You can support him directly.
As of last week Strava routes can wirelessly sync to your Garmin head unit without using ConnectIQ. Strava Routes on ConnectIQ still works though.
Strava just has really bad leadership and direction. It began to dip its feet in a lot of different areas but never actually expanding on them enough to make them remotely useful or worth paying the sub for (training calendar could have been more like TR, power curve could also been more like TR, gear usage tracking is nearly unusable since you canāt do simple things like change wheelsets on the same bike, training plans are virtually useless, etc).
At first I felt almost offended that instead of adding value to convince people to sub, theyāre subtracting existing features and locking them behind a sub instead, but then I read more about it and apparently this is a move of desperation rather than of greed.
The fact is that we all hate annoying ads, but honestly, anyone with any small measure of tech-savvy runs an ad-blocker browser extension anyway, so while it may be annoying in general, in actuality it wouldnāt really affect you and in the bigger picture, joe-schmoe who doesnāt have an extensionāthe same people who enable YouTube content creators to quit their dayjobsāwill help keep the lights on. They could even make subs ad-free to help incentivize it.
The other thing they could do is charge to use their API by some combination of request number and payload size like AWS and other SAASs or limit it to a ābusiness-use licenseā sub or something like that. As it as now, it seems like any idiot can make massive, massive career-activity requests for their personal project that no one will ever use which could be a huge percentage of overhead for them.
iād rather pay for premium than see ads.
He is in the top-10 right? 
They have this covered. Strava rate limits are tough and you have to engineer well to stay inside them. And every 3rd party app adds more value to Strava.
I can only thumbs-up you once so imma quote you and add more: 
Adherence to the heatmap is the reason Iāve kept using Strava routes instead of swapping to RWGPS or Komoot, and the reason I donāt understand how RWGPS and Komoot even enter the conversation as alternatives. Iād need to know the roads backwards to use them, and if I know the roads backwards, I donāt need routes. Stravaās routing is so good, and so important to me (somebody who doesnāt own a car and lives among mostly unfamiliar European roads that got slapped together over centuries like wet noodles dumped on a platter), that itās honestly worth $60/year by itself.
(Thereās a fun ethical argument to be made about how the value in Stravaās routing product is entirely dependent on their mostly-free userbase, and how maybe taking our data and then charging to feed it back to us is kind of mean, but I agreed to their terms when I signed up. I canāt fault them for deciding to stop giving away the gold mine I agreed to build for them.)
Strange business decision. Why not give users a warning beforehand? Maybe even showing off all the new features firstā¦ āWeāve enrolled you in a trial of our new features. From July these features, along with some of our existing features, will become subscription-onlyā. Get people hooked on the new route builder first.
The way theyāve done it will just make things appear broken to the average user. And if your toy is too badly broken, you just throw it away.
Weāve always wondered how there could be competition to strava, but it seems strava make themselves obsolete instead.
Iām sure this is a coincidence but Iāve just received another email fromRWGPS detailing new features. If route building is your purpose seems a good time to make hay while the sun shines to me.
As a 100% solo rider, the leader boards and my place within them are a big motivating factor to me on most rides.
I have paid the sub for a while now to be able to see the 200lbs - 220lbs category where I am competitive because the open rankings might as well not even exist to meš
Iāve only been using strava a couple of years but I could swear at one point in time I got live segments for free, then late last year I had to subscribe to get themš¤
There also seems to be a randomness to when the live segments actually pop on my wahoo element bolt - I can do a 40 mile ride where I have about 10 favourite segments and only 2 or 3 of them ever go live
weird, my experience is the complete opposite. strava tries to send me down unsafe roads and rwgps does exactly what i want.
donāt know if youāve ever tried to plot a semi off-road route either but the last time i tried, strava was completely useless.
i just went in to download all my routes, but can still make them?!? 
I really like Komoot. I never got on with Garmin Connect, and didnāt really like Stravaās routing tool. I used RwGPS for a while but the final straw was when it sent me down a tree-root infested -10% wooded path on my road bike. At least Komoot shows me exactly what the surfaces are like.
Can they be both? 
When it comes to route finding/plotting, I often wish there was a way to search for routes that minimize stops rather than the usual distance/elevation/traffic.
I did not read the article, what did it say about the guy in 1617th? That is the guy to worry about. 
They usually offer a 30 day free trial but I think I saw that they are now offering a 60 day trial.
Definitely same here. And honestly I feel like itās gotten worse, not better.
Does anyone know why the targeted ad modell does not seem to work in Stravas case? I mean from a marketing point its ideal, you get exactly those folks you want to get faster and are ready to spend. How does it get more targeted? Looks like a dream.
Like you could advertise that 2k USD wheelset, right when someone makes top 10 on the segment as āthe tool that helps you for KOMā, maybe even 10% off. Easy to find many examples. From the data on gear, weight and location even possible to advertise the exact store and clothing size etc. Great opportunity for local bike shops. Why is that not possible?
I have a feeling there is something I donāt know, because its not revolutionary to think like thisā¦