[SwagGrocery]

Strava's co-founders, who recently returned to run the company, sent a fairly transparent email to users about the changes. The rationale is clear: Strava needs to achieve profitability. They've been around for over 10 years and have completed 6 rounds of fundraising. They see three paths to profitability: 1) ads, 2) sell user data, 3) subscriptions. They're all in on option #3.

The biggest challenge they face with subscriptions, as mentioned by other posters, is that the majority of features that users want are available in the free tier. Most of the subscribers I know (myself included) pay the subscription fee because they want to see the platform survive, not because the subscription tier is dramatically better than free. This model works for non-profits (kind of), but probably doesn't work for a company sitting on $42M in venture funding.

Therefore, they quickly need to a) make the subscription tier much better than free to pull free users over and/or b) pull free tier features behind the paywall. Both are very challenging. If 'a' was easy, you'd think they would have done it years ago. And 'b' is going to risk user churn, which will ultimately erode their network effect. This makes me wonder why they're not considering advertising to free-tier users? Haven't most people accepted the "ad-free for paying users" model?

[prh8]

I think the biggest reason for lack of sympathy from anyone is that the platform was completely stagnant for years. I've been on there as a runner for a long time, and by the time there was any compelling reason to pay, those features had already been done either by browser add-ons or by Runalyze.

Additionally, having built (although never fully launched) an app on their APIs, they never really cared about the developer platform. There's plenty of stories around of their poor treatment of more popular apps.

And lastly, having heard stories from inside, it's just another fun times startup that burned money for fun and very little to show for it.

[SwagGrocery]

All valid criticism, but despite the stagnation no one else came along and took the KOM chasing game from Strava. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only solidified their lock on it: races are canceled so people are chasing KOM's instead.

Until people start publicly measuring their accomplishments via another platform, Strava is in good shape from the user loyalty perspective. Now, they need to figure out how to monetize. The risk is sacrificing that user loyalty capital in the pursuit of profit, but either way investors will get closure.

[usrusr]

wholeheartedly agree with your general assessment gparticularly the part where you consider yourself more a supporter than a subscriber)

What might be keeping them from going deeper down the advertisement lane: at some point it becomes indistinguishable from selling user data. Sure, with Strava you don't need the adtech panopticon to reach some very specific audiences, but without opting into the panopticon they are cut off from all established online ad procurement processes.

And also there is d) stop being so damn expensive. This alone might make the ad path pointless, it could well be that Strava just happens to be more expensive per user than maximum ad monetization could ever be. If my personal bubble is in any way representative they are already taking in a lot of subscriptions. What we can't know at all is how Strava cost is structured: is it dominated by devs? operations? brand people? Of it's operations then their options are particularly limited and culling personalized leaderboards from free accounts could actually be more about saving expensive queries than about pushing subscriptions.