It’s been two weeks since the Strava Fiasco™ began. Of course, this is actually a fiasco that’s been quietly brewing in the UK since late November. Now, if you missed Episode 1 of this storm, check out that post here. In short here, here’s a quick recap in one paragraph:
Strava decided to increase pricing at varying rates, up to doubling the price for some monthly users. This would apply to their most populous regions/countries, but ultimately to all users. Except, they didn’t tell anyone. Instead, they sent out a boilerplate renewal notice that your subscription was renewing at a higher rate. Meanwhile, when people checked what their renewal price was on the site, it’d show an incorrect lower price. This led me to ask Strava’s PR department what was going on, which triggered a Strava press release, which in turn led to me asking (again) what the actual listed price of Strava was (since it wasn’t listed anywhere). They refused to state it or answer. All of which basically blew up the internets, in both athletic and mainstream media. Got it? Good.
Fast forward to this week and Strava has finally made some changes. First, they updated a slate of pages across their site, making it easier to figure out what your new price will be. Second, they’ve posted an apology of sorts, albeit posted to a location you’ll likely never see. And third, as part of their new pricing page, they’ve seemingly violated a slate of EU laws around pricing and consumer rights.
In this post, I’m gonna dig through it all, including checking Strava pricing in an absurd number of countries. So, let’s get started.
*Title technicality: Not every country, just a silly number of countries to spend time figuring out, as you’ll see.
The Strava Club Post:
A few DCR readers started chatting about “a new Strava message” on late Tuesday afternoon. This was slightly confusing to me. Mainly because I didn’t seem to get “the message”. Neither did my wife for her account. However, it’d turn out that’s because it wasn’t an actual e-mail message. Rather, it was a message posted within the Strava app, under “The Strava Club”. This self-named club is just like any other Strava club (such as for cycling teams, running groups, etc…), except, it’s in all capitals – The Strava Club. Not just any Strava club, but *THE* one and only The Strava Club. Basically fight club without most of the blood. The club officially shows 4,245,630 athletes as being part of it, though, that would mean that only about 4% of total Strava users are members. Apparently most people do abide by “The first rule of [The] Strava Club is: you DO NOT talk about [The] Strava Club.” mantra here.
Anyways, in theory, Strava would bubble this into your Strava feed, just like how workouts from your friends show in your feed – even if you weren’t a member of The Strava Club.
In practice, of course, that didn’t happen. At least not for me or others at the unrelated cycling media event I’ve been at the past few days full of cycling journalists. Instead, I had to go fishing for it, but eventually, I found it:
We updated our pricing. Our messaging was very confusing. So we are providing more clarity.
In an effort to roll out pricing updates for our subscription, we made a mistake by not providing enough information directly to our community. We sincerely apologize for the confusion and concern this has caused many of our valued subscribers.
Our intention was not to hide these pricing changes, we just moved too fast. We also missed the opportunity to inform long-standing monthly subscribers that, by shifting from paying monthly to annual, they can avoid a significant price increase altogether.
Strava is fully committed to our community. This commitment means allowing our subscribers to receive an automated email about changing subscription costs, or to read or hear about price change confusion elsewhere is unacceptable. We hear and understand your frustration, and we aim here to make subscription rates clear to our community.
What you need to know:
We are moving to consistent pricing by country – this means that all subscribers in a country will pay the same monthly or annual price.
At Strava, we’re constantly working to innovate and improve the experience for all active people. Over the past 13 years we have added significant value to the Strava subscription, including features and experiences for route discovery and planning, tracking progress over time, improved privacy controls, more activity types and even prehab and mobility. We will remain committed to future investments to provide even more value to subscribers.
Since launching Strava in 2009, this is our first time increasing prices for all-access subscribers. As Strava has grown to include over 100 million people with over 8 billion uploads, the cost of supporting our active community at scale has also grown. In addition to continuously releasing and improving features our community relies on, going forward, we will periodically assess our prices. As a result, they could change in the future to better reflect the work it takes to build the best experience.
We sincerely hope that every member of our community can feel the value our team has added to Strava over the years to make your experience better (https://www.strava.com/whats-new). We are incredibly grateful for the support of our subscribers, and we thank you for being part of the Strava community.
In terms of messages, it’s actually not too bad. It takes responsibility for their screw-up, it outlines how they screwed up, and it makes clear they were really annoyed that I called out their screw-up. Specifically, this part:
“…to read or hear about price change confusion elsewhere is unacceptable.”
Kidding aside (somewhat…), it’s not a bad message. Really, it’s not.
It links to the pricing with an easy-to-understand/remember URL (more on that in a second), and makes it easy to find out what your new renewal price is. It also outlines that you can save a bunch of money by going from monthly to annual, and that they really really really want you to do that, so they’ve made the monthly pricing nearly double in most cases what it was before:
“We also missed the opportunity to inform long-standing monthly subscribers that, by shifting from paying monthly to annual, they can avoid a significant price increase altogether.”
They also talk about the features they’ve added, though, this part is a bit more fuzzy. I would have leaned harder on new things here:
“Over the past 13 years we have added significant value to the Strava subscription, including features and experiences for route discovery and planning, tracking progress over time, improved privacy controls, more activity types and even prehab and mobility.”
After all, to a certain degree, the entire point of a subscription renewal service is ‘evergreen’ new features. Meaning, you’re paying monthly to get either new things monthly, or continued access to a consumable. Whereas in the past when you bought software once, it didn’t tend to see these level of upgrades. Still, they at least own up to the fact that things just simply got more expensive:
“As Strava has grown to include over 100 million people with over 8 billion uploads, the cost of supporting our active community at scale has also grown. In addition to continuously releasing and improving features our community relies on, going forward, we will periodically assess our prices. As a result, they could change in the future to better reflect the work it takes to build the best experience.”
So, all in all, a good message.
Except, one problem: They didn’t send it out.
Rather, they just posted it to a group (a Strava club) that most of their members will never see.
For context, yesterday they sent out an e-mail that they acquired a company called FATMAP. Frankly, I’d never heard of FATMAP before. Neither had a few cycling journalists I pinged. But that’s fine, there’s plenty of acquisitions that turn out to be super cool. And indeed, looking at what they acquired, it looks cool. I trust they’ll do something cool with it.
Still, the point is they sent out an e-mail for acquiring a no-name company this week. Yet they can’t copy/paste the price change text via e-mail above to all subscribers?
Of course, being the friendly guy I am, I asked Strava’s PR department if perhaps an upcoming price change e-mail was in the works. And if so, roughly when it might be released? Basically, I gave them every opportunity to show that things were in the works – to show that, per their own posted message “their intention was not to hide these pricing changes”. Here’s my e-mail, sent Tuesday mid-afternoon California time.
“Can you clarify or confirm whether or not Strava will also be e-mailing subscribers about the price change? And if so, is there a rough timeframe for when that e-mail will go out? This is for a piece for tomorrow morning my time.”
The response?
Nothing. It’s been ~40 hours now.
Every other company on this planet has managed to send an e-mail to their users for price changes. Yet Strava still refuses to meaningfully communicate this to members. And frankly, if I were a Strava investor sitting in Silicon Valley, I’d be equally upset at the way this is being handled. All of it.
The Great Pricing Decoder:
One of my chief complaints previously was that Strava effectively hid their pricing. There was no way to easily see the price for your country before signing up, either monthly or renewal. The only way to see this price was to create an account, then try to upgrade to a paid account, which even then still hid the actual one-time billed annual price (and tried to make it look like the monthly price). Meanwhile, for existing users, the renewal rate was incorrect on the renewal page, leading people to believe their price wasn’t actually changing (when in reality it still would).
Strava has, to their credit, taken some steps to address that. They’ve created a page (strava.com/pricing) that you can access which will show you both the monthly and annual price options for your country. You can see an example of this below:
Additionally, they have corrected your account renewal page, to show your upcoming renewal price. Here’s mine (in USD, because my account subscription was initially instantiated in the US):
And here’s my wife’s (I know, still on the stupid monthly plan, my fault, we’re gonna cancel it before Feb 9th anyways, she doesn’t get any value out of any of the paid features). Her paid subscription was initially substantiated in the Netherlands. However, interestingly, her account has a note about ‘pricing different than expected?’ (whereas mine does not):
Still, at least they’ve gotten this updated correctly to show the right prices now. That’s good.
Of course, they don’t show what those prices are in other countries in a handy table back on that pricing page. And to be fair, most other companies don’t either. Then again, most other companies don’t charge different rates within the EU either (certainly, a few do, but most don’t). Whereas Strava charges a different price for people in the Netherlands, another for France, and yet another for Germany.
Now, there’s some debate in the comments section on whether or not this is legal. And at first this seemed legal, as it falls under EU companies’ rights to charge different rates based on taxes or other components within a country. However, while looking into this, I found this handy EU Rights site (run by the EU to clarify things for EU residents), that very clearly indicates, even with an exact replica example – that what Strava is doing seems to violate EU law. Here’s the exact section that covers this scenario:
(For Strava’s lawyers, you can look at the full legal directive page here, which also references the consumer page linked above, Regulation (EC) No 864/2007, Article 6A, as discussed in Section 1.2 for non-EU traders targeting EU consumers.)
Now you may be wondering, what about Netflix? After all, they do have different pricing per EU country. But in Netflix’s case, they have different video catalogs per country. In other words, the quantity of the service varies. Whereas in Strava’s case, it’s all the same (the EU FAQ site even explains this SKU concept too, it’s amazing!). Even if Strava could find a way to justify (legally) their different pricing, they fail the law at being able to direct to a different country version.
So, that got me thinking – as a resident of the EU, what are the prices across the board? Well, back I went to the VPN to figure it out. You see, Strava shows pricing based on what it thinks is your geographic location. As I learned in the first episode of this fiasco, using a VPN is all I needed to find the prices for different countries. Your pricing is based on the sign-up country when you first joined Strava. In my case, I initially signed up in the US, and thus, continue to pay the US despite not living in the US for nearly 11 years.
In any case, off I went with my VPN again:
And, if we jump-cut forward, here’s the giant table of all the pricing for Europe (the EU designation in my chart is specifically aligned to EU member-state countries, not EEA or the umpteen other variations). Also, for fun, I put a column using today’s exchange rate to USD, showing how these all differ in relative pricing based on USD. I had to use something as the baseline, and given Strava is based in the US and most of their employees/costs are in the US, I went with that. I then sorted based on annual cost using USD (color coding comparison based on full global country set, red is most expensive):
(Data as of January 26th, 2023 – both currency exchange rates and Strava pricing data)
Then I got curious and did the same for a crapton of other countries (I just used the ~Top 75 country viewers of the site here, albeit three countries didn’t have VPN access points). Congrats Brazil!
Condolences to Germany.
So a couple of interesting things I discovered as part of this:
A) For all EU countries, and a few other European countries, Strava charges in local currency and specifies as such
B) However, for vast swaths of the world, Strava doesn’t have local pricing. In that case, it’s simply assigned a price of $7.99/$54.99 – charged in USD.
C) There are some non-European countries where Strava has specific local pricing, such as Indonesia and Brazil. These are among the cheapest Strava countries, yet there isn’t country-specific pricing for other expected ones like India (they default to USD pricing). Inversely, also-custom priced Australia and Canada are among the most expensive.
D) In the EU especially, outside of a handful of countries, Strava simply hasn’t bothered to account for cost of living or consumer prices. If we use the EU’s cost of consumer goods chart, Ireland should actually be priced more expensive than the Netherlands, yet it’s quite the opposite. You can also use the overall price index if you want instead, and you’ll see the same pattern.
E) While the majority of Azerbaijan lies in Asia, a chunk of it lies in Europe. Inversely, Turkey is split between the two continents. I gave Azerbaijan to Asia, and Turkey to Europe.
G) There are many other quirks you can see in the table above, related to Monthly/Annual differences.
H) It’s plausible Strava has a few other random custom-priced countries out there that I didn’t find, given I kept my list to the Top 75 countries (for visitors to the site here). I suspect Strava’s country ordering and mine are relatively close. For perspective, once I reached the 75th country, the number of visitors was near 1/1000th that of the US visitor count (not kidding, 1/983rd to be exact). Meaning, I doubt Strava is doing custom pricing for #76 on my list: Trinidad & Tobago.
