No. Strava's Fitness & Freshness chart is for subscribers only, and that's $79.99 a year in the US. But the math behind the chart isn't Strava's. It's been public for decades, and you can have it run on the same rides for a lot less. Keep free Strava for the kudos.
I've recorded every ride since 2012, and Strava is where I'd normally look at them. Distance, heart rate, calories. It's great at being Strava. The feed, the kudos, finding out your buddy snuck in a dawn patrol without you.
But last fall I started asking a different question. Am I actually getting stronger, or just tired? That's when it landed. Strava is a social network with some fitness stuff bolted on, and the fitness stuff is behind the paywall.
Strava explains it pretty plainly. Every ride gets a load score. If you have a power meter it comes from power. If you don't, it comes from Relative Effort, which is built from your heart rate, or from the how-hard-was-that number you type in. Stack those up day after day, run them through an impulse-response model (fancy words for: hard days add up and then fade), and you get a slow Fitness line and a jumpy Freshness line.
Coaches have used this kind of model since the 1970s. Strava didn't invent it and doesn't own it. The subscription buys you Strava's drawing of it, plus the segment leaderboards, the route tools, and everything else in the paid tier.
Free Strava still records, takes uploads from your Garmin or Wahoo, and shows you every ride. What it won't show you is the trend. You get Saturday. You don't get the last six weeks.
RideTool connects to your Strava account and reads the rides you already record. A free account is fine. From those you get:
$29 a year after a 14-day trial, no card to start. And it's private. No feed, no leaderboard. Nobody sees your number but you.
If you chase segments, want the full leaderboards, or build routes off the heatmap, pay the money. It's worth it for that, and the Fitness chart comes along for the ride. RideTool has none of it. No segments, no route builder, no social anything. Plenty of riders run both, and RideTool is built to sit next to Strava.
Eighty bucks a year to look at one chart is a lot of bean burritos. I built RideTool because I wanted that one answer, am I getting better or letting it slip, without the feed wrapped around it. This was never me versus the leaderboard. It was me versus me. If the chart is the only thing pulling you toward the subscription, you don't need it.
Connect Strava, Garmin, or Wahoo and RideTool turns every ride into a plain-English read on your fitness. It comes to you by email, as often as you choose, so there's no dashboard to remember. $29 a year, no ads, your data stays yours.
Start with your next ride