Lobby: Premium Membership.........

Your are doing a great disservice to us, your loyal users, by now requiring us to pay money to do what we've always been able to do for free.

I don't mind that there is now a subscription fee for the more advanced and NEW features.  What really irks me that my training logs are now on your servers and I have no way of downloading them for my personal record unless I pay.  We helped make this site what it is today, and this is the thanks we get?

Being able to print what you construct seems to me a basic service feature.  I personally do not require the PDF feature as I can make my own PDFs from a printed copy.

As a road bicyclist, I am weighing the value for money for a Premium Membership of $48 per year.  For the avid bicyclist, our routes are normally quite large ranging compared to walkers,runners and hikers.   The current printable maps show the basic shape of a ride with little detail and, as has been stated elsewhere, of little real use as a map.  This was even true of Route Slip.  But the elevation chart was a nice extra.  

I have, therefore, always depended on the printable cue sheets far more than the maps, not for myself as I know my own routes, but for other riders to download and print who may come out for one of my rides (15 - 20 riders).  Under the current circumstances, it will cost people wanting to ride with me (or just on their own) IF they want their own cue sheet, etc. $5 to buy 5 credits in order to print out the map and notes on Map My Ride at 2 credits each or $2.  Personally, i don't think any of the club cyclists I know will spend the money.

As a mapper of bicycling routes for myself and others, I'd find membership more palitable at $48 per year if I could have unlimited mapping, and both print and save my routes in PDF format onto my computer.  Then I could print or email the routes to those coming on my ride to use.  Since I put a lot of time and effort into scouting routes and then mapping them, I'm providing as great a service as Map My Ride is, and should have some latitude in both when they can be accessed for printing and for how long, too.  Basically, the rides I lead are free (either my own rides or those I lead for my club), and I'd like them to be available for printing or downloaded for anywhere from a month to a week before a ride.  So it'd be nice to have both public and private maps, and public maps one could 'turn on' or make accessible without charge for a limited time. 

Most road bicyclists are looking for routes.  Few can map or come up with their own.  As I see it, I'm providing a service to bicyclists via Map My Ride but having to pay too dearly for the priviledge.   

I am definitely not dropping $48/year on this site just to line the pockets of the next dot com millionaire. Don't get me wrong, I've been using it near daily for the past 2 months and have enjoyed. However, if it comes down to it I will go back to using Google Maps and Excel which work just fine. 

 You'd think that with all the promotional material, advertisements, etc. that there would be enough money to keep the site running. 

ima_runner-

To clear up some confusion on the pricing, $48 is the price for an annual subscription.  If you want to pay monthly, it's $5.  

And sjberg,  I want to re-enforce the point that premium membership is not required to enjoy most of the functionality of the site.  The mapping and training log functionality is standard with the free membership.  For more details, check out the membership comparison.

While some warning would have been nice for those with data on the site, I can't fault the owners of the site for wanting to make money. It seems that those who complain the most are usually those who are used to getting something for nothing.

Then again, I keep track of my workouts on my own, so changing the fee structure doesn't affect me. I use this site, oddly enough, to measure my distance once I finish a run. You know, I... map my runs. As far as that goes, I'm happy with the features provided.

Final thoughts? If you don't see a need for the additional features, don't pay for them! If you want the premium features, drop the $48 a year and support what you intend to use.

I would not mind paying $48 a year if:

[1]  -  most of the stuff actually worked - e.g., route revisions and save with notes

[2]  -  ads were eliminated for premium members.  It takes some effort to block all those ad servers, and it would be nice not to have to do that.

Because of all the MMF bugs I've mostly migrated to bikely -  and there are two other free systems that are almost as good.

I don't understand all the griping about mapping.  Bike routes typically cover a span of 20 to 30 miles and to get a useful map, with enough detail to show all the turns and route intricacies you need to follow a route, you'd need a map sheet that's 5 to 10 feet long.  Then there are routes that cover hundreds of miles.  A useful general bike route map printing program is impossible.  It will always be a major effort to generate a useful printable map.

When I'm desperate enough to actually produce a  printed map I take screen dumps and put them together in photoshop.  I think you can still do that for free.  But it's a tedious process.

aea@mmf:

Peter-DG

That's definitely a concern for some routes and it's something we will look into as soon as the post-launch details are all ironed out. But as you said, having computer generated maps over long distances with high resolution (Thus multiple pages) isn't the most trivial of tasks.

If you have trouble with your points please contact us directly :)

 The 'problem' is, your new policy states that we don't get anything for them unless we pay for a 'premium' membership (unless you had 4500 prior to 7/1, which was before you launched the new site).

Peter,

 It's not about being able to print a map, it's about being able to generate a cue sheet.  Very few (nobody?) people that I ride with use maps.  Most (that haven't ridden the ride multiple times) will use a cue sheet.  Having to pay for a cue sheet is absurd.

The 'problem' is, your new policy states that we don't get anything for them unless we pay for a 'premium' membership (unless you had 4500 prior to 7/1, which was before you launched the new site).

 

Peter,

It's not about being able to print a map, it's about being able to generate a cue sheet.  Very few (nobody?) people that I ride with use maps.  Most (that haven't ridden the ride multiple times) will use a cue sheet.  Having to pay for a cue sheet is absurd.

