Is Strava free?

Yes, and permanently. The interesting part is what happens when you ask the second question. On price, Strava is the most forthcoming company this format has read: five plans, priced to the cent, published without an account, on four separate pages. On what the free account contains, it publishes four comparison tables that do not agree with each other. The money is settled and the free tier is not, which is the exact reverse of what Duolingo does.

Every price Strava publishes, and where

All of these were read signed out, in the US, on 10 September 2026. Strava notes on two of the pages that prices are shown in US dollars and may vary by location.

Two things deserve credit before any criticism. Every per-month figure on that list divides correctly — $79.99 over twelve really is $6.67, $139.99 over four people and twelve months really is $2.92 — and on a site whose payouts pages exist because companies publish numbers they will not divide, arithmetic that survives a check is worth saying out loud. And Strava keeps a dedicated pricing page, last updated 1 July 2025, stating that all subscribers in a country pay the same monthly or annual price and that subscribers get an email 30 days before renewal with the new figure. Compare that with the help center article Calm titled “Calm App Pricing Update”, which names no old price, no new price and no date. One omission on Strava’s version: the student plan is not on it.

Four tables, three answers, one free account

Strava carries a free-versus-paid comparison on four of its own pages. They do not match. The feature names differ, the row counts differ, and the free column is not the same on all four.

Three items are free on every version of the table: recording your activities, the social feed, and the safety features. The Family Plan page adds a fourth, Lifetime PRs, which the Student and Gift tables do not list at all and which the Subscription page does not carry under that name. The Subscription page is the outlier in the other direction: it lists six features the other three never mention, among them saving routes for offline use, measuring effort across activities and seeing your Fitness Score over time, and it is the only one that leaves the free cells empty rather than printing the word “no”.

We are not going to resolve which list is current, because nothing Strava publishes would. The likely explanation is ordinary and dull: four marketing pages written at four different times, each accurate when it shipped, none of them reconciled afterwards. That is untidiness rather than a trick, and it is the same shape as Duolingo stating its free trial at seven days and fourteen on different surfaces. It matters here for one reason: the free tier is the product most people use, and it is described less precisely than the thing being sold.

The single sentence a reader should carry away is not on any of the four tables. It is in the Terms of Service, section 3, and it is admirably direct: “Strava has the right to add, modify, or discontinue any free or subscription-only feature at any time.” The free account is real today and it is revocable by its own terms. That is the cost-side version of this site’s standing point that a balance is a database record.

What the stores print: nothing at all

Strava, Inc. publishes three apps, and we read every listing of all three. That habit came from the games pages, where reading every listing a studio publishes is what makes the pricing legible. Here it produced a clean result: five store listings, not one dollar figure.

• Strava on the App Store. “Free · In-App Purchases” under the title, and an Information row reading “In-App Purchases: Yes”. There is no promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel, which is the one place Apple prints a price where a developer has configured one.
• Strava on Google Play. An In-app purchases badge with no figure, and no In-game items and offers section, which is Play’s equivalent slot.
• Runna, on both stores. Free with in-app purchases on each, and a description that says to “subscribe to Runna Premium for monthly or annual plans” without naming either amount.
• Recover Athletics on the App Store. Free with in-app purchases, no figure, and a first line describing it as the recovery app for Strava athletes.

Both store descriptions carry the full auto-renewal disclosure — charged at confirmation of purchase, renews unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the period — and neither says what the amount is. Apple’s adds a phrase worth noticing: any unused portion of a free trial “if offered” is forfeited when you buy a subscription.

None of that breaks a rule; neither store requires a price. It is only worth recording because of where the prices actually are. Runna’s own price, $19.99 a month, appears on neither of Runna’s listings and on neither of its store descriptions. The only surface we found publishing it is Strava’s bundle page, where it exists to make the bundle look good.

The bundle, and what the 60% is measured against

Strava’s Strava + Runna page advertises “up to 60% off” and then does something most companies do not: it prints the three prices the claim rests on, side by side, with a footnote saying the saving is “calculated based on separate monthly Strava and Runna subscriptions”. So the arithmetic is checkable, and it checks out.

