There are paid gmail services from Google. Google Domain, Google Drive, etc. i have a G Suite account which gives me my own web domain for my office email address, a website and cloud storage, which I gladly pay for.

In Google's situation, they're taking their free email platform, and giving you the option to buy a higher level of service. Adding services, not taking free ones away if you don't pay.

in Strava's case, they appear to now be taking away services that have been free if you don't pay. Given the expectations of most web users, especially those that have grown up on the internet with the expectation that everything is "free" that roll back is a tough sell.
If Strava now wants us to pay, they need to add something new with something that people will really value.

Garmin has two features along these lines:

• Live Track is real time location sharing. It's the one that's most like Beacon. People say it's flakey.
• Incident Detection sends out a "help me I crashed!" text to your contacts.

If incident detection works, it's a much better option. I got hit by a car years ago while my GF at the time had a live track for me, for that kind of reason. She found out when I called her on my way to the hospital. She wasn't just staring at the computer watching my progress. People don't really do that. So Live Track and Beacon is more like a body finder tool than a get help tool.

exactly

the garmin systems work. I use them because I ride alone more now than before but I ride alone. I have had good luck with it. I have tested it out on various occasions to see how well it really works and its been good for me.

I have deleted my strava account, its nothing I want to pay for so I am out of the strava world.

As posted earlier, Strava makes it easy to extract all your ride data. Just go to https://www.strava.com/athlete/delete_your_account, make the download request, wait for the email, and download from the link they'll send you. There's no need to then actually delete your account.

Yes, I've done that. And then one needs to import - manually - the hundreds of rides into whatever other platform. Yes, it can be done. But the point is it takes effort that people may not want to undertake, and Strava can "exploit" people's laziness about moving to other options.

In what world can that be pegged on Strava?

I use two local apps, SportTracks and GoldenCheetah. I believe both can import multiple activity files in one operation. I just used it to populate a new installation of GoldenCheetah. All the years' activities in my Strava account are now in a new GoldenCheetah installation.

Strava's export compares favorably to Zwift's, which can only be downloaded one activity at a time.

It's here now on app and website. Worse than I expected.

The world in which migrating from one platform or another takes time, thereby allowing platforms to take advantage of locked in consumers.

I was in such awe of your eloquent argument that I was stupefied, so I opted to simply reply in the tone and spirit of your own post. Sorry if you didn't appreciate it.

Have a great day.

Yeah, I'mma call bull****. Strava made their end of migration easy - that your new provider of choice doesn't have their act together is no fault of Strava's.

I download my Strava data monthly, it is easy. I do that in case one day we have to pay to retrieve it or if Strava goes away.

15yr ago I used to record rides using Garmin Forrunner 201 - very basic GPS tracking. All the files were stored in some Garmin app on local PC, nothing online, but it was easy to export all at one as a .tcx file (.gpx for individual rides) and import in bulk into Strava. Then in Strava I had to manually clean up some activities, categorize the type and give them names. Took about half a day of intermittent work, mainly the renaming and categorizing activity type.

I just checked out VeloViewer -- that is exactly the kind of "Data Driven" platform I am looking for. I'm not really into the social / KOM side of things on Strava. I could see myself spending most of my time in VeloViewer. Too bad it relies on Strava though.

Photobucket was always terrible. That's the main reason nobody wanted to pay for it. The interface was terrible. It was sluggish, non-intuitive, and had no "community" despite its lame efforts at pretending to be some sort of social media. It was what the name implied -- just a dump for snapshots.

The only thing good about Photobucket was it managed to make Flickr seem good. I think I still have a Flickr account but haven't used it in years. My ISP fees used to include a premium subscription to Flickr, but when they discontinued that I never bothered to pay. Flickr never managed to develop decent tools for archiving photos. I switched to Google for awhile because auto-backups worked seamlessly in the background without being a resource hog. Flickr never managed that.

Strava isn't terrible. It generally works pretty well. They've made some efforts to improve (there's no evidence Photobucket ever tried to improve that lousy site).

I got a long free trial run. I don't mind paying for a subscription for a year to see how it goes.

All the changes are in place now. Oh man this is good! There is basically no reason to use the free version now. It's been completely bastardized, it's totally useless! The only thing you can do is load rides, but the only way to view them again is scroll thru your feed. And there's nothing that can be taken from any of your rides because all your previous efforts are hidden behind the pay wall. They really should just get rid of the free version altogether at this point. I deleted my account and moved all my data to RWGPS, it seems to have all the features I want. Good luck Strava.

Good riddance.

Honestly once I have power meter and heart rate monitor I will prolly pay for strava. Without having those things I feel that I am missing out on a lot of the info that the subscription covers. I like strava, it’s easy to use, and I have used it to meet other cyclist in the area.

The Strava move reminded me of Flickr's move a couple years ago - piling on free features and then taking them away.

I was a paying Flickr subscriber for years, and then Flickr changed their model and essentially encouraged people like me to go 'Free' by making the storage allotment massive and concentrating the 'Premium' features on things like viewing stats, showing where your viewing traffic was coming from, etc (none of which was important to me - I just wanted adequate storage and the ability to share among groups and friends). So I went the Free route for a while, using less than 1% of my storage allotment, until Flickr was bought by another entity and they switched tacks completely - instead of a data storage cap, they decided to cap the number of images that you could store. This instantly moved me from less than 1% of capacity to about 200% of capacity, and the pricing structure and feature set was so not worth it. On top of that, and far worse than Strava, they said that, if any Free users were over their cap, they'd be deleting pictures, oldest to newest, until the user was back under the cap. Then the user would have to delete a picture from their storage before they could upload another new image.

It was a lot of bull****. I stopped being an active user, though I'd check in occasionally; it seemed as if others had curbed their activity, too.

At first, I thought I might stick with the free version and hang around. Still nice to exchange a few Kudos.

Looks like they pay-walled the Training Log, which was my preferred way to view my activities -- I will be looking at alternatives before paying up. As has been said, Strava's willingness to make radical changes without warning has me skeptical of investing much time or effort into their premium version.

So it looks to me that I can still my efforts for a segment, and how I compare to my previous efforts on that segment, which is of some value to me.

I’ve lost the ability to compare myself to others on that segment, which to me was at best a curiosity.

I’ve never put much stock in competing on Strava. To me, if you want to compete, pin a number on.

They've yanked some stuff from the Free version, but what history do they have of making sudden, radical changes to Premium content? I really haven't taken advantage of a lot of the Premium features, but I'm tangentially aware that they've been adding quite a bit of it.

My feed is filled with sponsored challenges (aka advertisements) and each time someone I follow signs up for one it adds it again to the feed. This morning I have more advertisements in feed than others rides
Do these advertisements go away with the paid version?

good article that wound up in my Google news feed
 

I've been logging rides on Ride with GPS for a long time - started by using the phone app. When I bought a Garmin device, I was able to fairly quickly and easily enable syncing between my Garmin Connect and Ride with GPS accounts so that the rides are uploaded automatically. At some point I decided to also start uploading rides to Strava, so I fairly quickly and easily enabled syncing between my Ride with GPS and Strava accounts - it even automatically uploaded all my old rides. But if I wanted to sync up rides from Strava to some other service and it seems my only option would be to download and then upload all the data manually; maybe it would be doable in batches instead of individual rides, but it would still be a manual process.

It seems fairly clear to me which provider is the one being difficult here.