Which is why you're going to start your own nonprofit site to offer those services at your own expense, right? When can we expect your site to go online, as you obviously feel that having to pay for cue sheets is absurd?

 People are in the business of providing services for money. In this case, you fall into one of two camps. Either the service is not worth the price (in which case you ought to find a service that IS worth the price) and you're not willing to pay, or the service IS worth the price and you'll shell out the money to get what you want.

The premium services aren't worth it for me, but then... I'm not the one complaining about not getting something for free.

Mk1Racer:

Peter,

It's not about being able to print a map, it's about being able to generate a cue sheet. Very few (nobody?) people that I ride with use maps. Most (that haven't ridden the ride multiple times) will use a cue sheet. Having to pay for a cue sheet is absurd.

Yes, I use the cue sheet and not the map to follow a route. But, I don't think anything has changed with respect to cue sheets. I.e., click "Notes" > "View Notes" and cut and past the cue sheet - free. That's assuming the author took pains to make sure the correct notes are there, and they didn't get dropped in an edit pass (are you listening MMF :-). For some of my routes I provide a cue sheet in pdf format - see my list .

Found it.  It's on your Premium / Standard membership comparison page

having to pay for CPU power? that's a joke. just say how it is. you put a lot of work into the creation of this site and you feel it should pay for at least part of the effort. nothing wrong with that.

for me and most other users i know mapmyride is a good source to download courses to a GPS like the garmin705. i rarely see riders handling cue sheets and maps anymore. making this feature a for-pay-only feature will push the users of those devices towards garminconnect which offers that feature for free. garminconnect gets better by the week and is now almost user friendly.

i think the timing for the introduction of premium is unfortunate.

i will try to find a way to convert the still freely available google earth files to a file that my GPS can read. if this doesn't work i will go and use the free service from garmin.

i do like the new site designof mapmyride very much though.

a

On July 1 or 2 when I logged in to "mapmyrun" I was surprised to see the "Premium" offer. And actually I was kind of excited to see that perhaps some of the features that we've asked for actually coming! 

Imagine my surprise when I find out that instead of some cool new usable stuff I now have the opportunity to pay for what had been free. Not to mention that we've actually LOST features coming over from routeslip (elevation). 

@ aea you say "hope you find the newest itteration of MMF a great upgrade." I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing anything - from your new feature list:

- Premium Membership

- PDF Map Printing 

- Training Plans

new feature 1 - I've lost things I was able to do.

new feature 2 - oh, you have to have new feature 1. 

new feature 3 - something freely availalbe all over the internet. For free. oh, and you have to have new feature 1.

OMG! I just went to check reports to check out the hot new Premium reports... One report now available ONLY to premium users is "DIstance by Activity". You've got to be kidding me?

So, you took away something else away. 

 Come on... everyone of those reports requires the same basic query - the differece the where clause and order by you're specifying... oh and you might have to have a couple of variables to count in...

 So... I've now lost control of my training data without notice. I suppose I just got what I paid for. When do I get my commision check for the people I recommended move from other sites to this one? Can you apply that to 1 months subscription so I can download my data 1 last time and go back to Excel and Google maps? 

 Man I'm bummed. 

Things you buy usually work. Some even come with a warrantee.  This site is badly broke (mapping bugs, especially when editing).  The only businesses that can make you pay for things that are broke are government and monopolies.  Luckily MMF is not a monopoly (like Microsoft).  There are alternatives that are arguably better, and some are still free.

But, some of the griping is ridiculous.  All in all it's still a useful site, even just the free part.  I just wish they'd fix the bugs.  They have road name / turn recording and Topos which is a big plus that I have not found elsewhere.  I'd be happy to pay if what I'd like to use actually worked right.

I'd like to address some of the bigger picture items -- As the original founder of MapMyRun.com 3 years ago, this little site has come along way. 

This site is built on the feedback of it's users and we've been struggling to get all this new functionality out the door -- most things you see on the site are a direct response from a user saying to us, "Wouldn't it be cool if ... ?" 

One of the reasons it's been such a challenge is that it is expensive from a resource perspective to provide you these types of services.  Granted, a free site can be supported by advertisers however how much advertising would you as a user accept? Pop-ups? Interstitials? 

This summer and fall we really want to focus on quality and the premium level of services we now feel you deserve.  We've been working really hard to get us to this level and we're continuing to work hard to do so.  We're responding personally to every single reported issue and we're working on some bigger performance things right now to ensure that your experience with the site is perfect.

If there are individual issues that you've noticed and you would like to comment on, I welcome your discussion.  If you would like a personal reply, please send it to us through our feedback system -- that way we can actively track and fix anything specific.

Many of the performance issues that we are working on are still due to people's client / browser situation.  ie, Do you have a slower connection? older browser? a firewall program that is blocking our mapping script from working?  We're actively looking at work-arounds to improve these issues...

Anyways, I just want to say that working on delivering the best experience for you is my number one priority.  I'm working closely with our technical team over the next week to ensure that any of this post-release issues are sorted out effectively.  If you have any questions about the transparency of this process, please don't hesitate to post them here or send them through our feedback...

Cheers,

-Kevin
Co-Founder, MapMyFitness