Now, some have suggested why not just create a new Strava account in the cheapest country? And sure, you could do that. But for me – my Strava account is sorta like a photo album of my runs/rides/hikes/etc over the last dozen years. Abandoning that to save a few bucks just isn’t worth it to me. Whereas, if you were starting a fresh account? Well…the world’s your oyster. Literally.
And remember, per Strava’s own support team, your membership rate is based on whatever country you initially sign-up from (and you can seemingly use a credit card from any country, as is my and my wife’s case).
Emailed Strava because I noticed by subscription renewal was set in USD rather than GBP (I’ve been a subscriber since 2014). Amazing response. @dcrainmakerblogpic.twitter.com/8btAdItsnB
There does not appear to be any method to change billing country at this time, even by request (again, according to Strava support). Which, is also against EU law.
Wrap-Up:
Here’s the funny thing – I’m sure at this point someone’s gonna think I’m somehow against Strava. I’m not. In fact, I use Strava daily, multiple times a day, and find great value in it. Especially the paid features around mapping and routing. I used it numerous times this week alone while riding in Portugal, where I did some extra rides/runs outside the group I was with and was able to quickly get and tweak routes seamlessly from another person with Strava – all in mere seconds. I use the heatmap-focused features in the routing constantly, as arguably no platform has as much fitness heatmap data as Strava does.
Further, while some people are justifiably upset about the price increase from a monetary standpoint, I’m personally not complaining about that. I get that prices increase in today’s economy. And the price increase for me is $25/year. For what I use it for personally, I’ll happily pay that. I get more than enough value out of that $25 each year, than I do out of countless other stupid things I pay for related to sports/fitness.
I’ve also covered all the good stuff Strava has done over the past long-while. Dozens of posts/stories and YouTube videos over the last couple of years alone, netting millions and millions of views. And I’ll continue to do so – just like any other company I cover. The fact that Strava is making their own life more difficult here doesn’t really change the fact that if they do cool newsworthy stuff I’ll cover it.
But at the same time, like it or not, Strava is the biggest sports tech company out there. With a claimed userbase of more than 100 million users, they no longer get the free pass that a smaller company might get for making mistakes. And they shouldn’t. They’ve had weeks now to properly notify their users. They had every opportunity to simply reply back and say “Hey, e-mail’s coming up, just hang tight”. And they’ve had every resource in the world to understand how EU pricing laws work.
While Strava has made improvements around the site pricing page (good!), and the renewal page (great!), the simple reality is they’re still trying to hide this from their subscribers. At present, they’re the only company I know of in the tech space that refuses to e-mail their customers about upcoming pricing changes. And that needs to change.
With that, thanks for reading!
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Well, my renewal rate was updated after your initial post and it’s now more than Strava is worth to me. In all the talk of inflation this is the part they forgot – what’s the service worth to people? I’m happy to pay my way, but when you’re pricing Strava the same as a Disney+ subscription questions need to be asked.
Exactly. This just serves to remind me thé the value add above what I already have in garmin connect just isn’t worth it. Heat map routing segments etc. Already have that. In one place. With a few other interesting things too. Like my bp weight and even mfp. It wasn’t really worth it at $60, and certainly not at $80. I already planned to not renew this just affirms that decision. My only concern is interesting things that use Stravas api. Like gear maintenance apps, specifically if they will continue to function on the unpaid tier.
Other than that. I only look at Strava to see what Wahoo friends are doing really.
I also find enough value in Strava (especially the heatmap-based routing) to be OK with the price change. The odd communication is super weird. Excellent article. Thanks Ray!
I’m in the Netherlands so my subscription will go from €59,99 to €69,99. I would not have been bothered by this €10 increase if not for the fact that most of the EU will stay at €59,99.
My subscription runs until the end of September so hopefully by then Strava will have fixed the price difference. If not, I will probably cancel and go back to the free membership.
Strava communication was probably bad, but!
ou are lucky living in one of the better EU countries.
But I do not get why your expectations are that things should cost everywhere the same? When the salary and price of living is not the same. Basically you would expect communism in prices but capitalism in wages :).
Think of an extreme like Yemen, how would you feel about them paying same as you and then apply same logic to Bulgaria or (Ukraine even if not EU)
>> “But I do not get why your expectations are that things should cost everywhere the same?”
But that’s what this whole article is about, it’s like even in the youtube thumbnail? The whole thing about “can’t be charged a higher price when buying products or services in the EU just because of your nationality” is written EU law. And yes, the goal of the union of European states is to unify standards, not only in USB-C chargers but also in all other aspects of living. Neat, isn’t it? ;-)
Correct, I actually don’t have any problems with different pricing tiers for different countries. My issues is that the EU law says that in cases like this, it’s not permitted unless specific caveats are in place (which, are not here).
For example, why does Indonesia get special pricing, but India doesn’t? Or, fill in the blank other country. Which isn’t a slight on Indonesia, but more of a ‘WTF why not India?’.
And then in the EU, why on earth is Sweden so much cheaper than Spain (or just about any EU country), when any index you use puts it at least 20% higher than Spain. Did someone literally just typo the S countries? I mean, any person in Europe would know those two should be flipped.
But heck, with as big of a territory as the EU is, the US isn’t really any different in vast cost of living indexes. The cost of living index for someone in NYC is 2x that of Memphis. Seriously. Should they pay half as much?
Obviously, one can go crazy here, but Strava makes it really easy to show how silly this is in Europe in particular. It’s like someone took out a European Tourist Map and just picked a few countries they’d heard of, and decided to charge them more.
I’m not arguing that prices should be one way or another (nor am I arguing prices shouldn’t rise). I’m just arguing to be transparent about it, and to comply with laws.
German regulatory authorities (Bundesnetzagentur) have a FAQ on their website rg. geoblocking of digital goods within EU. The problem seems to be that the mentioned protecting regulations apply for EU companies and EU customers only: “The Regulation does not contain any particular rules on enforcement with regard to traders established in non-EU.(…)”
Source: link to ec.europa.eu section 3.4
Strava has offices in the EU, as they proudly note at the end of each of their press releases:
“400+ employees around the world, with seven offices across the globe:
San Francisco, CA (headquarters)
Berlin, Germany
Bristol, UK
Chamonix, France
Denver, CO
Dublin, Ireland
Vilnius, Lithuania”
They’ve updated it so much that I get 2 updated prices now!
If I go to my renewal page I get the new US price @$79.99, but when I go to their new pricing page, they give me the Canadian price @$99.99 CAD. I’m logged in using both links to the same account. Though I am Canadian, I’ve never lived in Canada with Strava – signed up in the US and live in the US.
I just cancelled mine. TBH its not the cost per se, as I now have a premium Runalyze subscription instead. It’s just that there simply isnt enough of value for me in Strava to justify it. I realised I only had Premium to get Beacon as a live track backup, and I now use Locus Map’s live tracking instead.
something interesting, because of the Fatmap takeover by Strava I saw that link to recoverathletics.com
was taken over too, which you can use as a Strava Premium user for free
after registration i received this information by mail:
… Strava and Recover share a subscription. All Strava subscribers have automatic access to 100% of Recover’s content. Since you connected a premium Strava account, you have access to all premium features on both apps. Please let us know if you have any questions!..
For the little user like me Strava lost me years ago when they started fractioning the memberships based on features. They started squeezing for more money to get the same service. If they added more value I might have understood. Thiamin just another example of a company riding the shareholder rails to show they can squeeze more value out of the user base when they need to. Yuck.
Ha, you should petition the UN to recognise “Big Island” and “Next To Big Island” as official regions :-)
Great article thanks; after your first article on this Strava palaver I realised I wasn’t getting value from the premium membership so I’ve now cancelled it – had Strava not been so obtuse then I may not even have thought about it and just let it renew. £68 saved for spending on other cycling goodies thanks!
Canceled my subscription which was about to renew with the reason marked as other and in the comment field that the pricing in the Netherlands was illegal and included a link to link to europa.eu.
Only think I really used was the relative effort number for the week which is more of an interesting metric than something I really require. Garmin gives me something similar with it Intensity minutes and already has all the other metrics.
Thank you for pointing out that the EU country pricing was different.
Oh, Strava. Don’t make the EU angry, you wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.
Wouldn’t be the first, or last California tech company to get the Brussels Slapdown.
For me, the price increase was expected. I pay annually and will be continuing with my subscription. A few things I wish they’d sort though, including units per activity.
Actually, funny side note on that. While going through the country lists, I did note that Puerto Rico was specifically listed as a separate country in Strava. Same price as US of course (given it’s a US territory), but thought that was interesting.
Not sure if this still works, but in October of 2022, I could still buy a yearly gift subscription from Japan for someone (and also myself with an account created in Germany) in another country without them having to have an account created in Japan. Japan back than also had a really cheap price and after the newest post it looks like they still are, so this might be worth a try.
They imply VAT is inclusive (though even that is fuzzy/non-existant in their wording), which is fine to have slight differences in that case.
However, that actually isn’t the case/explanation for why Spain (and a pile of other countries) have vastly different prices than other countries with equal VAT %’s.
Hi,
i pay with my Apple-Subscription. Did pay last year in August 59,99 EUR for one year. Next time I should pay 74,99 EUR.
I remember that Apple did change something in their rules for Apple~Subscription so that the subscription will not stop. The former Rules where that if a company ask for higher Price I must do a aktive renew of that subscription.
Do you know how many user are pay with Apple/Google Subscription?
I think you know the for pay in the Apple App Store the companies set not an exact price. They only can set a price point for the different regions, but different point for different regions .
Thanks, Ray, as always, for keeping us informed and for being our voice to companies like Strava. This sort of reminds me when Netflix separated physical and digital subscriptions and how badly those communications were. However, in this case, I also believe a lot of people may not actually know their pricing is increasing. Very odd. Strava must have either very stupid comms/marketing people (which I doubt) or are panicked they will shed customers by sharing the information more clearly. And Strava could easily add a banner to their site and apps that inform people about the new pricing. Why not make it super visible? Again, fear of backlash or losing subscribers. In the end, transparency should rate above this.
In any case, I also pay with my iTunes/Apple Store account. (I use airline miles to get Apple gift cards that I then fund my Apple account with.) So, I too have a link on my subscription page to see my billing at Apple. On my Mac, this link opens a page in the Apple Music app displaying all my Apple account funded subscriptions. From there, I can click on Strava. That shows my next renewal is December 7, 2023, and that I will pay $59.99 annually. However, I suspect that after the price increase in February, Apple will also show the new $79.99 annual renewal price. I am sure Apple has to have one price per country at any one time, and any new subscribers today (Jan 29) will pay $59.99 until the increase that takes place in a few days.
For me, Like Ray and many others here, I use Strava every day. In particular, I like my ability to connect via IFTTT to Google sheets and other apps, and I use add ons such as VeloViewer for analysis. So, the price increase does not bother me. Ironically, if Strava had been gradually increasing pricing every few years by $5/yr or $1/mo or something similar, I also think this would be a non-issue for most folks.
I just want to say “Thank You” for all the time & effort you are putting into this. The point you touch on in the end is important, as pricing (and changes over) can be evaluated by each user and is not a huge thing generally speaking.
But most important to me in all this is just how shady and badly Strava seems to be handling this. Mistake on top of mistake in what should be relatively straight forward. Be honest and up front with users and they will respond better.
Your efforts shining a light on this will hopefully lead to better handling of similar issues by other providers in this space as this seems to be destined for a case study on what NOT to do when raising prices for customers.
Probably wasn’t the right time for Strava to send me an email asking “ How likely are you to recommend a Strava subscription to a friend?” That was on a scale of 10 (very likely) to 0 (not likely). What would I say to the friend when they ask how much it costs? It’s a secret? Depends where you live?
What I think is even crazier is that they literally had a great example of how to raise prices and make people MORE happy with the recent actions of TrainerRoad. I see a lot of backlash on Reddit, etc. about how people think a price increase is justified (which is completely missing your point), so they probably would have done just as well. Some people/companies are really just shockingly bad at some things.
And so instead of getting good publicity with a preview of Strava and Fatmap, and how new features may be coming out (Ray, would still be interested to hear your thoughts on that) Strava is getting more publicity of their price hike and that’s what everyone is taking about. Some sites are just reporting the apology, and some (like the verge) are echoing Ray’s opinion that they are still not coming out 100% clean and legal.
