Tour Tracker Subscription Prices

Hello again from Tour Tracker Central, also known as my kitchen in Seattle. Today's topic is about increasing the subscription prices for my Tour Tracker Pro Cycling app this year. If you are reading this then you are probably a bit annoyed that I'm raising the price of the annual subscription prices. Fair enough. But just to be clear, this is not a question of trying to increase profit. This is about increasing revenue so that I can keep the app not just in existence but growing.

I first wrote Tour Tracker about 15 years ago. And for 10 years the primary business of providing custom apps to races (e.g. Tour of California Tour Tracker) and broadcasters (e.g. NBC Tour de France) supported the direct-to-consumers Tour Tracker Pro Cycling. It was great as it let me release an app that focused on covering cycling, while the NBC and other apps really focused on advertising and/or sponsorship placement. And it let me price the app at less than a cup of coffee a year for live coverage of the Grand Tours.

Things, however, have changed over the past 5 years. NBC's switch to streaming meant they no longer wanted a TDF app. And as you might know all of the U.S. races folded. So my golden geese disappeared. At the same time, users kept asking for more races and more features. And more races. And women's races. And the World Championships. And...

And while my cost of maintaining the app itself doesn't change much with scale, the cost of running the app does. More reporters. More fees to license data from the races or 3rd parties. More servers to manage races. More payments to Amazon for distributing the data to your phones. The net result is that we have gone from 3 races to about 30 with only one price increase in 10 years.

So, this price increase is ensuring that the app can continue to deliver what users want without compromising quality. That you will never see advertising. That you will get the best reporters in the industry. That you will get flawless data delivery via expensive-but-reliable Amazon services. And that you will continue to get timely and accurate data via our 3rd party partners as the number of races grow. I'm hoping that what we have built is worth at least as much as 2-3 cups of coffee every year.

Thanks for reading and I hope you stick with us. If the price is just too much for what we offer then I hope you find a solution that you enjoy. Allan

Women's Cycling Coverage, Part 2

Clara and I wanted to share some information about the state of women's coverage in our Tour Tracker Pro Cycling app. This is a topic we discuss every season, and a topic our users ask about often.

To start, let us say that we do care about women's cycling and have provided coverage of the women's peloton in some form for the last 10 years. That has included providing free custom apps for women's races, providing an app for Tour de France Femmes in select countries, and when possible including coverage within our main app. We have both have close friends who race, and Clara is past US national champion cyclist.

The challenge, however, is resources. Tour Tracker is just Clara and me. I do the development. She covers the races. And while I can do my part in adding more races to the calendar, ultimately Clara is just one reporter working crazy hours to cover the races we can. And even if she could duplicate herself, as mentioned in a previous blog entry, getting the detailed data our apps need has proven impossible for most women's races.

For 2025 we thought we had an ideal solution and have been working on it since the middle of last year. Specifically, we agreed to build a dedicated women's app for a group that intended to cover the entire women's season. We were doing this at no charge, and the app was looking great. But in December they backed out and we were left with a beautiful app with no data.

So for this year we are going back to what we have been doing for the past 4 years and covering the races that provide good data and for which Clara is available. We know this isn't the answer people want to hear, but it is the best we can achieve with our very limited resources. We will continue to look for partners who want to use our platform, however.

Thanks for reading this and thanks for your support.

Allan & Clara

Tour Tracker Grand Tours

Tour Tracker Grand Tours is our flagship, award-winning, 5-Star mobile app that provides unmatched live coverage of the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, Vuelta a España and 25+ other World Tour races, Monuments and Spring Classics. It is available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Tour Track Grand Tours has over 100 exclusive features that provide cycling fans with the ultimate companion to following pro cycling races. Just a small list of those features includes:

• Live GPS tracking of the race on interactive course maps and profiles.

• Live multi-media commentary from renowned cycling reporter Clara Beard.

• Live mid-race results for every sprint and climb, with a virtual leaderboard.

• Previews of every race including start lists and interactive profiles & maps.

• Full results and standings for every intermediate, stage and jersey competition.

• Exclusive video rider interviews before and after each race.

• Extensive race data including ranking riders by time in the break-away.

• Keep track of your favorite riders and teams and check their results with one tap.

• Integrated Fantasy Cycling competitions with national and private leagues.

• Exclusive Time Machine feature that allows rewinding to any time or distance.

• Time Machine lets you synchronize the app data with any race video feed.

• Curated cycling news feed of the best stories we can find on the web.

• And literally 100 more features that you will discover in the app!
  

Tour Tracker Grand Tours is available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.