tl;dr PedalPal will revert back to being a paid subscription service starting October 1, 2021. Keep reading for all the details, especially if you had a membership prior to April 2020.

Back in April 2020, we made the decision the take down all the paywalls of our service. Lots of digital content providers (including Peloton) were doing something similar as a way to help people cope with the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over these past 18 months, we've seen some really amazing growth, and with that comes the challenges of maintaining any large application (namely, hosting costs).

When we started this little website back in 2018, it was just a hobby for a group of neighborhood riders to keep their group challenges organized and streamlined. Since then, we've grown from a couple dozen users per month to several thousand. We average nearly 100,000 unique page views per month, which is both incredibly rewarding and also costly. Behind every page and challenge you see on here are servers and databases and monitoring and lots of other tools to keep things running smoothly.

After 18 months of offering every aspect of the site for free, we've decided to restore the paywall to help cover our growing hosting costs.

So, what's changing? Starting October 1:

• The cost of a 1 year membership will be $12.95. As before, users will get a 30 day free trial from their first login date.
• An active membership will be required to start or join any challenge, as well as view detailed workout metrics on your profile.
• We will also offer the ability to host sponsored challenges, wherein an organization can pay a one-time fee to host a challenge for non-paying users. We'll have more details on this in a future post.

What's not changing:

• The ride search page will continue to be free to anyone.
• All artist, instructor, and workout pages will continue to be free to anyone.

We know this is a big change, and hope you'll understand why we're making this decision. As this website as grown over the past 3+ years, we've done our best to keep it relevant with new features and updates. Our goal is to continue this, and we have lots of new ideas in the pipeline:

• New challenge types
• Strava and other integrations
• Completely new user interface
• Lots more

As always, we welcome ideas and suggestions via email. You can find our contact information below.

And finally, as a thank you to our original supporters who paid for a yearly membership prior to April 2020, we'll be giving you a new full year membership on the house starting October 1, 2021. There's nothing you need to do, we'll take care of it and please know we greatly appreciate your early support!

Thanks for reading, and happy riding!