I've never cared for any of the paid features they advertise. I can analyze my rides on my own without Strava. I use it to track where I've been, get approximate TSS and calorie info if I'm on my gravel bike with no power meter, and check out where friends are riding. I also like checking out my segment times on various segments. Removing segment info is annoying, but I suspect it'll just be nice to have less to obsess over after a ride, once the annoyance of not having this option wears off.

All the years I raced I had a Joule head unit. Always raced with my phone with Strava recording just so I didn't have to wait til I drove home to upload. Some years I'd upload power data from training rides. The only reason not to use my phone was the power data, and I had that on my computer anyway. Now I have a Wahoo head unit that can upload through my phone, so I've stopped using my phone to record.

Simply, it tracks where I ride and I can go back and see where I rode, how many miles I did last year, or the 4th week of 2017, or whatever. Also almost everyone uses it, so it's a social media for bike riding. Kinda like almost everyone uses facebook, therefore I never use SMS or ask for phone numbers anymore.

The new matched rides feature (matched runs has been a thing for awhile now) is awesome, and it is gonna be absolutely terrible for me. I've been riding the same no-touch 50k route every Tuesday for about 3 months now, so I guess Tuesday is now my default "blow by brains out my own arse" ride of the week. I can properly race against myself now, which happens to be the only person I can be competitive against.

I noticed this on Strava yesterday, but wasn't quite clear on what it was. Is it basically like a "My Results" for a segment, but over an entire ride that you've done multiple times?

Yessir.



Edit: the only problem being, Strava is super literal about what matches. In the above matched, there's a part where I reach probably the busiest intersection on the route. If the light is green, I go straight, then make a right at the next light. If it's red, I make a right there, and then a left at the next intersection. No difference in distance (it's the adjacent sides of a rectangle) but Strava isolates them. So I have like 5-6 different matched ride sections for what is essentially the same ride.

My understanding is that it will be $5 / mo. It annoys me but OTOH I've been on there for free for 4-5 yrs. And, now that I no longer ride with groups/friends it's nice to know how they are doing.

It sounds intriguing, but does this require that you'd have to start and stop your head unit recording at precisely the same spot for the matching to work? Or can Strava somehow find and compare a 30 mile section of a 50 mile ride to other instances where you covered that same 30-mile stretch within other rides of varying distances?

Now that I look through my rides, I'm seeing Matched Rides grab some stuff with a little one-block-over-one-block-up variation, but I'm not surprised to see how few matches are coming up - I tend to ride in a general direction one year and a different general direction another. Within those, there's a lot of overlap, but often some variation as I allow for construction, boredom, exploration, etc. Still, a cool feature.

I was on the fence about paying, this was the nudge I needed I'm signed up, we'll see how it goes in a year

I don't begrudge Strava the change in their terms. They can't operate at a loss indefinitely. It's silly to expect something for nothing forever.

I use (pay) Strava for the segments and to track my personal and bike mileage -- and for the social aspects. I use Garmin Connect to track my weight and plan / upload courses (using their heatmap). Connect's course generator features have always given me great courses I would never have planned myself. I use TrainingPeaks to plan my workouts and riding year and to link in to my WKO software. I don't use a fraction of the features of any of the three. I could probably consolidate to two or even to one . . . but I haven't been motivated to, so far.

I don't care what Strava does, its their product to sell/give away as they see fit. A group of us used it for the social aspect and the segment timing but we all have garmin and we can do all what we want on Connect so we are good not paying and dumping Strava.

I hope they get themselves figured out and even though I will choose not to use it I hope they make it work. It really is a brilliant concept. I will be interested in seeing how their future plays out this time.

I didn't renew my subscription this year because I wanted to re-evaluate why I was using Strava. The social aspect of it is becoming less and less interesting for me. It doesn't matter if I take a quick 20 mile ride after work or a metric century ride on the weekend, the same people always give me kudos. And for some reason I'll occasionally get a random kudo from someone in Brazil or Germany or California. No idea why that is unless they see me from some club I belong to.

My feed has become clogged with lots of stuff I'm not interested in. If anyone I follow joins a challenge it shows up in my feed which is really annoying especially if multiple people sign up for multiple challenges at the same time. Someone I follow has a Peloton and each time he rides it there are about 5 entries under his name in my feed, one each for stretching, warm up, the ride itself, cool down and post ride stretch. All take up the same amount of real estate on the computer screen. I don't really want to see anyone else's virtual rides anyway. I'm just interested in seeing the folks I know ride the roads I'm familiar with.