Yup, looking forward to digging into Fatmap over the weekend. It does legit look cool, and if Strava can quickly leverage it – all the better. Most of the immediate examples appear to be ski areas – I’m not sure they can make the integration work fast enough for this ski year, but still, looking forward to digging…
Fatmaps is very cool. I think Strava 3D maps have been a flop–far behind Fatmaps and it doesn’t even work in the browser. I think it could be great with Fatmaps technology. I would like to see feature parity between app & browser and much better video capability.
Originally I thought Fatmaps would renew focus on the Strava browser experience, but now I just think Strava is going to be fighting a long battle to recover from this customer relations disaster.
Does not work until you create a new account with your Brazil VPN. Strava charges you based on where you opened the account. Which really sucks as a German living in Spain.
Unless you buy new sub on your old account trough google pay with connected revolut card with random brazil adress atleas it works that way for Turkey payment – 20$ year
I bought my Strava sub through Google Play app. IWhen i look at my renewal, it gives me a link to google Play which shows my original cost ($69.99). I think it’s gone up to $79 in the USA, right? I’m unsure if managing through Google Play gives me a better deal, or they just have not updated that yet.
I signed up originally in Denmark and my account pricing is updated in line with my current country, so it’s definitely not consistent about which country your account is attached to. Will not be renewing at that rate. Good job Strava.
Personally, I give them another couple of days to make an official announcement via email to all users. If they fail to do that, I consider them acting in bad faith towards their customers. Which means that their product loses me for good. Not just the paid version.
I was a Strava Premium (since 2014) user until the previous pricing post. It helped me clarify what kind of value I was getting from the service, which was increasingly limited.
Routing: My experience with routing is still lacklustre. I was a longtime customer (in parallel with Strava) of a mapping-specific service because Strava’s routing was so poor. As someone who likes to explore a lot of less travelled roads, the heat map feature was less useful to me. When travelling abroad and cycling, I found it often took me on places that were popular but far less than ideal. My growing (but possibly wrong sense) is that we had begun to reach a heat map tipping point in certain areas where it was now just a heat map death spiral: it’s hot because it’s on the heat map. I realise from other comments this isn’t the case everywhere.
The noise. Oy the noise! Make enough friends and there wasn’t enough of a way to filter content to be kudo-worthy. Sure I’m a bit of a activity grinch, but with enough people in the friends list, it was often just a wash of daily commutes or short training sessions. How long has Strava had the commute tag, or workout options, available for activities? What’s the use when you can’t filter those activities out. Unless I’m wrong (highly possible) this 9-year-old-thread remains accurate: link to reddit.com . “What does it do?” “How do I filter it out?” Etc. etc.
Training: Lots of other places to upload and analyze training data as noted by Ray. My indoor bike trainer comes with its own suite of tools that were included in the purchase. This one is also highly personal, but over time, I just started caring less about the data related to every ride beyond tracking that I did it. I do almost all my training over the winter on a virtual-world platform that I pay for all year round. In the summer, when I’m outside, I’ve gotten back to just riding for the love of it.
In the end, this whole fiasco simply helped me reassess where the value lies in the things I use and I’m grateful for the all help I’ve gotten over the years because of this site.
I am Belgian and member since 2012, subscriber since 2014. I just noticed that my next renewal will be October 2023… but the price will be 79.99 USD!!! How can it be that they charge me the US price. I never lived in the US, I actually lived in Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium. What a mess!
I bought a years’ subscription in 12/2020. I didn’t find the value to be there, so I didn’t ever renew. Weirdly, I still have premium features even though my subscription lapsed a long time ago. 🤷🏻♂️
Canadian here. Strava member since 2014. Was set to renew at USD$34.99 in August, now will renew at USD$79.99. So, we’re exposed to the USDCAD exchange rate at the time. At the moment it’s 1.33 which means my renewal would be CAD$106 if I had to renew now.
Strava is asking for a global tax audit with that inability to change locations once an account is opened. Here in the US, sales tax is based on your location (even within a state, rates will differ between cities and counties – and importantly to those governments, who gets the $ depends on the sale being coded to the right location). I know very little of VAT in Europe, but I think it is similar in that it is unique to the country. So Ray, your membership may still be sources to the US on Strava’s tax filings, causing Strava to underpay in your current location.
Actually, here in Europe digital taxes will be introduced over the next few years in the EU. Taxes will be based on the user’s location. I suspect this will create more headaches for Strava.
Definitely cancelling mine. It’s not about the money but arrogance and total disrespect to long term loyal paying subscriber. I have my own business too where price increases are sometimes unavoidable to my clients but had I done it Strava way we’d go bust without a doubt. Really Strava its so disgusting.
It would have been nice if they did this the classy way. Like Wahoo did.
Wahoo warned their users that prices were going up and gave them a chance to re-up their subscriptions at existing prices for up to 2 additional years. I jumped on the chance and they won some more customer satisfaction points across the board.
I get it, prices go up, but take care of the customers that supported you long enough to get you where you are.
Strava could take another pointer from Wahoo while they are at it, and add a bunch of additional value enhancing features and functionality for the same subscription fee.
If I cancel my subscription but have already prepaid by subscribing annually, do I immediately lose premium features, or lose them once my annual runs out?
I set a calendar reminder to cancel before my subscription renews. I assume most people who are inclined to cancel their subscription will do the same, instead of risk losing premium features for which they’ve already paid.
I joined the free trial in July last year, fully intending to cancel after a month, but didn’t. I rationalized the cost at the old annual price because I wanted to support the company after being a free user for over a decade. However, with the price increase, it’s definitely not worth it to me. And my opinion of Strava as a company has been irreparably shattered.
I realize everybody is dealing with inflation and costs go up. I was also excited by the Fatmaps acquisition. But I don’t really use the premium features and I intend to send Strava a message with my wallet.
Strava may underappreciate the number of people who are going to do the same and not realize until some time in late 2023 the true cost of this fiasco.
i wonder how this is affected by apple’s icloud private relay. it’s supposed to maintain your general location within the country but who knows what the actual effect would be here.
Ray, did you have a copy of the spreadsheet that I can reference? I could make my own from your posted photo, but I thought I would ask first to prevent extra work.
I am canceling too. I have been a member for 9 years and a premium one most of the time. But I do not use the premium features. A $25 increase for a digital logbook seems a bit excessive.
Strava hasn’t been worth it for me for a long time. I cancelled years ago and am somehow still getting Premium without getting billed for it. Eventually they’ll figure it out.
The fact that Premium has existed in various forms for ages and yet still does not allow you to pair a power meter is insane. I could justify premium if it replaced my head unit with comparable features. The only feature I use on Desktop is Sauce, which isn’t by Strava, and Strava still won’t allow comparable functionality on mobile (like power curve). Garmin allows power curve on mobile and doesn’t charge extra for their version of Beacon.
Strava is basically just a data aggregation tool for me. Once Strava stops accidentally giving me premium I’m gone. Back to Garmin and their functional software for fitness tracking.
This is deception and lack of communication is unacceptable. I spent a little time on Garmin Connect today and I think the course mapping is good enough for me. That combined with Zwift implementing personal leaderboards next month (those are the segments I care most about anyway) was enough for me to turn off auto renewal of my Strava account. The funny thing is it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to turn it off and try other alternatives if the company hadn’t behaved this way.
I just canceled (still active until Dec 15th), so I could send them cancellation feedback. I believe the new pricing is worth it for the value I get, BUT this is purely corporate greed, with unfair pricing across different countries. You could not screw a pooch any better than this PR disaster.
I have been billed in USD. Account setup in US when racing there in 2011, team had Strava as a sponsor, using voucher codes for couple of years, until they stopped sponsoring) and paid for it myself afterwards in USD
Euros when moved back to Europe
Last one in GBP, end of last year cancelled subscription, and had my wife (with UK based account) send me a gift subscription, that was on GBP.
The renewal for November 2023 now shows price in GBP but only 47,99…
I looked into this for myself as my annual subscription just recently renewed in end of 2022. Before pricing increases came into effect.
And It looks like my subscription is still set to renew at “$59.99” since I used Google Play I guess?
I’m Assuming that by the time Next August comes around, my cost will increase to the $80/yr US Cost.
Their system seems to be able to change regions, just not on active subscriptions. I was due to renew in JPY, where I first subscribed to premium, but I hit cancel at the first fiasco. Now if I look at the pricing page is offers me to resubscribe in USD, as I’m now in one of the non-local price countries.
Since Strava is in the US and has a US cost structure what would be the problem with just having one USD price and everyone paying that price converted using the exchange rate at the time of payment? Credit Card companies do the conversion automatically when I buy cycling gear overseas.
What benefit are they getting from the complication of multiple pricing structures?
From a pure financial mechanics perspective, nothing is preventing that.
BUT….
It has been common practice for online services to evaluate individual markets and populations and price offers accordingly for the variations across those markets. This reaches well beyond the basics of currency conversion and into the far murkier waters of “what is productX worth to marketA vs what it is worth to marketB?” and then developing pricing strategies targeted at each market.
I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression “what the market will bear”….. except applied with uniqueness to each market segment.
BTW before the inevitable cries of corporate greed happen….. this in practice usually means that non-primary markets are DISCOUNTED, rather than primary market prices being INCREASED. Why? Because user growth (how many users on platform) is a KPI to which things like valuation and fundraising are often tied. So rather than price certain user/potential user populations out, it is more favorable to provide targeted discounts to ensure user growth continues apace and on plan.
I’m a paid subscriber for Strava, sometimes they send me some questionaires about their paid service. I find it always really hard to justify.
Why I pay:
Segments
Route planning when I am in a new area.
But the trainingplans weekly load (which is always low at the beginning of the week) I see no use. Beacon is unreliable so I use the garmin feature.
Am I missing a feature which is really worth paying for?
*
Ray, Strava’s Twitter response to your reader also doesn’t make sense. The response says, “when you subscribe, your account will remain in the same currency unless the subscription is canceled.” That seems to imply that if you cancel and resubscribe again the currency will match where you currently live or are located, however this is contradicted by the second sentence, “Strava determines currency based on the IP address location at the time of registration.” So if the second sentence is true, the third cannot be. Very confusing.
This series of videos / articles reminded me: I don’t actually get enough value of paid strava features to warranf the annual fee (come to think of it – I used them MYBE once per year over the past couple years; namely heatmaps to find suitable routes). My subscription renews in Aug and I plan on canceling it. Being physically located in Germany — strava’s most expensive market? only makes that decision easier. Thank you for your research and dedication!
This type of response speaks volumes about the leadership at Strava. Whoever is in charge of PR should be relieved of their duties. This is not a tough one and the longer it drags out, makes me want to cancel my subscription.
Ray, I understand your comment that it is reasonable for companies to raise prices and that Strava is worth it to you, but an almost 50% increase is pretty hard to justify (in my US case 54.99 to 79.99). It is not like Strava is really providing any content, they are just providing a log of your fitness data and using everybody else’s fitness data to provide some useful tools (Segment leaderboards, heat map routing, etc.) Much of their usefulness is duplicated on the various platforms supplied with the equipment that is used to record the data, in my case Garmin Connect. I have decided this is one subscription I don’t need.
Regarding Strava: I do not need their premium features, but for years I paid the premium price anyhow. Because I like their regular free content and thought they deserve remuneration.
However, I do not want to be treated the way they do (it is not about the money, it is about transparency), thus I cancelled the premium service.
As a German I quit my subscription yesterday, was premium for about three years. No notice from Strava (learned about the price increase here) and different prices across EU for the same service are too much. I hope the get sued for such stupid behaviour.
I canceled. As a German user I don’t see any new features that bring value to the highest price in Europe. And without your blog I wouldn’t have checked my account to find out about the new price. It isn‘t even the price itself. It’s just the fact that I don’t feel valued as a customer for nearly 10 years but as a simple cash cow. And there are little features I will miss.
While other features I missed for years are still nowhere to find.
So, I just emailed Strava support telling them I am not accepting EU price discrimination… Do you know how to bring this to an end quickly? What can EU citizens do to make Strava comply? According to the law a customer must be asked if redirected to a specific country price site. So, I should be able to pay the lowest amount charged anywhere in the EU, right?
This entire debacle has reminded me that I keep a monthly subscription in order go be able to switch it off when I don’t need all the premium stuff.
I also feel they need and deserve to get hit over the head for their poor handling of the price hike.
