on that just seems to make things worse. No one wins.

I like Strava... wanna see them succeed, don’t mind paying for it. That said, I see a bunch of 60 day trial messages... I’m not too clear on what it costs after that?

For what it is worth, Nike Run Club app along with all premium features is now free, at least for a few months while this pandemic is going on

aka how to become the &quot;myspace&quot; of athletes in a year<p>their whole attraction is segments and leaderboards<p>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<p>but someone will

Garmin Connect could win here.

I switched to Runkeeper 5 years ago. It just works.

What is new here? Many others have done the same.

Their front page tells nearly nothing about the app. Instead, one half of it solicits registration. This tells me all I need to know about their respect to the users.