Can You Do Strava Group Challenges Without a Subscription?

September 27, 2026 · 6 min read

Group challenges used to be one of Strava’s best free features. Pick a goal, invite your running group, watch the leaderboard fill up. Then Strava took away the free “tokens” that let non-subscribers create or join them, and a lot of informal challenges stopped overnight. The Community Hub thread about the change is still one of the first results when you search for it.

Here’s what changed, what it costs a group to keep challenging each other, what’s still free, and the realistic alternatives.

What changed in August 2024

Before the change, subscribers could create unlimited group challenges and free athletes got three free “tokens” to create or join one. From August 5, 2024, free athletes lost those tokens. Strava’s help centre now states that participants “must be a subscriber or have a free subscription trial” to join. Anyone already in a challenge was allowed to finish it.

The practical effect is that a group challenge now only works if every single participant pays or is on a trial. For a running club where half the members use Strava free, that usually means no group challenge at all.

How Strava group challenges work now

There’s no step metric at all. If your group includes walkers, or people who count steps rather than record runs, they’re left out.

What it costs your group

Strava’s own pricing page (updated July 1, 2025) lists these individual plans:

A Family plan is listed at ₹6,499 a year in India. For one person who uses Strava’s training tools, that can be good value. But look at it as a group cost: eight friends on annual plans in India pay ₹19,992 a year between them, and a large part of what the group is paying for is the ability to compete with each other. Prices change, and App Store pricing can differ, so check in the app before you subscribe.

What’s still free on Strava

• Recording and sharing activities, with kudos and comments
• Clubs: joining, the club feed and club events
• Strava’s own challenges: the monthly distance challenges and brand-sponsored ones you join from the Challenges tab

What you can’t do for free is build a private challenge with your own friends, your own goal and your own dates. That’s the part most groups actually want.

5 free ways to challenge your friends

1. Line up a free trial (good for a one-off)

If everyone starts a free trial the same week, you can run one group challenge within the trial period. It works once. Set a reminder to cancel, and expect a couple of people to join late because their trial wasn’t set up in time.

2. Use your club as a rough leaderboard

Put everyone in the same Strava club and compare weekly totals. It’s free, but it isn’t a real challenge: there’s no goal, no finish line, no rules and nothing to win. It works best as background motivation for a group that already trains together.

3. Race one friend at a time

Head-to-head rivalries are the most motivating format anyway. It’s much harder to let yourself off against a person than against a goal. Pick one friend, one metric and a deadline, then compare at the end.

4. Keep a spreadsheet (briefly)

A shared sheet with daily totals works for small, motivated groups. It usually falls apart in the second week once the scorekeeper gets busy. Use it for a weekend challenge, not a month.

5. Use a free app for the challenge and keep Strava for your runs

You don’t have to leave Strava to challenge your friends somewhere else. If your activity already ends up in Apple Health, from an Apple Watch or from apps that write to it, a challenge app that reads Apple Health can score everyone automatically. Keep Strava for segments and training analysis, and run the competition wherever joining is free.

Strava vs Sweats for group challenges

To be fair to Strava: it’s the better choice for segments, route building, detailed training analysis and the sheer size of its community. For challenging your friends, here’s how the two compare:

The difference that matters most for a group is the first row. On Sweats, only the organiser needs a challenge slot, and everyone else joins free.

Why group challenges are worth keeping

Visible competition moves people. In a randomised trial of 790 students, groups that could see how they compared with each other attended about 90% more exercise classes than groups without comparison. The “supportive” group that couldn’t compare did worse than the control group. Encouragement alone isn’t enough; seeing where you stand is what moves people. It’s the part to protect when a platform puts it behind a paywall.