Strava lost me 10 years ago, As a Runner you are not important to them and are a second class citizen. Apparently there was no demand to add mileage for shoes, despite me at the time finding years old requests on the forums. But like everyone else I’d still occasionally poke around now and then, but they then announced there was no intention to support running power, I believe that’s been addressed. But I’ve not logged in or sent any workouts to them in over three years. The only positive I can see to it is if social integration is important to you, or said differently dick wagging, “look how big mine is!”
I now use Runalyze as a supporter. It offers me everything I need and nothing I don’t. Syncs seamlessly with Withings for weight measurement too. I couldn’t be happier with it. If you’re “just” a runner do check it out
Yes I know you can now, even for free, but back when I paid them 40 iirc a year, they were so negative to anything running. Just take your money and update the cycling features is how it felt to me.
Yeah, after 10 years membership (9 of which I paid 59$ for “premium” service) and many years of waiting for improvements which actually interest me (hint: I don’t care about posting Strava to Snapchat) it’s finally time to quit. I’ve rather been using Veloviewer / GoldenCheetah for analysis the last few years and never really got why Strava wanted to become a social network of sorts instead of actually giving me insight into my training. Going to 80$/year here in Germany is simply unjustified and the way they’ve communicated this price hike unfortunately speaks volumes about the future of this platform.
I wonder what went through the minds of Strava when setting up such pricing, independently from EU law.
Easiest comparison is Denmark vs Germany. EUR equivalent 6.35 versus 10.99 a month.
It is clear they didn’t look at VAT, economic fundamentals, customer propensity to spend, etc etc.
Denmark is far richer than Germany, I do not have precise figures but in nominal terms average salary must be 50% to 100% higher.
In practice Denmark price is low for Danes, German price is really super high, app monthly prices e.g Spotify are max 10 euros.
Knowing how cost conscious Germans are I foresee massive cancellations in Germany, even if most will not be aware price is substantially lower in other countries.
Overall I would expect lower revenues for Strava and a price realignment to the rest of Europe pretty soon.
Even Sitzerland ist cheaper than Germany, so I am pretty sure they just looked where they got the highest rate of paying customers and decided to charge them extra. Well, they have at least one paying German less now.
Denmarks GDP per capita is less than 10% above Germany. I doubt people there make 50-100% more.
That said, there’s obviously no reason why Germany should be more expensive than Denmark when it comes to Strava pricing. Let alone more expensive than Switzerland.
I’ve never subscribed to Strava’s premium account, but can you use a VPN to sign up for Brazil’s cheaper rate and then use it like normal in the EU or America? Is this illegal? Seems like a work around for getting the service cheaper.
No, you cannot. Not if you have an existing account, Strava will use the country in which the account was originally created. The only way would be to ditch your old account and create a new one while on the VPN, but who would want to do that..
When I log into my Strava account and my account looks different. It states how long I have had membership and what my renewal cost will be next time. However, I do not have the options to see my annual receipts and I am annual subscriber. I’m not sure why mine is different as I subscribe yearly. Is it because I’m UK based.
One of the main things I use in Strava premium is the route planner. I have looked at both Komoot and Ride With GPS but maybe I should look again? Any thoughts on those alternatives? I’m in the US and it seems Komoot has more rides/detail in Europe.
Ride With GPS is superior for route creation IMO. The new features they rolled over the last year (without a price increase) make Strava’s route planning tool look like someone’s weekend hobby.
So, I guess the reason the prices in Denmark did not increase is because we were already paying a premium – those 449 is the same as I paid last year. It’s also a bit odd, that Denmark is in the top when you look at the annual prices, while the monthly price is so low – Just across the border in germany, the monthly price is 13.7% of the annual price, while here it is 10.9%. And in France it is 16.6%…
Plot twist: the annual rate for DCR supporter is always twelve packs of gummi bears, converted from the local prices of wherever Ray is residing at the time of renewal.
And just to confuse matters more: I’m in the UK, and pay for Strava through Google Play, and had an email on Friday 27th January to tell me that my subscription would renew at £47.99/year, starting 27th February. A friend of mine (I don’t know how he pays for Strava), was told earlier in the month that his renewal would be £54.99 starting in August.
Hi Rainmaker. In youtube video Czechia is having the price USD 7.99 (time 6:11 in video), but in your table it’s 7.99 EUR. Can you please re-check? Thanks.
I get that software services cost money, I really do. I get Strava is debatably not funded by adverts, which is a welcome rarity in social media. But subs have to be good value and provided honestly.
A company that raises their sub prices without emailing is bound to lose my trust. A company that cannot understand the most basic of EU competition rules loses my trust. And, as a runner, not having the ability to show real pace, not fake inflated moving pace is just not good enough for me to justify the old price let alone the new price (I’m in the Uk, and note sub will include VAT at 20%).
I actually like most of Strava’s interface compared to Garmin connect or runalyze, but to expect me to pay two coffees out a month for something that won’t give me the most *basic* stat there is without hoops. Nope.
Curious to see if Strava factor in IP location for subscription gifting.
I still have a few months on my current account but the price diff shown makes it worth creating a new account in a low-cost region using a VPN and gift a 1Y subscription which can be activated in your existing account and region. Perhaps something for a follow up!
The price hike is not value for money given the features I use. Which are available elsewhere anyway (Garmin Connect). A lot of the new features Strava introduced over the last 2-3 years seem like fillers. None of my running, cycling, swimming or Tri friends use them (discussed over coffee recently).
Disappointed that Strava have turned into a typical Corporation with poor communication to its customer base when it comes to actually delivery a value for money service.
The outcome of my friends and fellow athletes coffee…. 17 long-time subscriptions cancelled. The free account will provide wha is needed – though most of use agreed we would miss the Segment leaderboards, but that’s mostly for ego boasting any way :p
In the past for sure there WAS a way to change the country (or it has been changing by itself every time I cancellend and subscribed again?). Over the last 8 years I have been switched so many times between RUB and USD. Currently residing in Australia, for sure I would be looking for a hack to switch to AUD from USD this year.
A currency solution exists, as per pricing FAQ strava links to in your renewal price email – i just go mine. (it helps, for people who moved country). Plus now we can triangulate info to get best price (hence the folly of different prices by country) . There are 2 obvious wins ; 1) avoid extra card fees for a foreign currency charge, and (depending on yoru new country) getting a better rate. lets assume I (um) moved to South Africa (or even better Brazil), I now need to cancel my membership, wait to it to expire, ensure my country is right in my accoutn settings and renew from there, or use my VPN to be sure if I am travelling.
The exact details of it arent documented. so not sure if it works… I *might* have to renew from within my Android App store whcih is set to my old country, as I have not replaced my phone yet. We will see.
Below is relevant paragraph from the FAQ for Strava pricing. It says cancel. then when it runs out renew in your new local currency. the details of this are NOT explaiend however. I can only hope and ASSUME I am right that if I have cancelled my subscription in my Android App store (whichis not Australian), I renew via the website ofter logging into to Strava and making sure my country is up to date.
The Seventh rule of The Strava Club is: subscriptions will renew as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at The Strava Club, you have to subscribe.
It was great when it first came out and everyone ended up using it as a public forum to show and share sports. The problem is they don’t have a great financial model. The basic site is great. (It could do with a few more inbuilt tools to tidy up fit/gpx/tcx files (e.g. remove segments, join separate workouts) but it is OK)
The problem comes when you stump up for a subscription. What added value do you get for your money?
The heat maps are good (and Movescount is dead)
The route builder works OK (with a few quirks) but I could use Komoot or Garmin’s own.
That is about it!
The training related metrics are weird / junk?
I have a power curve. It doesn’t say which sport. It doesn’t say which sensor. Without being able to filter by sport and sensor source this is useless.
Fitness and freshness? What does fitness mean other than an accumulating a number in some mathematical model of training load, fatigue and adaptation. It bears no relationship to V02 max in a particular sport nor predicted race times. No desirable ranges are provided to inform training. I get more on my Garmin 255 just on the device for free.
It doesn’t support the ability to create structured workouts and send to your chosen device or add to a calendar of structured workouts that you can synchronise to your watch. They should have introduced this eons ago. They could be in the lucrative market of providing various levels of coaching from computer generated adaptive training to personalised coaching.
I think they have sleep-walked into an existentially threatening position as other sites (native and third party) have upped their game. They now find they have to substantially invest to bring the platform up to date and have a chance of going beyond a mere advertising based subsistence model.
Hi all,
Greetings from Colombia
Concerning the chart. Colombia prices are somewhat misleading.
If you sign through google play you get the price in our local currency colombian peso ($COP)
A month 22900 $cop a year 167000 $cop
A $US is roughly equivalent to $COP 4600.
That puts up there with brazil amongst the cheapest.
I checked and prices are equivalent acctoss all latin america the trick is not to sign from strava website but use google pay
For Apple App Store, it wasn’t exactly easy to find out what I’ve been paying (plus I have 2 Apple ID’s, and THAT is a nightmare in itself!) but I’ve never had to do that before. Apparently I’ve been a subscriber since 2015! And they can’t come up with a way to explain to me that they are raising their prices? Wow…
That’s crazy, Costa Rico pays $59.99, and US pays $79.99?
I’ve had a problem finding out how much I’ve been paying through the Apple App Store, but Strava went up $20.00? Okay, not huge, but for nothing new (that I would use) they went from $59.99 to $79.99? –And wouldn’t tell people?– I checked the renewal price about a week ago, and it still said $59.99. Now, I get a page that lists the cost at the bottom ‘per month’, and apparently have to click an ominous button labeled ‘Continue to billing’ to get it official.
AND I asked for MY data over 3 weeks ago, and have yet to receive an email that the data set is available. Hmm…
The only reason why i paid was the nice heatmap and to supports the Programmers. But such a impudence to discriminate users in Germany has moved me to cancel the paying completely. I think many other users in germany will do so.
That’s it, I’ve canceled my paid subscription and will be supporting intervals.icu from now on. I will miss out on Strava Routes, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
When I check my price in Mexico (and what you also saw in your post above) is that my price in local currency (which should be Mexican Peso) is actually US Dollars. It even says the price is in local currency. But I am pretty sure Mexico doesn’t use the US Dollar. Huh. Just one problem after another.
Danke für den Post und Grüße aus Deutschland ;-) Ich wohne nur 20km entfernt von Polen und habe mal mein Strava ABO gekündigt, wenn es Zeit für die Verlängerung ist, fahre ich nach Stettin einkaufen und verlängert mein Jahresabo von Polen aus. :p
Thanks for the post and greetings from Germany ;-) I live only 20km away from Poland and once canceled my Strava subscription, when it’s time to extend it I go shopping in Szczecin and renew my annual subscription from Poland. :p
I extended my subscription in Germany for a year before the price increase in December 2022. As of today, my membership no longer exists, but I can purchase a new membership for €75. Totally crazy! Am I an isolated case or are there other cases?
I’ve had the same thing happen 2x now. I email in and they act like it was a problem on my app (it wasn’t I checked online). But… it was fixed when they responded.
As a longtime Strava Premium member, I canceled my renewal. This is outrageous. They keep adding the DUMBEST features and telling me I should pay more for that (stretching app anyone?). Thanks for the heads up DC Rainmaker.
I have been following this wit interest, waiting to see when Strava might officially spill the beans as to when/what the price change would be. Low and behold this morning, at approximately 3:03 am, the email hit with all the price increase info. I guess 90 days isn’t too long a time to wait to get something official…..
It looks like Strava is still having pricing issues. Yesterday it stated I would renew at $59 a year. This morning (today is my renewal day) it showed I would renew at $7.99/year. Obviously, that was a mistake. I reached out to customer support to check on the prices and they now told me that I will be subscribing $7.99 per month, but if I’d like to continue it will be at $11.99 per month. How is this still going on? Are they actually intentionally trying to tank the company? I think this turned into a rant rather than a comment, but I’m not sure if there is a difference.
I’m annual subscriber with renewal end of April, so I’ve paid until next April but got mail today about “price change” from next year.
NOK is being butchered in value against the USD so my increase from next year is from NOK470 (approx USD42.5) to NOK799 (approx USD72,3). Thats over 70% increase!!
I get that all costs increase but this is waaay too much, I very much doubt I will pay for Premium when you have other options (Garmin Connect, Elevate). Only a question of time before integrations to 3rd party apps also will be subject to subscription cost (looking at you Reddit)?