• Derived: $11.99 plus $19.99 is $31.98 a month, or $383.76 over a year. The bundle is $149.99. That is $233.77 saved, about 61% — the claim is true and, if anything, understated.
• Derived: the comparison is against the most expensive way to buy both, because the bundle is sold annually and the two products it is measured against are priced monthly. Against Strava’s own annual plan at $79.99, the bundle costs $70.00 more a year, which is what Runna costs inside it.
• Not derivable: Runna’s annual price, if it has one. No surface we could reach publishes it, so the honest comparison stops at $70.00 a year against $19.99 a month.

The disclosure is in the footnote and the footnote is on the page, which is more than the asterisk usually gets. Read it before deciding whether 60% describes your situation.

The 30-day trial is not a promise

The Subscription page opens with a three-step timeline that is better than most: Today, unlock subscription features; 2 days before, get a reminder about when the trial ends; in 30 days, you are charged, cancel at least 24 hours before. A reminder ahead of the charge is a genuinely pro-customer piece of design and Duolingo’s equivalent timeline does the same thing at day five.

What the card does not say, and what the Student Plan FAQ says outright, is that the trial is once per person across everything Strava sells. In its own words: if you have never taken a Strava trial under any plan, including monthly, yearly and family, you might be eligible, a 30-day trial will be shown on the checkout page if you are, and “if not, you’ll be immediately charged the full annual subscription amount upon subscribing”. The Terms of Service put the same thing from the company’s side: Strava has the right to offer free trials “whenever we want and however we choose”, and registering for one may involve a temporary authorization against your payment method that reduces your available balance.

The practical version, which costs nothing to follow: check the checkout page for the words 30-day trial before you confirm, and if a returning subscriber is expecting a second free month, expect $79.99 instead.

The student plan, and the question its FAQ does not answer

$39.99 a year, verified through a third-party service called SheerID, and the eligibility rule is published: in most countries, enrolled at an accredited college or university and 16 or older, with high schoolers eligible in some. The part worth reading before you start is the ending. Student pricing is locked for one year and can be re-verified when the year ends for a maximum of three additional years, four in total, after which the subscription renews at the standard rate unless you cancel. Derived: four student years cost $159.96, and the fifth costs $79.99 unless you act.

One gap, published rather than hidden and easy to check. The FAQ’s fourth question is “What if I’m already a subscriber?”, and the answer under it is the same paragraph as the answer to “How much will I be charged?” — the one about starting with 30 days free and then a one-time charge equal to half the cost. An existing subscriber who becomes a student is asking what happens to the months they have already paid for, and that question is asked on the page and not answered on it.

The one way to buy Strava that cannot renew on you

Strava’s Gift page sells an annual subscription at $79.99 with a single line of small type under the price: “Subscription does not auto-renew.” That is the same price as the ordinary annual plan and the only version of it on any of these pages that stops by itself.

It is sold as a present, and nothing published says who the recipient has to be. For a reader who wants a year of Strava and does not want a recurring charge on a card, that footnote is the most useful sentence on strava.com, and it is printed nowhere near the page selling the subscription.

Canceling, and what a refund is worth

Strava’s terms are unusually plain about all three parts of this, and plain in a direction that does not flatter the company, which is the reason to quote them rather than paraphrase.

• Cancel any time, and the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. You keep the features until then and you can resubscribe later “at the most current pricing” — which is to say, any legacy rate is gone.
• No refunds. “No refunds or credits will be provided by Strava, unless set out in these Terms.”
• One cooling-off right, and not for US readers. The terms say that if you reside outside the United States you may be entitled under local law to change your mind and receive a full refund within 14 days of subscribing. Most of the people reading this page are inside it.

Cancel where you bought it, which is the part people get wrong. A web subscription is canceled on your Strava account page; an App Store or Google Play subscription is canceled on Apple’s or Google’s subscription screen, because Strava is not the party billing you. Google’s own help page carries the sentence that costs people the most money: “When you uninstall an app, your subscription won’t cancel.” Apple’s equivalent page, for anyone who cannot find the subscription at all, says to search your email for the words “receipt from Apple” and check which account was used.

