RunningLog

When I created the membership plans for RunningLog, I had two things in mind: letting users see and use the app's features with no commitment (no credit card required), and avoiding as much as possible the hassle of refunds in cases where a customer was looking for something else.

As a result, the free plan gave access to all race results within the last 12 months, which let users try the app with several of their races already in place.

That worked well for a while. Most runners have a few recent results, so the last 12 months were usually enough to show off what the app can do. But over time I noticed a pattern: users would create an account and add older race results, or connect Strava and have older results imported, and those races fell outside the 12-month window. The result was a poor first experience, because their "last 12 months" view came up empty.

The problem is that this is completely normal for runners. People take breaks from racing or training. There's usually an offseason with no races for a few months (the winter period, for example). And the one nobody wants but that happens often, injury, can keep a runner out of racing for several months or even more than a year.

Taking all of that into account, it was clear something had to change. So I decided that free users would see their last 10 race results regardless of date, instead of results from the last 12 months. With this change, every active user who imports or adds results gets to actually see them, no matter when those races happened.

If you want to see how it works, you can try it at https://runninglog.app.