Interestingly enough–after canceling (membership was to renew on Apr 30th)–I noticed I still had Summit mark today. I checked billing and it had changed my expiration date to May 3rd and I could renew at $59.99 USD (I’m in US). For me–$59.99 is fair price so turned renewal back on. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
That was similar to my situation. I thought $60 that’s fair especially when I considered that I used it for free for many years. Then renewal day came and the price changed. what a bummer. I’m interested to see if you get renewed at $60.
$59.99 USD is what hit my credit card yesterday. I’ve bounced between Polar and Garmin over the years so Strava is my aggregator/record and for that $60 USD is worth it. Any more though and I will cancel. We will see what happens next year. Still have not received any communication from Strava regarding pricing.
And so yesterday I got renewed in NZ. I say that as I got no email advising me in advance, and I was charged $133NZD – basically the USD80. But wait, as up above it shows NZ is USD65 right?
So I asked strava about this, and this is even better than the post DC Rainmaker had saying it was where you first subscribed that set the price. Because I’ve been a subscriber for a decade, and they didn’t have NZ pricing back then, I don’t get the NZ pricing. It’s not just where you joined, but when!!!
So the catch/dodge here is that I can cancel, get a refund, then immediately rejoin and in that case I get the lower rate.
I don’t know if this is news or if I am super late to the party, but it seems that the pricing for Switzerland is a) even higher than shown in the table or b) has increased once more (although on strava it says, that the last price change was on January 20th).
Monthly price: 11.95 CHF
Yearly price: 79.95 CHF
Even more ridiculous, given the fact, that the exchange rate of Euro and USD have dropped / CHF has risen even more in comparison. And I am pretty sure, that Strava is not paying any expenses in Switzerland…
Sweden have gone from 529kr to 699kr in 6 months. I live in Sweden but was charged 499 Danish kr which hit me for 785kr in Sweden (never lived in Denmark). Not good.
2 things – fixing it so its your country. I attach a picture form their support pages for how to do that. unfortunately VPN isnt enough ot get athe brazil prices. but , as in my case, it correctyl knows i shoudl be offered Australia prices now, not my old swiss prices (moved).
After my paid subscription expired, I attempted to change my subscription currency to Danish DKK, since I was physically located in Denmark, instead of German EUR (I originally signed up in Germany). However, this didn’t work as intended; the currency and rate remained in EUR at the German rates.
I reached out to Strava support for clarity, but their response was somewhat evasive:
“The system determines the currency based on a certain number of activities recorded in a location, and doesn’t consider the city or country listed on your profile.”
I found this explanation lacking, so I’ve now asked them to define the specific number or duration associated with the “certain amount of activities” they mentioned.
I cancelled mine. I want to send a message to the company that we (the users) will not be taken for a ride. Give us useful features (routing services can be improved for example) then I will consider resubscribing.
As fan of FATMAP and namely their paid Explore premium features (national map overlays, downloadable maps, weather etc.), I am disappointed that you can no longer get Fatmap Explore (at Euro 30 p.a.). Strava is trying to force you into a paid Subscription (at Euro 60, 70, 75).
At least their behavior is very consistent when it comes to taking advantage of users (all of whom donate their data and often much more); e.g. if you rank #1 in a segment you created, your name is not displayed unless you pay🤣
Hi Ray
Happy New Year to you and family from Montreal Canada.
I received an offer from Strava for an annual membership at 25% reduction. 75 $ CDN per year.
Thanks for your effort to help us.
Pierre
Ok.. i canceled my account before it renewed…
then got a lot of advertising inside Strava to sign up again (and didn’t).
Now a week or two later they sent me a discount code about 25% which results in a yearly fee of 56,24 € _including_ tax, although the say on the first page (without adding the discount code) 74,99€ a year plus tax.
This is now even cheaper than it would be in Austria.
I would be glad if we wouldn’t have to play that game every year again.
Strava still insists on the different pricing in EU:
We won’t be able to provide you with a discount code for your subscription every year and at this time, the subscription prices in the EU will not be the same. However, we can assist with adjusting the country for your account to match another country that’s in the EU. Is there a preferred price/currency you’d like to subscribe to?
I wish Strava would go back to the “summit packages” so that you can selectively subscribe to features for 3€ p.m. If this happens, I will come back as a paying member.
Official: change country trick (VPN) works ONLY in “never been premium account”. Is there a way to backup the old account and restore to a new? Other suggestion? A “never been premium account” created in country A can change country for subscription, so the issue is you are bound to the country FIRST TIME made subscription
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Well, my renewal rate was updated after your initial post and it’s now more than Strava is worth to me. In all the talk of inflation this is the part they forgot – what’s the service worth to people? I’m happy to pay my way, but when you’re pricing Strava the same as a Disney+ subscription questions need to be asked.
Exactly. This just serves to remind me thé the value add above what I already have in garmin connect just isn’t worth it. Heat map routing segments etc. Already have that. In one place. With a few other interesting things too. Like my bp weight and even mfp. It wasn’t really worth it at $60, and certainly not at $80. I already planned to not renew this just affirms that decision. My only concern is interesting things that use Stravas api. Like gear maintenance apps, specifically if they will continue to function on the unpaid tier.
Other than that. I only look at Strava to see what Wahoo friends are doing really.
I also find enough value in Strava (especially the heatmap-based routing) to be OK with the price change. The odd communication is super weird. Excellent article. Thanks Ray!
I definitely didn’t get the FATMAP email either… Definitely have a bit of a hard time justifying the $80 per year on top of TrainerRoad et al.
I’m in the Netherlands so my subscription will go from €59,99 to €69,99. I would not have been bothered by this €10 increase if not for the fact that most of the EU will stay at €59,99.
My subscription runs until the end of September so hopefully by then Strava will have fixed the price difference. If not, I will probably cancel and go back to the free membership.
Strava communication was probably bad, but!
ou are lucky living in one of the better EU countries.
But I do not get why your expectations are that things should cost everywhere the same? When the salary and price of living is not the same. Basically you would expect communism in prices but capitalism in wages :).
Think of an extreme like Yemen, how would you feel about them paying same as you and then apply same logic to Bulgaria or (Ukraine even if not EU)
>> “But I do not get why your expectations are that things should cost everywhere the same?”
But that’s what this whole article is about, it’s like even in the youtube thumbnail? The whole thing about “can’t be charged a higher price when buying products or services in the EU just because of your nationality” is written EU law. And yes, the goal of the union of European states is to unify standards, not only in USB-C chargers but also in all other aspects of living. Neat, isn’t it? ;-)
Correct, I actually don’t have any problems with different pricing tiers for different countries. My issues is that the EU law says that in cases like this, it’s not permitted unless specific caveats are in place (which, are not here).
For example, why does Indonesia get special pricing, but India doesn’t? Or, fill in the blank other country. Which isn’t a slight on Indonesia, but more of a ‘WTF why not India?’.
And then in the EU, why on earth is Sweden so much cheaper than Spain (or just about any EU country), when any index you use puts it at least 20% higher than Spain. Did someone literally just typo the S countries? I mean, any person in Europe would know those two should be flipped.
But heck, with as big of a territory as the EU is, the US isn’t really any different in vast cost of living indexes. The cost of living index for someone in NYC is 2x that of Memphis. Seriously. Should they pay half as much?
Obviously, one can go crazy here, but Strava makes it really easy to show how silly this is in Europe in particular. It’s like someone took out a European Tourist Map and just picked a few countries they’d heard of, and decided to charge them more.
I’m not arguing that prices should be one way or another (nor am I arguing prices shouldn’t rise). I’m just arguing to be transparent about it, and to comply with laws.
German regulatory authorities (Bundesnetzagentur) have a FAQ on their website rg. geoblocking of digital goods within EU. The problem seems to be that the mentioned protecting regulations apply for EU companies and EU customers only: “The Regulation does not contain any particular rules on enforcement with regard to traders established in non-EU.(…)”
Source:
link to ec.europa.eu section 3.4
Strava has offices in the EU, as they proudly note at the end of each of their press releases:
“400+ employees around the world, with seven offices across the globe:
San Francisco, CA (headquarters)
Berlin, Germany
Bristol, UK
Chamonix, France
Denver, CO
Dublin, Ireland
Vilnius, Lithuania”
They’ve updated it so much that I get 2 updated prices now!
If I go to my renewal page I get the new US price @$79.99, but when I go to their new pricing page, they give me the Canadian price @$99.99 CAD. I’m logged in using both links to the same account. Though I am Canadian, I’ve never lived in Canada with Strava – signed up in the US and live in the US.
From link to strava.com (while logged into my account)
from my account settings
from strava.com/pricing (while logged into the same account)
from the strava dot com / pricing page when logged into the same account
I just cancelled mine. TBH its not the cost per se, as I now have a premium Runalyze subscription instead. It’s just that there simply isnt enough of value for me in Strava to justify it. I realised I only had Premium to get Beacon as a live track backup, and I now use Locus Map’s live tracking instead.
Thank you Adam! :) Really appreciate that!
i added this in you old Strava article too:
something interesting, because of the Fatmap takeover by Strava I saw that link to recoverathletics.com
was taken over too, which you can use as a Strava Premium user for free
after registration i received this information by mail:
… Strava and Recover share a subscription. All Strava subscribers have automatic access to 100% of Recover’s content. Since you connected a premium Strava account, you have access to all premium features on both apps. Please let us know if you have any questions!..
For the little user like me Strava lost me years ago when they started fractioning the memberships based on features. They started squeezing for more money to get the same service. If they added more value I might have understood. Thiamin just another example of a company riding the shareholder rails to show they can squeeze more value out of the user base when they need to. Yuck.
Ha, you should petition the UN to recognise “Big Island” and “Next To Big Island” as official regions :-)
Great article thanks; after your first article on this Strava palaver I realised I wasn’t getting value from the premium membership so I’ve now cancelled it – had Strava not been so obtuse then I may not even have thought about it and just let it renew. £68 saved for spending on other cycling goodies thanks!
Canceled my subscription which was about to renew with the reason marked as other and in the comment field that the pricing in the Netherlands was illegal and included a link to link to europa.eu.
Only think I really used was the relative effort number for the week which is more of an interesting metric than something I really require. Garmin gives me something similar with it Intensity minutes and already has all the other metrics.
Thank you for pointing out that the EU country pricing was different.
– Another American in the Netherlands
Thanks Ray for digging deep!
Hope your efforts keep on making a difference :)
Oh, Strava. Don’t make the EU angry, you wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.
Wouldn’t be the first, or last California tech company to get the Brussels Slapdown.
For me, the price increase was expected. I pay annually and will be continuing with my subscription. A few things I wish they’d sort though, including units per activity.
S
Love how Australia’s region is Big Island and New Zealand’s is Next to Big Island.
I wonder what Tasmania thinks…. ;-)
Tas-who? ;)
Actually, funny side note on that. While going through the country lists, I did note that Puerto Rico was specifically listed as a separate country in Strava. Same price as US of course (given it’s a US territory), but thought that was interesting.
Not sure if this still works, but in October of 2022, I could still buy a yearly gift subscription from Japan for someone (and also myself with an account created in Germany) in another country without them having to have an account created in Japan. Japan back than also had a really cheap price and after the newest post it looks like they still are, so this might be worth a try.
Just tried to find the page, but it seems you can’t gift subscriptions anymore. Or at least it is disabled for my location.
It was removed
Looking forward to your video about forcing strava to charge equal pricing in the netherlands and germany.
Not sure how it applies, but different pricing in Europe might also have to do with different VAT brackets in each of those countries.
They imply VAT is inclusive (though even that is fuzzy/non-existant in their wording), which is fine to have slight differences in that case.
However, that actually isn’t the case/explanation for why Spain (and a pile of other countries) have vastly different prices than other countries with equal VAT %’s.
I click on your link to strava.com link and get Dutch pricing, even though I’m in the UK. Odd. Doesn’t seem to matter if I refresh or anything.
“Netherlands
Subscribers pay €10.99/month or €69.99/year.
Learn more about the Strava subscription and see What’s New or Manage your account
Note: Prices are displayed in local currency”
Any chance you’re on either a corporate network, airplane/train/bus, some random cafe, or with a VPN enabled?
(Sometimes those places will have internet exit points in other countries.)
Hi,
i pay with my Apple-Subscription. Did pay last year in August 59,99 EUR for one year. Next time I should pay 74,99 EUR.
I remember that Apple did change something in their rules for Apple~Subscription so that the subscription will not stop. The former Rules where that if a company ask for higher Price I must do a aktive renew of that subscription.
Do you know how many user are pay with Apple/Google Subscription?