Two other clauses belong in the same paragraph, because they are the answer to “will this price hold”. Strava reserves the right to increase subscription fees or add new fees at any time after giving reasonable notice, with changes taking effect on the next billing date. Against that, its pricing page commits to an email 30 days before renewal naming the new figure. The second is the good half of the first, and it is why the price page is worth bookmarking rather than the marketing one.

The price that is itemized

As on every page in this format, the money cost is the one a company can decline to print and the data cost is published in detail. Strava’s declarations are lighter than most, and the two stores agree with each other, which is not something we can say often.

Apple’s App Privacy panel names two categories used to track you across other companies’ apps and websites — purchases and identifiers — and eleven linked to your identity, including health and fitness data, location, contact info, contacts, user content and search history. Google Play’s data safety page declares device IDs and crash diagnostics shared with other companies, and collection covering app activity, fitness info, approximate and precise location, photos and videos, contacts, purchase history, name and email address. Both declare data encrypted in transit and a route to request deletion.

For scale: Duolingo declares eight tracked categories for an app that teaches you Spanish. Strava, which knows the route you ran this morning, declares two. The panels are still self-declarations rather than audits — we found one game whose two store forms flatly contradict each other — but on this app they line up, and the App Store Information row carries the disclosure that matters most for a tracking app: it may use your location even when it is not open, which can decrease battery life.

What Strava does better

This section is compulsory on every page here, and on this one it is not hard to fill.

• It publishes prices, plural, without an account. Five plans across four pages, in a category where the app whose whole product is telling you what your subscriptions cost publishes none of its own.
• It keeps a dated price-change page. One price per country for everyone in it, and an email 30 days before renewal naming the new figure. That is a commitment most subscription apps never make in writing.
• No advertising. No Contains ads badge on Play and no ad disclosure on either listing. Four of our own four reward apps run ads, so this is a line we cannot match and should not skate past.
• The safety features are on the free side of every table. Beacon live location sharing, and hiding the start and end of an activity on the map, are free. The things most likely to matter to someone running alone are not behind the paywall.
• It sells a version that cannot renew on you, and it offers student, teacher, military and medical discounts with the verification route published.
• It is enormous and well liked. 4.8 across 372,000 App Store ratings and number one on Apple’s Health & Fitness chart; 4.6 across 1.18 million Google Play reviews and over 100 million downloads; Editors’ Choice on both. Nothing in our catalog is in that conversation.

What we did not read, and are therefore not telling you

Three holes, left visible on purpose.

• Strava’s support site was not reachable to us when this page was written, so its cancellation and refund articles went unread and everything above about both comes from the Terms of Service and from Apple’s and Google’s own pages instead. It is the most useful thing missing here and it will be added when the source can be read.
• Nothing was read behind a login. The professional discount pages require an account, so the 25% is published as the percentage Strava states and not as a dollar figure. Twenty-five percent off $79.99 is $59.99, and that is our arithmetic, not Strava’s.
• We did not compare the in-app price with the web price. That would need a purchase, and the $10 gap we found on Calm is a reason to expect the question to be worth asking rather than a reason to guess the answer.

How to check any of this yourself

The habit that produced this page is the one the ChatGPT page arrived at: when a company describes the same thing on more than one page, open all of them and compare word by word. Here it took four tabs and no account. Strava’s Subscription, Family, Student and Gift pages all answer “what do I get for nothing” and all four answer it differently, and nobody writing about Strava’s price seems to have opened more than one.

The rest is mechanical. Read the small type under the price cards, because the footnote is where the saving is defined and where the gift plan quietly says it will not renew. Check both store listings for the optional price slots — just above App Privacy on Apple, In-game items and offers below the description on Google Play — and remember that an absence in either proves nothing. Read every listing a publisher owns, not just the one you searched for; that is where Runna’s $19.99 turned up, on somebody else’s page. And when the terms and the marketing disagree about what a plan includes, the terms are the document the company has to stand behind.