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Strava moves to become a Paid Subscription Service

Astonishingly around 55 million athletes use Strava globally, but it has yet to make a profit. The world-famous fitness app will change both in the way it works and how you can use it

Strava moves to become a Paid Subscription Service

While anyone can still download and use the app without paying on iOS and Android, certain popular features are now locked behind a paywall.

Users who want access to the segment leaderboards and analysis will need to sign up for the new subscription, which is a way of ensuring the app can stick around in the future.

If you want the full Strava experience from now on you’ll need to become a subscriber ($5 per month). Unless you cough up monthly cash you won’t be able to access Segment Leaderboards, Matched Runs or Matched Rides. And then going forward, new major functions will likely only be available to paid users.

Strava Summit may have made sense to the tech bods who created it but for many athletes were confusing. It’s why, Strava Summit is being retired. From today, you either use Strava for free or you subscribe.

Free users will still be able to see the top 10 all-time efforts for men and women, create new segments, explore and search segments, flag segments, see their own achievements and earn segments, personal records and all the other fun stuff that may help get you up in the morning.

Strava also hints that it will also be moving away from ranking segments purely on speed and moving toward participation rewards.

But the most significant change is a considerable update to Strava’s Routes, though, which will see a far more advanced route-building platform within the app.