I think you know the for pay in the Apple App Store the companies set not an exact price. They only can set a price point for the different regions, but different point for different regions .
Thanks, Ray, as always, for keeping us informed and for being our voice to companies like Strava. This sort of reminds me when Netflix separated physical and digital subscriptions and how badly those communications were. However, in this case, I also believe a lot of people may not actually know their pricing is increasing. Very odd. Strava must have either very stupid comms/marketing people (which I doubt) or are panicked they will shed customers by sharing the information more clearly. And Strava could easily add a banner to their site and apps that inform people about the new pricing. Why not make it super visible? Again, fear of backlash or losing subscribers. In the end, transparency should rate above this.
In any case, I also pay with my iTunes/Apple Store account. (I use airline miles to get Apple gift cards that I then fund my Apple account with.) So, I too have a link on my subscription page to see my billing at Apple. On my Mac, this link opens a page in the Apple Music app displaying all my Apple account funded subscriptions. From there, I can click on Strava. That shows my next renewal is December 7, 2023, and that I will pay $59.99 annually. However, I suspect that after the price increase in February, Apple will also show the new $79.99 annual renewal price. I am sure Apple has to have one price per country at any one time, and any new subscribers today (Jan 29) will pay $59.99 until the increase that takes place in a few days.
For me, Like Ray and many others here, I use Strava every day. In particular, I like my ability to connect via IFTTT to Google sheets and other apps, and I use add ons such as VeloViewer for analysis. So, the price increase does not bother me. Ironically, if Strava had been gradually increasing pricing every few years by $5/yr or $1/mo or something similar, I also think this would be a non-issue for most folks.
I just want to say “Thank You” for all the time & effort you are putting into this. The point you touch on in the end is important, as pricing (and changes over) can be evaluated by each user and is not a huge thing generally speaking.
But most important to me in all this is just how shady and badly Strava seems to be handling this. Mistake on top of mistake in what should be relatively straight forward. Be honest and up front with users and they will respond better.
Your efforts shining a light on this will hopefully lead to better handling of similar issues by other providers in this space as this seems to be destined for a case study on what NOT to do when raising prices for customers.
Probably wasn’t the right time for Strava to send me an email asking “ How likely are you to recommend a Strava subscription to a friend?” That was on a scale of 10 (very likely) to 0 (not likely). What would I say to the friend when they ask how much it costs? It’s a secret? Depends where you live?
I got the same email and let them know EXACTLY how I felt about this entire cluster f…
What I think is even crazier is that they literally had a great example of how to raise prices and make people MORE happy with the recent actions of TrainerRoad. I see a lot of backlash on Reddit, etc. about how people think a price increase is justified (which is completely missing your point), so they probably would have done just as well. Some people/companies are really just shockingly bad at some things.
And so instead of getting good publicity with a preview of Strava and Fatmap, and how new features may be coming out (Ray, would still be interested to hear your thoughts on that) Strava is getting more publicity of their price hike and that’s what everyone is taking about. Some sites are just reporting the apology, and some (like the verge) are echoing Ray’s opinion that they are still not coming out 100% clean and legal.
Yup, looking forward to digging into Fatmap over the weekend. It does legit look cool, and if Strava can quickly leverage it – all the better. Most of the immediate examples appear to be ski areas – I’m not sure they can make the integration work fast enough for this ski year, but still, looking forward to digging…
Fatmaps is very cool. I think Strava 3D maps have been a flop–far behind Fatmaps and it doesn’t even work in the browser. I think it could be great with Fatmaps technology. I would like to see feature parity between app & browser and much better video capability.
Originally I thought Fatmaps would renew focus on the Strava browser experience, but now I just think Strava is going to be fighting a long battle to recover from this customer relations disaster.
I like Strava, but I don’t like being treated unfairly or misled.
So basically, we all cancel our subscriptions for the next renewal period and resign using a VPN connected to Brazil 😉👍🏻
Does not work until you create a new account with your Brazil VPN. Strava charges you based on where you opened the account. Which really sucks as a German living in Spain.
Unless you buy new sub on your old account trough google pay with connected revolut card with random brazil adress atleas it works that way for Turkey payment – 20$ year
I’d happily take the amount of my salary in EUR instead of BRL!
:-D
I’m from Colombia,
Never left my country, created my account in 2014 IN COLOMBIA.
Here is strava dot com / pricing for Colombia: $7.99 monthly
But I’m getting charged $11.99
What a joke.
I bought my Strava sub through Google Play app. IWhen i look at my renewal, it gives me a link to google Play which shows my original cost ($69.99). I think it’s gone up to $79 in the USA, right? I’m unsure if managing through Google Play gives me a better deal, or they just have not updated that yet.
I’m the same – still shows the original price will be charged on my next renewal in April. Maybe they forgot to update Google Pay subscriptions
My google play store subscription renewed today for US$63.74
Edit: US $59.99 + tax
I signed up originally in Denmark and my account pricing is updated in line with my current country, so it’s definitely not consistent about which country your account is attached to. Will not be renewing at that rate. Good job Strava.
Thanks for not letting them off the hook Ray.
Personally, I give them another couple of days to make an official announcement via email to all users. If they fail to do that, I consider them acting in bad faith towards their customers. Which means that their product loses me for good. Not just the paid version.
I was a Strava Premium (since 2014) user until the previous pricing post. It helped me clarify what kind of value I was getting from the service, which was increasingly limited.
Routing: My experience with routing is still lacklustre. I was a longtime customer (in parallel with Strava) of a mapping-specific service because Strava’s routing was so poor. As someone who likes to explore a lot of less travelled roads, the heat map feature was less useful to me. When travelling abroad and cycling, I found it often took me on places that were popular but far less than ideal. My growing (but possibly wrong sense) is that we had begun to reach a heat map tipping point in certain areas where it was now just a heat map death spiral: it’s hot because it’s on the heat map. I realise from other comments this isn’t the case everywhere.
The noise. Oy the noise! Make enough friends and there wasn’t enough of a way to filter content to be kudo-worthy. Sure I’m a bit of a activity grinch, but with enough people in the friends list, it was often just a wash of daily commutes or short training sessions. How long has Strava had the commute tag, or workout options, available for activities? What’s the use when you can’t filter those activities out. Unless I’m wrong (highly possible) this 9-year-old-thread remains accurate: link to reddit.com . “What does it do?” “How do I filter it out?” Etc. etc.
Training: Lots of other places to upload and analyze training data as noted by Ray. My indoor bike trainer comes with its own suite of tools that were included in the purchase. This one is also highly personal, but over time, I just started caring less about the data related to every ride beyond tracking that I did it. I do almost all my training over the winter on a virtual-world platform that I pay for all year round. In the summer, when I’m outside, I’ve gotten back to just riding for the love of it.
In the end, this whole fiasco simply helped me reassess where the value lies in the things I use and I’m grateful for the all help I’ve gotten over the years because of this site.
If you use Chrome, then the Sauce for Strava extension gives you the ability to hide virtual and commute activities amongst other handy stuff.
I am Belgian and member since 2012, subscriber since 2014. I just noticed that my next renewal will be October 2023… but the price will be 79.99 USD!!! How can it be that they charge me the US price. I never lived in the US, I actually lived in Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium. What a mess!
I bought a years’ subscription in 12/2020. I didn’t find the value to be there, so I didn’t ever renew. Weirdly, I still have premium features even though my subscription lapsed a long time ago. 🤷🏻♂️
Canadian here. Strava member since 2014. Was set to renew at USD$34.99 in August, now will renew at USD$79.99. So, we’re exposed to the USDCAD exchange rate at the time. At the moment it’s 1.33 which means my renewal would be CAD$106 if I had to renew now.
Great breakdown again, Ray and please do let us know when Strava’s legal department serves you with a cease and desist letter…lol
My subscription renews on Feb 2nd and still has me at $59.99. Guess I lucked out by a day
Strava is asking for a global tax audit with that inability to change locations once an account is opened. Here in the US, sales tax is based on your location (even within a state, rates will differ between cities and counties – and importantly to those governments, who gets the $ depends on the sale being coded to the right location). I know very little of VAT in Europe, but I think it is similar in that it is unique to the country. So Ray, your membership may still be sources to the US on Strava’s tax filings, causing Strava to underpay in your current location.
Actually, here in Europe digital taxes will be introduced over the next few years in the EU. Taxes will be based on the user’s location. I suspect this will create more headaches for Strava.
I’m your article you should incorporate the “free” Strava app called “recover” and it’s value to Strava subscribes.
The article is about hiding and and miscommunication, not about Appos you can use for several months now.
Definitely cancelling mine. It’s not about the money but arrogance and total disrespect to long term loyal paying subscriber. I have my own business too where price increases are sometimes unavoidable to my clients but had I done it Strava way we’d go bust without a doubt. Really Strava its so disgusting.
It would have been nice if they did this the classy way. Like Wahoo did.
Wahoo warned their users that prices were going up and gave them a chance to re-up their subscriptions at existing prices for up to 2 additional years. I jumped on the chance and they won some more customer satisfaction points across the board.
I get it, prices go up, but take care of the customers that supported you long enough to get you where you are.
Strava could take another pointer from Wahoo while they are at it, and add a bunch of additional value enhancing features and functionality for the same subscription fee.
If I cancel my subscription but have already prepaid by subscribing annually, do I immediately lose premium features, or lose them once my annual runs out?
I set a calendar reminder to cancel before my subscription renews. I assume most people who are inclined to cancel their subscription will do the same, instead of risk losing premium features for which they’ve already paid.
I joined the free trial in July last year, fully intending to cancel after a month, but didn’t. I rationalized the cost at the old annual price because I wanted to support the company after being a free user for over a decade. However, with the price increase, it’s definitely not worth it to me. And my opinion of Strava as a company has been irreparably shattered.
I realize everybody is dealing with inflation and costs go up. I was also excited by the Fatmaps acquisition. But I don’t really use the premium features and I intend to send Strava a message with my wallet.
Strava may underappreciate the number of people who are going to do the same and not realize until some time in late 2023 the true cost of this fiasco.
You’re good. You will maintain premium features until your subscription runs out. (I just did it – my subscription runs out in June.)
i wonder how this is affected by apple’s icloud private relay. it’s supposed to maintain your general location within the country but who knows what the actual effect would be here.
Ray, did you have a copy of the spreadsheet that I can reference? I could make my own from your posted photo, but I thought I would ask first to prevent extra work.
Thanks! And great reporting, it is appreciated.
No prob – just replied back via e-mail. Cheers!
I am canceling too. I have been a member for 9 years and a premium one most of the time. But I do not use the premium features. A $25 increase for a digital logbook seems a bit excessive.
Hi Ray,
THX, pls check the Answers on YT, somebody is trying to misuse your photo (impersonate), not sure about other planned actions of that one.
I reported couple posts but there are many and maybe your report to yt will be also good.
Can send screenshot if it will disappear.
Strava hasn’t been worth it for me for a long time. I cancelled years ago and am somehow still getting Premium without getting billed for it. Eventually they’ll figure it out.
The fact that Premium has existed in various forms for ages and yet still does not allow you to pair a power meter is insane. I could justify premium if it replaced my head unit with comparable features. The only feature I use on Desktop is Sauce, which isn’t by Strava, and Strava still won’t allow comparable functionality on mobile (like power curve). Garmin allows power curve on mobile and doesn’t charge extra for their version of Beacon.
Strava is basically just a data aggregation tool for me. Once Strava stops accidentally giving me premium I’m gone. Back to Garmin and their functional software for fitness tracking.
So can you cancel, wait a couple of days, and then sign up again?
Cancelling just means you don’t have premium features, not that all your data disappear . . .
This is deception and lack of communication is unacceptable. I spent a little time on Garmin Connect today and I think the course mapping is good enough for me. That combined with Zwift implementing personal leaderboards next month (those are the segments I care most about anyway) was enough for me to turn off auto renewal of my Strava account. The funny thing is it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to turn it off and try other alternatives if the company hadn’t behaved this way.
I just canceled (still active until Dec 15th), so I could send them cancellation feedback. I believe the new pricing is worth it for the value I get, BUT this is purely corporate greed, with unfair pricing across different countries. You could not screw a pooch any better than this PR disaster.
Funny that they cannot change billing :-)
I have been billed in USD. Account setup in US when racing there in 2011, team had Strava as a sponsor, using voucher codes for couple of years, until they stopped sponsoring) and paid for it myself afterwards in USD
Euros when moved back to Europe
Last one in GBP, end of last year cancelled subscription, and had my wife (with UK based account) send me a gift subscription, that was on GBP.
