Strava becomes a pay-to-win mobile game

OK, not literally. Well, maybe a bit. After a couple of years trying to add extra value that entices its free users to subscribe, such as training tools and safety features, they’ve finally taken the opposite approach to monetization: removing features that have been free for 11 years and putting them behind a paywall.

“This means that, starting today, a few of our free features that are especially complex and expensive to maintain, like segment leaderboards, will become subscription features.” – Strava founders Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath

Here’s what’s been taken away from the free plan:

• The full leaderboard: You’ll only see the top 10 times
• Leaderboards in third party apps: Another fun surprise for the independent developers who’ve supported Strava
• The web route builder: Perhaps the strangest of all – it’s easy and convenient to use, but almost nobody would ever choose to pay for it

It should be clear that Strava are really banking on their main draw: their segments. The training, analysis, and safety features they added to create value for paying subscribers often felt half-cooked and inferior to other options, and didn’t drive subscriptions in the way they expected.

“Dedicating Strava to the community is also a commitment to longevity. We are not yet a profitable company and need to become one in order to serve you better.” – Strava founders Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath

Monetization has long been an issue for Strava. Subscriptions haven’t driven enough revenue, Challenges are engaging but increasingly have found themselves subject to free workarounds, Sponsored Integrations at $0.75 per active user felt like a good compromise on displaying ads in the feed but have been pulled for seemingly mysterious reasons that weren’t ever communicated to device manufacturers, and Strava Live Segments with a $300,000 licensing fee caused a backlash among device manufacturers, DC Rainmaker, and their users. In fact, backlash has long been a part of the Strava experience, and they’ve just created another one.

There’s a load of annoying bollocks in every comment section banging on about how “you spend a billion dollars on a bike but won’t spend the price of a coffee to use a service you love.” But it is true. Strava’s subscription is cheap, and what they offer both as a social network and with their segments is unique and valuable to the cycling community.

But pulling the rug out from under users and removing free features is never going to be popular. And not just with free users: rolling back features and then pulling free features into the subscription model devalues the paid experience too. But it is the free users who’ll take the biggest hit: the base experience has suddenly become hollow. Like a mobile game constantly pinging you for payments to unlock almost everything, the Strava experience for the vast majority of its users will become a frustrating, empty shell.

Is that sustainable? Does losing a huge chunk of the social community in exchange for a potential increase in subscription revenue really pay off for Strava in the long term? I don’t know, but it’s a pretty stunning parallel to the current debates about our economies opening.