Not surprised. My take - Strava was founded over 13 years ago, which is a dinosaur in startup land. They've raised $150m+ from investors and they want a return, so the company is scrambling to make decisions which can make the company more money. So I wouldn't be surprised if the specification for pricing was made by a committee and implemented by engineers with little direction. And since no one has conviction on what will work, this is your result (throwing stuff at the wall).
Note - if you follow Strava's history, this isn't the first time they've been screwy with their commercial model. They had this funky "Training, Safety and Analysis" pack pricing program[0] that was confusing and they ultimately reverted back to the simple pricing model.
Ultimately the unit economics just don't work out in this space - 100 million people don't want to pay to hold their training data in a prettier interface when they can just get it for free with Garmin (Strava does more than that btw, but the people who are fanatical about that info are a miniority). Likewise, if they don't IPO, there are too few players in the space that would make a $1b+ acquisition.
Note - if you follow Strava's history, this isn't the first time they've been screwy with their commercial model. They had this funky "Training, Safety and Analysis" pack pricing program[0] that was confusing and they ultimately reverted back to the simple pricing model.
Ultimately the unit economics just don't work out in this space - 100 million people don't want to pay to hold their training data in a prettier interface when they can just get it for free with Garmin (Strava does more than that btw, but the people who are fanatical about that info are a miniority). Likewise, if they don't IPO, there are too few players in the space that would make a $1b+ acquisition.
[0] - https://www.bikeradar.com/news/strava-is-making-a-huge-chang...