The renewal for November 2023 now shows price in GBP but only 47,99…
I looked into this for myself as my annual subscription just recently renewed in end of 2022. Before pricing increases came into effect.
And It looks like my subscription is still set to renew at “$59.99” since I used Google Play I guess?
I’m Assuming that by the time Next August comes around, my cost will increase to the $80/yr US Cost.
Their system seems to be able to change regions, just not on active subscriptions. I was due to renew in JPY, where I first subscribed to premium, but I hit cancel at the first fiasco. Now if I look at the pricing page is offers me to resubscribe in USD, as I’m now in one of the non-local price countries.
Since Strava is in the US and has a US cost structure what would be the problem with just having one USD price and everyone paying that price converted using the exchange rate at the time of payment? Credit Card companies do the conversion automatically when I buy cycling gear overseas.
What benefit are they getting from the complication of multiple pricing structures?
From a pure financial mechanics perspective, nothing is preventing that.
BUT….
It has been common practice for online services to evaluate individual markets and populations and price offers accordingly for the variations across those markets. This reaches well beyond the basics of currency conversion and into the far murkier waters of “what is productX worth to marketA vs what it is worth to marketB?” and then developing pricing strategies targeted at each market.
I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression “what the market will bear”….. except applied with uniqueness to each market segment.
BTW before the inevitable cries of corporate greed happen….. this in practice usually means that non-primary markets are DISCOUNTED, rather than primary market prices being INCREASED. Why? Because user growth (how many users on platform) is a KPI to which things like valuation and fundraising are often tied. So rather than price certain user/potential user populations out, it is more favorable to provide targeted discounts to ensure user growth continues apace and on plan.
I’m a paid subscriber for Strava, sometimes they send me some questionaires about their paid service. I find it always really hard to justify.
Why I pay:
Segments
Route planning when I am in a new area.
But the trainingplans weekly load (which is always low at the beginning of the week) I see no use. Beacon is unreliable so I use the garmin feature.
Am I missing a feature which is really worth paying for?
*
DC Rainmaker for the people!
Ray, Strava’s Twitter response to your reader also doesn’t make sense. The response says, “when you subscribe, your account will remain in the same currency unless the subscription is canceled.” That seems to imply that if you cancel and resubscribe again the currency will match where you currently live or are located, however this is contradicted by the second sentence, “Strava determines currency based on the IP address location at the time of registration.” So if the second sentence is true, the third cannot be. Very confusing.
“A) For all EU countries, and a few other European countries, Strava charges in local currency and specifies as such”
Poland begs to differ :(
This series of videos / articles reminded me: I don’t actually get enough value of paid strava features to warranf the annual fee (come to think of it – I used them MYBE once per year over the past couple years; namely heatmaps to find suitable routes). My subscription renews in Aug and I plan on canceling it. Being physically located in Germany — strava’s most expensive market? only makes that decision easier. Thank you for your research and dedication!
This type of response speaks volumes about the leadership at Strava. Whoever is in charge of PR should be relieved of their duties. This is not a tough one and the longer it drags out, makes me want to cancel my subscription.
I created my Strava account in Zimbabwe and I’m seen US pricing. Too bad I wasn’t in South Africa?
Or is it now because I’m present in the US, I get US pricing. Or is it because Zimbabwe uses $USD so they get charged double neighboring SA?
Whackadoo.
Ray, I understand your comment that it is reasonable for companies to raise prices and that Strava is worth it to you, but an almost 50% increase is pretty hard to justify (in my US case 54.99 to 79.99). It is not like Strava is really providing any content, they are just providing a log of your fitness data and using everybody else’s fitness data to provide some useful tools (Segment leaderboards, heat map routing, etc.) Much of their usefulness is duplicated on the various platforms supplied with the equipment that is used to record the data, in my case Garmin Connect. I have decided this is one subscription I don’t need.
Thanks, Ray, very much appreciated.
Regarding Strava: I do not need their premium features, but for years I paid the premium price anyhow. Because I like their regular free content and thought they deserve remuneration.
However, I do not want to be treated the way they do (it is not about the money, it is about transparency), thus I cancelled the premium service.
As a German I quit my subscription yesterday, was premium for about three years. No notice from Strava (learned about the price increase here) and different prices across EU for the same service are too much. I hope the get sued for such stupid behaviour.
I canceled. As a German user I don’t see any new features that bring value to the highest price in Europe. And without your blog I wouldn’t have checked my account to find out about the new price. It isn‘t even the price itself. It’s just the fact that I don’t feel valued as a customer for nearly 10 years but as a simple cash cow. And there are little features I will miss.
While other features I missed for years are still nowhere to find.
So, I just emailed Strava support telling them I am not accepting EU price discrimination… Do you know how to bring this to an end quickly? What can EU citizens do to make Strava comply? According to the law a customer must be asked if redirected to a specific country price site. So, I should be able to pay the lowest amount charged anywhere in the EU, right?
Olaf,
I was about to do the same. Where did you send the complaint and did you refer to any EU specific pricing regulations, if so which ?
This entire debacle has reminded me that I keep a monthly subscription in order go be able to switch it off when I don’t need all the premium stuff.
I also feel they need and deserve to get hit over the head for their poor handling of the price hike.
My next renewal has now been cancelled.
Strava lost me 10 years ago, As a Runner you are not important to them and are a second class citizen. Apparently there was no demand to add mileage for shoes, despite me at the time finding years old requests on the forums. But like everyone else I’d still occasionally poke around now and then, but they then announced there was no intention to support running power, I believe that’s been addressed. But I’ve not logged in or sent any workouts to them in over three years. The only positive I can see to it is if social integration is important to you, or said differently dick wagging, “look how big mine is!”
I now use Runalyze as a supporter. It offers me everything I need and nothing I don’t. Syncs seamlessly with Withings for weight measurement too. I couldn’t be happier with it. If you’re “just” a runner do check it out
I’m able to track mileage on my running shoes using the free version
Yes I know you can now, even for free, but back when I paid them 40 iirc a year, they were so negative to anything running. Just take your money and update the cycling features is how it felt to me.
Yeah, after 10 years membership (9 of which I paid 59$ for “premium” service) and many years of waiting for improvements which actually interest me (hint: I don’t care about posting Strava to Snapchat) it’s finally time to quit. I’ve rather been using Veloviewer / GoldenCheetah for analysis the last few years and never really got why Strava wanted to become a social network of sorts instead of actually giving me insight into my training. Going to 80$/year here in Germany is simply unjustified and the way they’ve communicated this price hike unfortunately speaks volumes about the future of this platform.
I wonder what went through the minds of Strava when setting up such pricing, independently from EU law.
Easiest comparison is Denmark vs Germany. EUR equivalent 6.35 versus 10.99 a month.
It is clear they didn’t look at VAT, economic fundamentals, customer propensity to spend, etc etc.
Denmark is far richer than Germany, I do not have precise figures but in nominal terms average salary must be 50% to 100% higher.
In practice Denmark price is low for Danes, German price is really super high, app monthly prices e.g Spotify are max 10 euros.
Knowing how cost conscious Germans are I foresee massive cancellations in Germany, even if most will not be aware price is substantially lower in other countries.
Overall I would expect lower revenues for Strava and a price realignment to the rest of Europe pretty soon.
Even Sitzerland ist cheaper than Germany, so I am pretty sure they just looked where they got the highest rate of paying customers and decided to charge them extra. Well, they have at least one paying German less now.
Denmarks GDP per capita is less than 10% above Germany. I doubt people there make 50-100% more.
That said, there’s obviously no reason why Germany should be more expensive than Denmark when it comes to Strava pricing. Let alone more expensive than Switzerland.
Well, you might be in for a surprise, at least according to Wikipedia: link to en.wikipedia.org
I’ve never subscribed to Strava’s premium account, but can you use a VPN to sign up for Brazil’s cheaper rate and then use it like normal in the EU or America? Is this illegal? Seems like a work around for getting the service cheaper.
yeah you can
No, you cannot. Not if you have an existing account, Strava will use the country in which the account was originally created. The only way would be to ditch your old account and create a new one while on the VPN, but who would want to do that..
When I log into my Strava account and my account looks different. It states how long I have had membership and what my renewal cost will be next time. However, I do not have the options to see my annual receipts and I am annual subscriber. I’m not sure why mine is different as I subscribe yearly. Is it because I’m UK based.
One of the main things I use in Strava premium is the route planner. I have looked at both Komoot and Ride With GPS but maybe I should look again? Any thoughts on those alternatives? I’m in the US and it seems Komoot has more rides/detail in Europe.
Ride With GPS is superior for route creation IMO. The new features they rolled over the last year (without a price increase) make Strava’s route planning tool look like someone’s weekend hobby.
So, I guess the reason the prices in Denmark did not increase is because we were already paying a premium – those 449 is the same as I paid last year. It’s also a bit odd, that Denmark is in the top when you look at the annual prices, while the monthly price is so low – Just across the border in germany, the monthly price is 13.7% of the annual price, while here it is 10.9%. And in France it is 16.6%…
Plot twist: the annual rate for DCR supporter is always twelve packs of gummi bears, converted from the local prices of wherever Ray is residing at the time of renewal.
That’s pretty much spot-on exact: link to ah.nl
And just to confuse matters more: I’m in the UK, and pay for Strava through Google Play, and had an email on Friday 27th January to tell me that my subscription would renew at £47.99/year, starting 27th February. A friend of mine (I don’t know how he pays for Strava), was told earlier in the month that his renewal would be £54.99 starting in August.
Hi Rainmaker. In youtube video Czechia is having the price USD 7.99 (time 6:11 in video), but in your table it’s 7.99 EUR. Can you please re-check? Thanks.
I get that software services cost money, I really do. I get Strava is debatably not funded by adverts, which is a welcome rarity in social media. But subs have to be good value and provided honestly.
A company that raises their sub prices without emailing is bound to lose my trust. A company that cannot understand the most basic of EU competition rules loses my trust. And, as a runner, not having the ability to show real pace, not fake inflated moving pace is just not good enough for me to justify the old price let alone the new price (I’m in the Uk, and note sub will include VAT at 20%).
I actually like most of Strava’s interface compared to Garmin connect or runalyze, but to expect me to pay two coffees out a month for something that won’t give me the most *basic* stat there is without hoops. Nope.
Curious to see if Strava factor in IP location for subscription gifting.
I still have a few months on my current account but the price diff shown makes it worth creating a new account in a low-cost region using a VPN and gift a 1Y subscription which can be activated in your existing account and region. Perhaps something for a follow up!
Subscribed member since 2010 no more…
The price hike is not value for money given the features I use. Which are available elsewhere anyway (Garmin Connect). A lot of the new features Strava introduced over the last 2-3 years seem like fillers. None of my running, cycling, swimming or Tri friends use them (discussed over coffee recently).
Disappointed that Strava have turned into a typical Corporation with poor communication to its customer base when it comes to actually delivery a value for money service.
The outcome of my friends and fellow athletes coffee…. 17 long-time subscriptions cancelled. The free account will provide wha is needed – though most of use agreed we would miss the Segment leaderboards, but that’s mostly for ego boasting any way :p
In the past for sure there WAS a way to change the country (or it has been changing by itself every time I cancellend and subscribed again?). Over the last 8 years I have been switched so many times between RUB and USD. Currently residing in Australia, for sure I would be looking for a hack to switch to AUD from USD this year.
A currency solution exists, as per pricing FAQ strava links to in your renewal price email – i just go mine. (it helps, for people who moved country). Plus now we can triangulate info to get best price (hence the folly of different prices by country) . There are 2 obvious wins ; 1) avoid extra card fees for a foreign currency charge, and (depending on yoru new country) getting a better rate. lets assume I (um) moved to South Africa (or even better Brazil), I now need to cancel my membership, wait to it to expire, ensure my country is right in my accoutn settings and renew from there, or use my VPN to be sure if I am travelling.
The exact details of it arent documented. so not sure if it works… I *might* have to renew from within my Android App store whcih is set to my old country, as I have not replaced my phone yet. We will see.
Below is relevant paragraph from the FAQ for Strava pricing. It says cancel. then when it runs out renew in your new local currency. the details of this are NOT explaiend however. I can only hope and ASSUME I am right that if I have cancelled my subscription in my Android App store (whichis not Australian), I renew via the website ofter logging into to Strava and making sure my country is up to date.
