Strava

Strava tracks every run, ride, and swim. The app is free. 40 million athletes use it. Then Strava did something unusual. It removed features from free users and moved them behind a $60 annual paywall. Leaderboards, route planning, training analysis, all locked. The community revolted briefly. Then two million people subscribed within six months. The bet was that athletes who had built years of training history would pay rather than lose their data. Switching to a competitor meant abandoning route maps, personal records, and social connections. A runner with three years of data on Strava cannot replicate that history elsewhere. The data is portable in theory, but the social graph is not. Your running club, your cycling group, your kudos network all live on Strava.