I found myself checking the status of all of my segment efforts after each ride and decided that was taking away from my pleasure of cycling. The feeling trying to compete with everyone else while out on a ride was always in the back of my mind, so I turned off the live segments on my Bolt.

Even if I were to subscribe to Strava, they don't have a major piece that I would be interested in and that is being able to do ad-hoc reports. Something like show me all rides I've done this year solo versus a group ride (driven with how I've tagged them with my own tags). Show me all rides I've done with more that 3,000' of climbing. How many time did I ride with my wife? Stuff like that. As far as I know, there's no way to export that type of data into a spreadsheet. If Strava doesn't have that yet, I know that it would be a major lift to bolt on a reporting suite.

I've been looking into RWGPS and supporting them with a subscription rather than Strava. I like their route planning module, it syncs automatically with my Bolt, there's not the social "fluff" aspect that I'm not interested in and I can create private segments if I want to see how I progress on stretches I'm interested in (I know that you can do that in Strava).

I do like Strava's maintenance module with the ability to track mileage on individual components. I'm not sure if RWGPS has that ability or not.

So far this year, I've survived with out paying much attention to Strava.

So do the advertisements go away with paid version? That is standard for many apps, pay and the ads go away.

When I was a paying subscriber there were challenges that were sponsored. Le Col comes to mind. I'm still on their e-mail list from a challenge I completed which they sponsored.

I think I heard somewhere that Strava was going to do away with advertisement based income but I could have been dreaming it up. I don't know if that was in reference to sponsored challenges.

When I was paid subscriber for many years up until Dec 2019 there were the occasional sponsored challenges in feed. But lately they seem to have multiplied with some days I see a dozen or more in feed from many new and different sponsors as people I follow sign up for them.

ive lost my cateye Strada in the desert going down Kit Peek in Arizona 3 years ago and started using free strava on my iPhone in my rear pocket.

the only thing I check at the end is my total distance and elevation.

the segments was starting to piss me off as there are many who are going slow the rest of the ride, group riding, and attacking on a segment during a ride to get the KOM.

I mainly ride alone since covid19 and since I have kids I go for early ride, so I don’t like the segments since it’s overly dependant in tailwind and strava doesn’t correct for that

I keep only selecting one other data option than the required and it takes me back, do I have to select all?

If Beacon is the only premium feature you use, it may be worth using other free solutions that do the same thing, like Whatsapp, which allows live location sharing for preset amounts of time.

​​​​​​I'm not sure. I selected all.

check out a an app called glympse. It is a free tracking app. Real time and shows direction, speed, and a few other things.

Just keep using it as usual. I don't see that anything has changed.

I understand Strava want to have a profitable business and i think the whole platform appear underdeveloped. Likely from lack of funding. Maybe its a good thing shifting more users to a subscription model.
I however, am a very infrequent user. Im staying outside the paywall, unless they bring out some killer feature

subscribed member since 2015.

don't care about my rank on leaderboards or segments. don't seek out/research segments unless they are hc climbs.

i do care about being able to create routes, the heatmap (which gives me incentive to go new/infrequently visited places) and tracking rides/monthly mileage.
some challenges actually motivate. others...not so much.

the social aspect i can take or leave but have met some pretty cool people that i've ridden with because of strava.

i've also found that tracking recent club rides in an area i'm visiting/vacationing in has generally been immeasurably more helpful than the applicable regional discussions within these forums
regarding research into roads. conditions, support, etc.

ride approx 6k miles a year. less than many. more than some. aim for 1,200-1,500 miles a year at least an hour's drive away to keep it fresh.

it's been worth it for me but i understand why it wouldn't be worth it for others.

I use the social features very little; there are a few friends around the world I stay in touch with, with kudos and comments. I use segments to track progress on workouts and like Strava simply because of the sheer size of the leaderboards. It's a great motivator to not just see the numbers improve (for example time or avg power for a hill sprint), but also moving up the leaderboards. That's pretty easy when there are 70000 best efforts for a particular climb and even improving by 5 seconds lets you move up 100+ positions.

I'm curious how that happened if you feel like sharing?

PS you ride more than I do.

been a premium member sine '11 and think for the money it still has value