The Seventh rule of The Strava Club is: subscriptions will renew as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at The Strava Club, you have to subscribe.
i have following option on my Strava Accout:
Resend last receipt (last billed on August 9, 2022)
Resend all receipts (last billed on August 9, 2022)
Resend last receipt (last billed on August 9, 2022) -> There was a problem sending your receipt.
Resend all receipts (last billed on August 9, 2022) -> it looks like i have no bills, see attached screenshot
I don’t actually see the option to receive all my receipts by email. Does that depend on the country, too?
I think that’s tied to if you signed up with Apple/Google instead of direct to Strava.
Can anyone kindly explain me how to sub via Google play? I sub at strava.com but id rather use Google play to use points and the likes
I think Strava may be in trouble.
It was great when it first came out and everyone ended up using it as a public forum to show and share sports. The problem is they don’t have a great financial model. The basic site is great. (It could do with a few more inbuilt tools to tidy up fit/gpx/tcx files (e.g. remove segments, join separate workouts) but it is OK)
The problem comes when you stump up for a subscription. What added value do you get for your money?
The heat maps are good (and Movescount is dead)
The route builder works OK (with a few quirks) but I could use Komoot or Garmin’s own.
That is about it!
The training related metrics are weird / junk?
I have a power curve. It doesn’t say which sport. It doesn’t say which sensor. Without being able to filter by sport and sensor source this is useless.
Fitness and freshness? What does fitness mean other than an accumulating a number in some mathematical model of training load, fatigue and adaptation. It bears no relationship to V02 max in a particular sport nor predicted race times. No desirable ranges are provided to inform training. I get more on my Garmin 255 just on the device for free.
It doesn’t support the ability to create structured workouts and send to your chosen device or add to a calendar of structured workouts that you can synchronise to your watch. They should have introduced this eons ago. They could be in the lucrative market of providing various levels of coaching from computer generated adaptive training to personalised coaching.
I think they have sleep-walked into an existentially threatening position as other sites (native and third party) have upped their game. They now find they have to substantially invest to bring the platform up to date and have a chance of going beyond a mere advertising based subsistence model.
Hi all,
Greetings from Colombia
Concerning the chart. Colombia prices are somewhat misleading.
If you sign through google play you get the price in our local currency colombian peso ($COP)
A month 22900 $cop a year 167000 $cop
A $US is roughly equivalent to $COP 4600.
That puts up there with brazil amongst the cheapest.
I checked and prices are equivalent acctoss all latin america the trick is not to sign from strava website but use google pay
Yeah, I didn’t quite want to go down the rabbit hole of Google/Apple pricing plans as well. I figured my rabbit hole was messy enough already. :)
Thanks for the data though!
For Apple App Store, it wasn’t exactly easy to find out what I’ve been paying (plus I have 2 Apple ID’s, and THAT is a nightmare in itself!) but I’ve never had to do that before. Apparently I’ve been a subscriber since 2015! And they can’t come up with a way to explain to me that they are raising their prices? Wow…
.
That’s crazy, Costa Rico pays $59.99, and US pays $79.99?
I’ve had a problem finding out how much I’ve been paying through the Apple App Store, but Strava went up $20.00? Okay, not huge, but for nothing new (that I would use) they went from $59.99 to $79.99? –And wouldn’t tell people?– I checked the renewal price about a week ago, and it still said $59.99. Now, I get a page that lists the cost at the bottom ‘per month’, and apparently have to click an ominous button labeled ‘Continue to billing’ to get it official.
AND I asked for MY data over 3 weeks ago, and have yet to receive an email that the data set is available. Hmm…
The only reason why i paid was the nice heatmap and to supports the Programmers. But such a impudence to discriminate users in Germany has moved me to cancel the paying completely. I think many other users in germany will do so.
Siegfried
That’s it, I’ve canceled my paid subscription and will be supporting intervals.icu from now on. I will miss out on Strava Routes, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
When I check my price in Mexico (and what you also saw in your post above) is that my price in local currency (which should be Mexican Peso) is actually US Dollars. It even says the price is in local currency. But I am pretty sure Mexico doesn’t use the US Dollar. Huh. Just one problem after another.
Just checked my new price in Sweden 79 sek, or 7 USD monthly.
I will switch to yearly subscription now which is 529 sek or 49 USD.
Danke für den Post und Grüße aus Deutschland ;-) Ich wohne nur 20km entfernt von Polen und habe mal mein Strava ABO gekündigt, wenn es Zeit für die Verlängerung ist, fahre ich nach Stettin einkaufen und verlängert mein Jahresabo von Polen aus. :p
Thanks for the post and greetings from Germany ;-) I live only 20km away from Poland and once canceled my Strava subscription, when it’s time to extend it I go shopping in Szczecin and renew my annual subscription from Poland. :p
I extended my subscription in Germany for a year before the price increase in December 2022. As of today, my membership no longer exists, but I can purchase a new membership for €75. Totally crazy! Am I an isolated case or are there other cases?
I’ve had the same thing happen 2x now. I email in and they act like it was a problem on my app (it wasn’t I checked online). But… it was fixed when they responded.
I don’t even know if I want membership at all. Garmin Connect is not bad and for just a little more money you can get trainingpeaks…
As a longtime Strava Premium member, I canceled my renewal. This is outrageous. They keep adding the DUMBEST features and telling me I should pay more for that (stretching app anyone?). Thanks for the heads up DC Rainmaker.
I have been following this wit interest, waiting to see when Strava might officially spill the beans as to when/what the price change would be. Low and behold this morning, at approximately 3:03 am, the email hit with all the price increase info. I guess 90 days isn’t too long a time to wait to get something official…..
Just got an email saying my subs will go from £39.99 to £54.99. 37.5% price increase.
It’s been 8 great years as a premium member, but no thanks at that price. Cancelled.
Just received my price increase email too – 26% increase in the US… Cancelling now.
UK based. Been paying £3.99 a month forever. Just gone up to £8.99 a month. That’s 125% increase overnight. Subscription cancelled.
At least you can subscribe :). I only get error messages on any subscribe or pricing pages ))
Thanks for your posts which are very informative! I’m like to subscribe.
It looks like Strava is still having pricing issues. Yesterday it stated I would renew at $59 a year. This morning (today is my renewal day) it showed I would renew at $7.99/year. Obviously, that was a mistake. I reached out to customer support to check on the prices and they now told me that I will be subscribing $7.99 per month, but if I’d like to continue it will be at $11.99 per month. How is this still going on? Are they actually intentionally trying to tank the company? I think this turned into a rant rather than a comment, but I’m not sure if there is a difference.
I’m from India and got $79.99/yr :/
Got an email off Strava this morning, going up to £54.99 in the UK.
I got an email from Strava this morning, going down 10€ to 49,99€ in Portugal.
I’m annual subscriber with renewal end of April, so I’ve paid until next April but got mail today about “price change” from next year.
NOK is being butchered in value against the USD so my increase from next year is from NOK470 (approx USD42.5) to NOK799 (approx USD72,3). Thats over 70% increase!!
I get that all costs increase but this is waaay too much, I very much doubt I will pay for Premium when you have other options (Garmin Connect, Elevate). Only a question of time before integrations to 3rd party apps also will be subject to subscription cost (looking at you Reddit)?
Interestingly enough–after canceling (membership was to renew on Apr 30th)–I noticed I still had Summit mark today. I checked billing and it had changed my expiration date to May 3rd and I could renew at $59.99 USD (I’m in US). For me–$59.99 is fair price so turned renewal back on. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
That was similar to my situation. I thought $60 that’s fair especially when I considered that I used it for free for many years. Then renewal day came and the price changed. what a bummer. I’m interested to see if you get renewed at $60.
$59.99 USD is what hit my credit card yesterday. I’ve bounced between Polar and Garmin over the years so Strava is my aggregator/record and for that $60 USD is worth it. Any more though and I will cancel. We will see what happens next year. Still have not received any communication from Strava regarding pricing.
And so yesterday I got renewed in NZ. I say that as I got no email advising me in advance, and I was charged $133NZD – basically the USD80. But wait, as up above it shows NZ is USD65 right?
So I asked strava about this, and this is even better than the post DC Rainmaker had saying it was where you first subscribed that set the price. Because I’ve been a subscriber for a decade, and they didn’t have NZ pricing back then, I don’t get the NZ pricing. It’s not just where you joined, but when!!!
So the catch/dodge here is that I can cancel, get a refund, then immediately rejoin and in that case I get the lower rate.
Completely and utterly bonkers.
My renewal is due next week and I see this outrageous price increase.
I sis send my complaint and will see what will can be done about this, in the meantime I did change my location to Sweden, let’s see if that works :-(
hmm someone told me that with indian apple account is paying yearly 2499 ind (round 29 euro). and poland saying 149 zl (round 33 euro).
possible that some data (prices) wrong in table?
checked india, i made indian apple account and it shows yearly 2499 ind, means 30.20 usd.
I don’t know if this is news or if I am super late to the party, but it seems that the pricing for Switzerland is a) even higher than shown in the table or b) has increased once more (although on strava it says, that the last price change was on January 20th).
Monthly price: 11.95 CHF
Yearly price: 79.95 CHF
Even more ridiculous, given the fact, that the exchange rate of Euro and USD have dropped / CHF has risen even more in comparison. And I am pretty sure, that Strava is not paying any expenses in Switzerland…
Sweden have gone from 529kr to 699kr in 6 months. I live in Sweden but was charged 499 Danish kr which hit me for 785kr in Sweden (never lived in Denmark). Not good.
2 things – fixing it so its your country. I attach a picture form their support pages for how to do that. unfortunately VPN isnt enough ot get athe brazil prices. but , as in my case, it correctyl knows i shoudl be offered Australia prices now, not my old swiss prices (moved).
After my paid subscription expired, I attempted to change my subscription currency to Danish DKK, since I was physically located in Denmark, instead of German EUR (I originally signed up in Germany). However, this didn’t work as intended; the currency and rate remained in EUR at the German rates.
I reached out to Strava support for clarity, but their response was somewhat evasive:
“The system determines the currency based on a certain number of activities recorded in a location, and doesn’t consider the city or country listed on your profile.”
I found this explanation lacking, so I’ve now asked them to define the specific number or duration associated with the “certain amount of activities” they mentioned.
I cancelled mine. I want to send a message to the company that we (the users) will not be taken for a ride. Give us useful features (routing services can be improved for example) then I will consider resubscribing.
As fan of FATMAP and namely their paid Explore premium features (national map overlays, downloadable maps, weather etc.), I am disappointed that you can no longer get Fatmap Explore (at Euro 30 p.a.). Strava is trying to force you into a paid Subscription (at Euro 60, 70, 75).
At least their behavior is very consistent when it comes to taking advantage of users (all of whom donate their data and often much more); e.g. if you rank #1 in a segment you created, your name is not displayed unless you pay🤣
Hi Ray
Happy New Year to you and family from Montreal Canada.
I received an offer from Strava for an annual membership at 25% reduction. 75 $ CDN per year.
Thanks for your effort to help us.
Pierre
1 year later…
Strava didn’t change it’s pricing policy, yet.
Did anyone already sue them, or know if the authorities took any action against this behavior?
Ok.. i canceled my account before it renewed…
then got a lot of advertising inside Strava to sign up again (and didn’t).
Now a week or two later they sent me a discount code about 25% which results in a yearly fee of 56,24 € _including_ tax, although the say on the first page (without adding the discount code) 74,99€ a year plus tax.
This is now even cheaper than it would be in Austria.
I would be glad if we wouldn’t have to play that game every year again.
Strava still insists on the different pricing in EU:
We won’t be able to provide you with a discount code for your subscription every year and at this time, the subscription prices in the EU will not be the same. However, we can assist with adjusting the country for your account to match another country that’s in the EU. Is there a preferred price/currency you’d like to subscribe to?
I wish Strava would go back to the “summit packages” so that you can selectively subscribe to features for 3€ p.m. If this happens, I will come back as a paying member.
Official: change country trick (VPN) works ONLY in “never been premium account”. Is there a way to backup the old account and restore to a new? Other suggestion? A “never been premium account” created in country A can change country for subscription, so the issue is you are bound to the country FIRST TIME made subscription
Oct 2024. Would the silent URL removal from activities and posts on Strava make anyone leave?