Yeah I spent time trying to find mine, just to get an email offering it with 2 months free…grumble.
Garmin Connect can also show you your figures for the past year, at any time you want.
In GC you can generate a round trip route of varying distance , and let it use popularity routing.
sort of, not all, and it is the last 1 year (no year to date, season to date, etc). GC is ok for free, I use it for some things but not graphing and charting.
Honestly, there are more resources for free or freemium than ever for a cyclist. I never paid for Strava, but have paid for coaching, static training plans, TrainerRoad, TrainingPeaks and probably some other stuff.
Today I self coach, use intervals.icu, maybe go to Strava once a week, but that is less and less. I am on a free 60 day trial of Zwift but not sure I will pay for that. The only tool I use regularly that I am considering paying for is Mapmyrides. I regularly use the free version and the premium features are likely worth it.
If you also need a platform essentially to control the trainer for indoor sessions Trainer day should be a more than valid alternative that I’m looking at and it comes at a fraction of the price.
If you also have some experience in self coaching and don’t need to follow a standard template, which they also provide anyway, it should do the work.
Plus they also seem to have a rather user friendly workout creator.
I contemplated paying for Strava back when they pay walled the route creator feature before I found ridewithgps. I simply don’t feel the same way about ‘your year in review’ lol.
Their business model is to attract everyone for free, then get a share of people to pay for the accessory features (like Twitter is transitioning to). It’s smart. If it was always subscription, it probably never would have gotten half the people to know about it
I don’t care about most of the social features so I’m really with Strava just for PRs and seeing how fast the local KoM holders are. Plus recording my rides in general but Garmin Connect will do that too. Their route planner was OK but Garmin’s works fine too (didn’t like RideWithGPS). I don’t mind paying for things but subscriptions add up; RideWithGPS is $8/month or $60/year for navigation, Strava is $12/month (or $80/year, so really slamming you for paying monthly). Then if you pay for intervals.icu that’s $4/month, and of course there’s TrainerRoad… starts to feel like being nickel-and-dimed to death.
Also Strava dropped ANT+ support which was really annoying.
Strava has to make money somehow. I have a Premium membership, so I was able to admire my year in review the other day, which was interesting, but likely wouldn’t pay for it.
I have a subscription almost entirely because Strava’s route builder combined with its heat maps, showing other users previous adventures, is second to none.
I don’t mind market segmentation. But I cannot think of a really great Premium feature Strava has added since their automatic route creation tool. Instead they have been moving features behind a paywall, something Premium subscribers don’t notice. Regular users (rightfully) feel that functionality is taken away from them. This is bad. Feels like a continuation of them taking away Bluetooth sensor support as it was “too difficult to test”.
Meanwhile, Strava has done nothing to expand e. g. It’s social features. How about being able to schedule group or team rides? Letting us share the route for said group ride ahead of time? Or collect race results. Proper group messaging support?
Strava makes plenty of money. Last I looked, they are making $50-60M per year.
Their problem is that they got VC money and that money is/was looking for a buyout from someone like Garmin or an IPO.
The 2nd problem is that Strava has never came up with very compelling features that simply makes most people want to subscribe.
The 3rd problem is the analytics and KOMs they’ve tried to sell appeal to a very small segment of the cycling population. It’s just not enough for an IPO. Why can’t Strava even do basic policing of KOMs? I imagine that software could do it 99% better than human eyes. It would be trival to auto-flag rides in cars or 500 watt efforts with an 80bpm heart rate.
Without VC money, Strava could have been a very nice $60M per year small business but they want more and keep coming up short.
IMO, they should have:
Made their clubs features better. Offer club communication, DMs. Allow people to join a club but require premium for DMs. Subscriptions will be stickier when people rely on it for communication with their friends.
They could have done TrainingPeaks light analytics included way before ICU came along.
They could have included trainer control and basic training plans. Maybe not as good as TR but even a basic virtual training plan would have nabbed a lot of Premium users for $60/year.
^ True. And how about something simple like being able to flag segments for moderator review? Bikes under running segments; cars & ebikes on biking segments, etc. Leaderboards aren’t really leaderboards with this stuff in them. Simple updates would make the platform better.
At a high level, I’ve always felt Strava never knew how to monetize. Instead of adding in awesome features that people wanted to pay more for, they just start charging for more and more things they used to give for free.
Since when has that stopped companies from wanting make more money? Strava obviously thinks they’ll get a certain percentage of free-users to subscribe with the year in review feature. I personally wouldn’t have thought that to be case, but given there’s now a thread about it, apparently I’m wrong. Because if some people are complaining, some will also say screw it and pay the peanuts that their subscription costs.
This is a good point and someone else mentioned the ability to organize group rides.
Your expectations of an app that costs $5 a month are higher than mine I think. Like I said, I pay $60/year solely for Strava’s route builder and really $5 a month is nothing. My coffee this morning was close to $5 and much less useful than Strava!
Your expectations of an app that costs $5 a month are higher than mine I think. Like I said, I pay $60/year solely for Strava’s route builder and really $5 a month is nothing. My coffee this morning was close to $5 and much less useful than Strava!
Garmin’s route builder is free. Kinda clunky, but so was Strava’s back when it was free. My coffee this morning was probably under $0.50 (home brewed, but premium beans), and pretty darn useful. I’d rather give up Strava than coffee.
Companies don’t think or want. The owners want. But Strava’s owners cashed out to venture capitalists a long time ago. VC doesn’t want a sustainable business that generates a nice cashflow. They want an exit strategy. They probably saw dollar signs and thought some bigger player would buy Strava for a billion.
I hate this argument because it’s not an argument. I’m not into corporate charity. It doesn’t matter if a corporation asks for $5 or $100. If 100 corporations want money from you every month, it adds up. You have to be smart with your money and you can’t rationalize every purchase because it’s only $5/month. When businesses and services offer me value, I buy their products and sing their praises.
Strava is ok but they’ve been trying to boost membership by taking features away for years now and it hasn’t worked. It rubs people the wrong way. They have offered poor customer service. They’ve had broken features over the years and don’t fix them. You search in their customer support database for the problem and find that it has been a known problem for years. When will they build something more people want and will pay for?
I think you are mistaking turnover with profit, in 2019 / 2020 they had a turnover of around $50-60M per year, but were still in trouble financially
https://www.strava.com/clubs/484148/posts/10607771
2021 they had a massive growth to $165 revenue, but as we have seen from Peleton/Wahoo/Saris/Zwift (TR from the pricing thread ?) that is more a blip than norm
You can do that with Strava?!? 
We usually put links to the .gpx/whatever files in a Facebook chat. That’s definitely not my preferred solution. But now I will have to try that.
